Emotions and the Skin: The Conditioning of Scratch Responses in Cases of Atopic Dermatitis

Summary.— To test the hypothesis that patients with atopic dermatitis would react with a scratch response to a variety of environmental signals a group of 18 patients and a group of normal controls, matched for age and sex, took part in a conditioning experiment with an itch as the unconditioned stimulus (U.C.S.). The dermatological patients were found to differ from the controls in terms of several personality measures, notably anxiety and hostility, and in the number of galvanic skin responses and scratch responses they produced during the conditioning sessions. The implications of these findings are explored and a tentative hypothesis about the aetiology and nature of atopic dermatitis is proposed.