Effect of Pleasant and Unpleasant Ideas on Respiration in Psychoneurotic Patients

The relation between mental phenomena and respiratory function has long been of interest to psychologists and physicians. Many earlier workers, notably Lehmann,1Mosso,2Mentz,3Rehwaldt4and Zoneff and Meumann,5investigated the effect of various types of ideational stimuli on respiratory tracings in normal persons. More recently, the influence of emotions on respiration and metabolism has been studied by Feleky,6Landis7and Landis and Gullette8in normal persons; by Segal, Binswanger and Strouse9in hyperthyroid patients, and by Ziegler and Levine10in psychoneurotic patients. There have been studies on the effect of emotions on the inspiration-expiration ratio by Mentz,3Mosso,2Benussi,11Burtt,12Mignot and Le Grande13and Landis and Gullette.8Golla and his associates14studied various types of respiratory tracings found in schizophrenic patients. Peterson and Jung15studied the relationship between respiratory tracings