The Effect of Humidity on Nervousness and on General Efficiency
REVIEWS AND CRITICISM. :Author: Lorle Ida Stecher, Ph.D. Archives of Psychol. No. 38, Dec. 1916. New York: The Science Press. Pp. vi + 94.
“This study,” explains Dr Stecher in her summary, “was undertaken primarily to investigate the supposed effect of air of low relative humidity upon nervousness as shown by defective motor control, and upon general inefficiency in work similar to that performed in daily life by clerks in offices and operatives in factories. Since tests cannot be given often enough to obtain reliable measures of a changing condition without having the influence of the variables obscured by practice, the following device was adopted to balance out the practice effect. Subjects were tested in squads for a fortnight each. The first squad spent its first week under the wet, its second under the dry condition. The second squad spent its first week under the dry, its second under the wet condition. For each test an average for performance in the wet weeks was obtained by adding the first week of Squad A and the second week of Squad B. A similar average for the dry weeks was obtained by adding the remaining weeks. By averaging the data from a number of squads, half of which were at the beginning and half at the end of their practice curve, the practice was pretty well eliminated.” The psychological tests used were,?addition, aiming, hand steadiness, tapping, typewriting, arm steadiness, mirror tracing, industrial fatigue, reflex wink, and eyelid tremor. “By these tests of nervous and motor control,” Dr. Stecher observes, “and by the more purely intellectual tests we could detect no influence of excessive dryness during two weeks’ exposure or during the working day… The practical situation is that experimental humidity conditions considerably more rigorous than those obtaining in any artificially heated apartment show no demonstrable effect in behavior. Similarly, wherever psychological tests have been used in ventilation studies, the results have been negative. … Still,” she cautions, “our finding that individuals put under certain controlled conditions react or fail to react in certain ways is by no means to be taken as sanction for all sorts of uncomfortable ventilation conditions. … we did not attempt to reproduce the conditions that go to make up a crowded, ill-smelling, and excessively hot room. … If this absence of demonstrable effect is due to a constant adjustment of the organism that will eventually result in a strain, it is for physiology to trace any subtle, long-time, ill effects that may have escaped the behavior tests.”
Dr Stecher’s monograph “is part of an extensive investigation of the subject of ventilation in its various biological and mechanical aspects, carried on during the years 1913-16 by the New York State Commission on Ventilation. … by the aid of the Elizabeth Milbank Anderson Fund. The other psychological experiments of the Commission which were, like this one, planned by Professor Edward L. Thorndike and carried out under his direction, are described in full in a recent number of the Teachers College Contributions to Education, and briefly reviewed in the historical section of this monograph.”
The tests which Dr Stecher used she describes in every essential detail and presents her results in well studied tables and curves. The bibliographical references given in the form of footnotes, constitute a guide to the further investigation of the literature of the problem. In her chapter on correlations the author remarks, “To bring together this loosely connected group of correlations into any sort of consistent scheme is almost impossible. These conclusions can be drawn: 1. The distinction between the purely intellectual mental-multiplication and the motor tests, particularly the inverse relation with those designed especially to test nervous control?hand steadiness, arm steadiness, tremor?seems evident. 2. Addition is not an intellectual performance of the same order as mental multiplication, as is shown by its incomplete resemblance to mental multiplication .22, and by its tendency to correlate positively with many of the motor tests to which multiplication is opposed. 3. Typewriting seems to hold a sort of intermediate position between a purely intellectual and a purely motor test. 4. Mirror tracing seems to be somewhat the same sort of test as typewriting.” Taken altogether, Dr Stecher has done an admirable piece of work that must be of value to architects and hygienists as well as to psychologists. A. T.
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