When the situation admits of a complete fusion, the one resulting
feeling is almost always greater. When summation of unpleasant stimuli
occurs, the singleness of the attention process is not a prominent
feature of the experience. Rather each unpleasant element exists
throughout, each in turn intensifying the whole undertone of feeling,
but also remaining a feeling-tone of a particular kind. Partial
reënforcement is descriptive of that state when both feeling-tones
contribute to a feeling of the same kind, yet do retain some individual
characteristics which stand out for themselves. The general state of
pleasantness, for example, is increased by both elements contributed
by a low tone and the yellow color, yet one retains its soothing and
the other its exciting character. Again, the feeling-tone for green
may occur when its relation, on the other hand, to a pleasantly
sounding tuning-fork is not at all noticed. Subjects find in such
cases always more effort required to note both the feeling-tones, and
there is probably some diminution in quantity of feeling for each of
the simultaneous elements. Other subjects have preferred to call this
partial inhibition. Cases of total inhibition have been noted above,
and are by far the most frequent, as would naturally be expected. When
sandpaper is being applied, and no repose is felt in the body, a color,
suddenly presented, for a moment pleases the eye, but quickly loses all
feeling-character, and can only be "intellectually perceived."
Again, the way in which subjects will take certain combinations seems
to depend entirely upon the person. Beautiful colors, presented in
disagreeable forms, bring about for some a feeling altogether worse
than does an unpleasant color in the same form. To others there is
always the tendency to enjoy the color and to "reconstruct" the form,
or stress in it those elements only which do suggest symmetry and
definiteness. All feel, when two or more elements contribute to the
feeling-experience, that a total mood generally serves as the undertone
for them. When there is a clear strife between the two, they both can
exist as equal partial tones with an undertone of unpleasantness in the
failure to coördinate them. There are still other cases where the total
result cannot well be called a fusion or summation. For example, when
an unpleasant color in an unpleasant form, or for Subject D, a pleasant
color in an unpleasant form, is presented, the feeling for the whole
is often out of all proportion to the value of each alone, or of what
might be expected from the simple summation. The uncommon revulsion
here was frequently so striking that the subjects would afterwards
laugh heartily over the strength with which it first appeared.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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