Research Ethics

Part 1: Study of Emotion

Read this description of a real study published by Stanley Schachter and Jerome E. Singer in Psychological Review in 1962, then answer the following questions.

Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State

In 1890, William James proposed that we feel an emotion when our body is spontaneously aroused by an emotion-producing event. Schachter and Singer expanded upon James' theory to propose that in order to experience specific emotions, such as joy and anger, we need both physiological arousal and a specific cognitive interpretation of the emotion-producing situation. They designed a study to test their hypothesis using undergraduate psychology students who received 2 extra points on their final exam for participating.

Students were deceptively told that the purpose of the study was to test how a vitamin injection would affect their visual skills. In reality, participants were randomly assigned to receive either an injection of epinephrine (a drug causing physiological arousal) or a placebo injection (an inactive substance). Immediately following the injection, students were placed in a room with a confederate of the investigators who pretended to be either very happy or very angry about being in the research study. (Half of the participants who received each type of injection were with a happy confederate, and the other half were with an angry confederate.) The confederate's external behavior was supposed to provide the participants with a cognitive interpretation of the emotional nature of the event. Students were then asked to answer several written questions about how angry or happy they felt. For example, they were asked:

How good or happy would you say you feel at present?

• I don't feel at all happy or good
• I feel a little happy and good
• I feel quite happy and good
• I feel very happy and good
• I feel extremely happy and good

Schachter and Singer found that those students who were given the placebo did not report any specific type of emotion, while those who were given the epinephrine reported strong feelings of anger or joy depending on whether the confederate had acted angry or joyful. The investigators concluded from their study that in order to experience specific emotions we need both physiological arousal and a cognitive interpretation of the emotional nature of the event.

1.Does this study have an experimental or non-experimental design, and why?

2.What are the independent/predictor and dependent/criterion variables in this study?

3.Evaluate this study according to the four ethical principles we discussed (weighing risks against benefits, acting responsibly and with integrity, seeking justice, and respecting people's rights and dignity). Which principles are at risk of being violated in this study, and why/how?

4.Identify potential benefits and potential risks of this study (to the participants, scientific community, or society).

Part 2: The Monster Study

Read the attached excerpts from The Stuttering Doctor's 'Monster Study' by Gretchen Reynolds, which describes a famous unethical psychological experiment. Then answer the following questions.

1.Does this study have an experimental or non-experimental design, and why?

2.What are the independent/predictor and dependent/criterion variables in this study?

3.Evaluate this study according to the four ethical principles we discussed (weighing risks against benefits, acting responsibly and with integrity, seeking justice, and respecting people's rights and dignity). Which principles are at risk of being violated in this study, and why/how?

4.Identify potential benefits and potential risks of this study (to the participants, scientific community, or society).

Excerpts from The Stuttering Doctor's 'Monster Study' by Gretchen Reynolds

Wendell Johnson was a tall, knobby 20-year-old farm boy when he arrived at the University of Iowa in Iowa City to study English in 1926. The class president and valedictorian of his tiny high school in Roxbury, Kan., Johnson was engaging, ''quite a clown'' in the estimation of the folks back home. He also stuttered grotesquely, often rendered speechless by the impediment. His inability to express himself nudged him toward writing and literature, and he developed a penchant for antic humor, which kept him popular despite his silence. It also propelled him to U. Iowa, the most famous center for stuttering research in the world. ''I became a speech pathologist because I needed one,'' he'd later say.

At the time, physiology had become the favored explanation at Iowa for stuttering. But Johnson, by 1937 an ambitious assistant professor, wasn't convinced. His life story suggested otherwise. He'd spoken fine until he was 5 or 6, when a teacher mentioned to his parents that he was starting to stutter. Gradually an obsession with his speech took hold. His voice grew hesitant. He self-consciously repeated sounds. Those, of course, are among the hallmarks of stammering. By worrying about the problem, he decided, he'd produced it. His disorder lay not in his brain, in biology, but in his learned behavior. Stuttering, he later concluded, ''begins not in the child's mouth but in the parent's ear.''

This idea was provocative and powerful, with enormous implications for speech therapy. If stuttering is learned behavior, it can be unlearned. Biography, however, isn't proof. Johnson, to validate his thesis, needed to design an experiment that induced stuttering. If, he reasoned, any and every child could be made to stutter, then obviously no underlying physiological defect was required. If stuttering could be called forth in normal youngsters, it would be proved as a learned, conditioned response.

In the fall of 1938, Wendell Johnson recruited one of his clinical psychology graduate students, 22-year-old Mary Tudor, who was avid but timorous, to undertake exactly that experiment. She was to study whether telling nonstuttering children that they stuttered would make it so. Could she talk children into a speech defect? The university had an ongoing research relationship with an orphanage in Davenport, Iowa, so Johnson suggested she base her study there.

The Iowa Soldiers and Sailors Orphans' Home was founded as a refuge for the offspring of men killed in the Civil War. By 1939, at the height of the Great Depression, it housed more than 600 orphans and demi-orphans (those whose destitute parents, although alive, couldn't care for them) in clusters of small cottages. Not as harsh as the nearby Industrial School for Boys in Eldora, Iowa, or as forlorn as the Institute for Feeble-Minded Children at Glenwood, it was nevertheless spare, joyless and regimented. Children rose at 5:30 a.m., had breakfast and cleaned until school began. They marched in long, careful lines, to facilitate order.

Mary Tudor's research at the Iowa Home began with the selection of 22 subjects. None were told the intent of her research. They believed that they were to receive speech therapy. Her experimental design was complicated. She was not only trying to induce stammering in healthy children; she was also trying to see whether telling stutterers that their speech was fine would produce a change. Included among the 22 subjects were 10 orphans whom teachers and matrons had marked as stutterers before the study began. Tudor and five other graduate students who agreed to serve as judges listened to each of the children speak, graded them on a scale from 1 (poor) to 5 (fluent) and concurred with the school's assessment. ''Unwilling to talk but certain definite 'stuttering' phenomena,'' a researcher wrote of one boy, ''tension, prolongations, explosiveness, repetitions. A stutterer.'' The 10 stuttering children were divided into two groups. Five were assigned to Group IA, the experimental set. They would be told: ''You do not stutter. Your speech is fine.'' The five in Group IB would serve as controls and be told, ''Yes, your speech is as bad as people say.''

The remaining 12 children were chosen at random from the population of normally fluent orphans. Six of these were assigned to IIA, the group that eventually would lead to the lawsuit and contention. These children, ranging in age from 5 to 15, were to be told that their speech was not normal at all, that they were beginning to stutter and that they must correct this immediately. The final six children in Group IIB, similar in age to those in IIA, were normal speakers who were to be treated as such and given compliments on their nice enunciation.

The experimental period lasted from January until late May 1939, and the actual intervention consisted of Tudor driving to Davenport from Iowa City every few weeks and talking with each child for about 45 minutes. She followed an agreed-upon script. In her dissertation, she reported that she talked to the stuttering youngsters who were going to be told that they did not stutter. She said to them, in part, ''You'll outgrow [the stuttering], and you will be able to speak even much better than you are speaking now. . . . Pay no attention to what others say about your speaking ability for undoubtedly they do not realize that this is only a phase.''

To the nonstuttering youngsters in IIA, who were to be branded stutterers, she said: ''The staff has come to the conclusion that you have a great deal of trouble with your speech. . . . You have many of the symptoms of a child who is beginning to stutter. You must try to stop yourself immediately. Use your will power. . . . Do anything to keep from stuttering. . . . Don't ever speak unless you can do it right. You see how [the name of a child in the institution who stuttered severely] stutters, don't you? Well, he undoubtedly started this very same way.''

From the first, the children in IIA responded. After her second session with 5-year-old Norma Jean Pugh, Tudor wrote, ''It was very difficult to get her to speak, although she spoke very freely the month before.'' Another in the group, 9-year-old Betty Romp, ''practically refuses to talk,'' a researcher wrote in his final evaluation. ''Held hand or arm over eyes most of the time.'' Hazel Potter, 15, the oldest in her group, became ''much more conscious of herself, and she talked less,'' Tudor noted. Potter also began to interject and to snap her fingers in frustration. She was asked why she said 'a' so much. '''Because I'm afraid I can't say the next word.' Why did you snap your fingers? 'Because I was afraid I was going to say ''a.'''''

All of the children's schoolwork fell off. One of the boys began refusing to recite in class. The other, 11-year-old Clarence Fifer, a chubby, diffident child, started anxiously correcting himself. ''He stopped and told me he was going to have trouble on words before he said them,'' Tudor reported. She asked him how he knew. He said that the sound '''wouldn't come out. Feels like it's stuck in there.'''

The sixth orphan, Mary Korlaske, a 12-year-old, grew withdrawn and fractious. During their sessions, Tudor asked whether her best friend knew about her ''stuttering,'' Korlaske muttered, ''No.'' ''Why not?'' Korlaske shuffled her feet. ''I hardly ever talk to her.'' Two years later, she ran away from the orphanage and eventually ended up at the rougher Industrial School for Girls. ''I couldn't never tell my husband about it,'' Korlaske, now Mary Nixon, said in a brief telephone conversation in January. ''It just ruined my life.'' Her voice broke. ''I can't talk no more,'' she said, and with an audible oath, she hung up.

Johnson's findings about the nature of stuttering, once it has begun, remains the accepted wisdom to this day. The disorder does respond to conditioning, and once established, stuttering can have a ruinous momentum. Often, the worse someone stutters, the more he fears speaking, and the worse his speech becomes.

What Johnson's thinking did not explain is why severe stuttering starts. In fact, the most telling aspect of Mary Tudor's experiment is that it failed completely. Of the six normal children who were falsely labeled stutterers, two actually improved their speech fluency, according to the researchers' ratings, over the course of the five-month study -- one by almost a full point, from 3 to 3.8. Another's fluency rose from 3 to 3.6. For two others, their fluency ratings didn't budge. Of the two children whose fluency fell, one, Clarence Fifer, dropped from 2.6 to 2, the second, Hazel Potter, from 3.1 to 2.8.

The other primary study group fared little better. Of the actual stutterers who were told they now spoke fine, two showed slight improvements in fluency, two decreased in fluency and one was unchanged. The results for each of the groups were ''not only insignificant, but also in the wrong (unexpected) direction,'' concluded Yairi and a colleague in an article in the May 2002 issue of The American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology.

The experiment did, however, have an impact. In each case, the nonstuttering children of Group IIA began to act like stutterers. ''All of the children in this group showed overt behavioral changes,'' Mary Tudor wrote in her thesis, ''that were in the direction of the types of inhibitive, sensitive, embarrassed reactions shown by many adult stutterers in reaction to their speech. There was a tendency for them to become less talkative.'' They also, during their sessions with her and in front of the researchers, shuffled their feet, whispered, snapped their fingers, gulped, gasped and clamped their mouths shut. They looked like stutterers. They spoke fine.

It seems highly unlikely that you can make a stutterer. You can induce the accompanying tics -- the shuffling and the self-consciousness. Those can be taught and reinforced. But clinical stuttering cannot. It exists or it doesn't. Johnson's theory was not upheld.

After Mary Tudor submitted her completed master's thesis in August 1939 with a dedication to Johnson, it sank straightaway into obscurity. Johnson did not oversee its publication, as he often did with his students' theses. He did not include it in his otherwise comprehensive indexes of University of Iowa stuttering research. Not until 2001 did it receive national press attention, in a series of articles in The San Jose Mercury News. However, the thesis, which was available at the university library, did have a ghost life among Iowa speech pathology students. ''Those who had heard about it nicknamed it the 'Monster Study,''' remembers Franklin Silverman, a professor of speech pathology at Marquette University and a former student of Johnson's. ''It reminded people of the Nazi experiments on human subjects. The other professors at the time told him that it would ruin his reputation to publish the data. It was chilling and disturbing, especially to think that Wendell Johnson, of all people, had sanctioned it. He knew the pain of being told that you stutter.'' It is an ugly thing, after all, to experiment on orphans.

The reverberations of the 64-year-old Tudor study will sound for years. The three surviving orphans from Group IIA, Norma Jean Pugh (now Kathryn Meacham), Mary Korlaske (now Mary Nixon) and Hazel Potter (now Hazel Dornbush), are each suing the State and University of Iowa for millions of dollars, citing among other things the infliction of emotional distress and fraudulent misrepresentation. The estates of the three deceased orphans will be part of the suit. ''I think that a jury will agree that even if these people's speech wasn't exactly ruined, their lives were,'' says Evan Douthit, a Kansas City, Mo., attorney who is representing five of the claimants. ''Kathryn Meacham has thought of herself as a freak all her life. She still hates to talk, except to her family and a few people in her church. She's a sad, sad lady.''

Hazel Potter Dornbush is scrappy and decisive at 79. ''Imagine trying to wreck a little child's voice,'' she says. ''But I've moved on. I married a good man. I talk O.K. Even the orphanage wasn't that bad. There were always other children around, so it wasn't lonely.'' She pauses. ''I don't really remember being that close to any,'' she adds, suddenly puzzled. ''But back then, you know, I was quiet.''