The most fundamental characteristic of the stupor symptoms is the change in affect which can be summed up in one word--apathy. It is fundamental because it seems as if the symptoms built around apathy constitute the stupor reaction. The emotional poverty is evidenced by a lack of feeling, loss of energy and an absence of the normal urge of living. This is quite different from the emotional blocking of the retarded depression, for in the latter the patient shows either by speech or facial expression a definite suffering. The tendency to reduction of affect produces two effects on such emotions as internal ideas or environmental events may stimulate. Exhibitions of emotion are either reduced or dissociated. For instance, anxiety is frequently diminished to an expression of dazed bewilderment; or, isolated and partial exhibitions of mood occur, as when laughter, tears or blushing are seen as quite isolated symptoms. This latter--the dissociation of affect--seems to occur only in stupor and dementia præcox. It should be noted, however, that inappropriateness of affect is never observed in a true benign stupor. A final peculiarity is the tendency to interruption of the apathetic habit, when the patient may return to life, as it were, for a few moments and then relapse. Closely related to the apathy, and probably merely an expression of it, is the inactivity which is both muscular and mental. It exists in all gradations from that of flaccidity of voluntary muscles, with relaxation of the sphincters, and from states where there is complete absence of any evidence of mentation to conditions of mere physical and psychic slowness. After recovery the stupor patient frequently speaks of having felt dead, paralyzed or drugged. By far the commonest cause of emotional expression or interruption in the inactivity is negativism. This is a perversity of behavior which seems to express antagonism to the environment or to the wishes of those about the patient. In the partial stupors it is seen as active opposition and cantankerousness. In the more profound conditions it is represented by muscular resistiveness or rigidity, or refusal to swallow food when placed in the mouth. Occasionally, too, the patient may even in a deep stupor retain urine so long that catheterization is necessary. All the explanations which one may gather from the patients’ own utterances, mainly retrospective, seem to point to negativism expressing a desire to be left alone. The appearance of perverse behavior in aimless striking or mere muscular rigidity seems to be an example of dissociation of affect.