Abstract
Research into correlations of thoughts and feelings was extended by asking psychiatric inpatients and outpatients, hospital paraprofessionals, and college students to complete the Situational Self-Statement and Affective State Inventory, which elicits responses to five classes of self-statements and their matching emotional reactions in the context of imagined frustrations. Correlations between “depressed” and “rational” thoughts with their presumed corresponding and noncorresponding feelings were most consistent with prediction, results for “anxious” thoughts least so. Apart from a tendency for paraprofessional subjects to show stronger correlations between “rational” thoughts and noncorresponding feelings than other subjects, there was no systematic group difference in the strength of the ideational/affective correlations, suggesting that research results from students have some generality to clients and patients.
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Drs. Thomas Harrell and Karen LaPointe were kind enough to share their inventories and data with us. Dr. Joel Gold gave invaluable assistance with statistical recommendations. The technical help of Michael Blier and Sanford Pederson is much appreciated.
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Thorpe, G.L., Barnes, G.S., Hunter, J.E. et al. Thoughts and feelings: Correlations in two clinical and two nonclinical samples. Cogn Ther Res 7, 565–573 (1983). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01172892
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01172892