Читать книгу Deficiency and Delinquency: An Interpretation of Mental Testing - James Burt Miner - Страница 8

The first broad conclusion that impresses those who try to use mental scales for diagnosing feeble-mindedness is that the lower types, the idiots and imbeciles, can be detected with great accuracy by an hour's testing. The difficulties pile up as soon as the individual rises above the imbecile group. The practical experience of those in institutions for the feeble-minded here becomes of fundamental importance. They are able to supply the history of exceptions that should make us cautious about our general rules. Certain people whom they have known for years to be unable to adjust themselves socially because their minds have not reached the level of social fitness will yet be able to pass considerably beyond the lower test limit for mature minds. The mental scales can only detect those feeble-minded who cannot succeed with our present tests. This is the basal principle in using any system of tests.

Stated in another way, this first caution for anybody seeking the assistance of a mental scale is that tests may detect a feeble-minded person, but when a person passes them it does not guarantee social fitness. The negative conclusion, “this person is not feeble-minded,” can not be drawn from tests alone. Mental tests at present are positive and not negative scales. This fact will probably always make the expert's judgment essential before the discharge of a suspected case of mental deficiency. When a subject falls below a conservative limit for tested ability a trained psychologist who is familiar with the sources of error in giving tests, even without experience with the feeble-minded, should be able to say that this person at present shows as deficient development as the feeble-minded. To conclude however that any subject has a passable mind requires in addition practical experience with feeble-minded people who pass the tests. It is very much easier to state that the tests do not detect all forms of feeble-mindedness than it is to give any adequate description of the sort of feeble-mindedness which they do not as yet detect.

This distinction between the feeble-minded who do well with test scales and those who do not, is well known in the institutions for the feeble-minded. Binet sought to distinguish some of the feeble-minded who escaped the tests by calling them “unstable,” or “ill-balanced,” individuals as Drummond (77) translates the term. To use the historical distinctions of psychology, their minds seem to be undeveloped more on their volitional and emotional sides than on their intellectual side. Weidensall (59) has described another type as “inert.” She found that quite a number of the reformatory women might slide through the tests but fail socially from the fact that “their lives and minds are so constituted that they feel no need to learn the things any child ought to know, though they can and do learn when we teach them.” Again, it seems to be a disturbance of will through the feeling, rather than an intellectual deficiency. Many of the so-called “moral imbeciles” are probably able to pass intellectual tests lasting but a few minutes. Like the unstable or inert they are not failures because of a lack of intellectual understanding of right and wrong, but because of excess or deficiency of their instinctive tendencies especially in the emotional sphere. Such weakness of will may arise either from abnormality of specific instinctive impulses or inability to organize these impulses so that one impulse may be utilized to supplement or inhibit another. We may call all this group of cases socially deficient because of a weakness in the volitional, or conative, aspect of mind.

The discrimination of mental activities which are predominately emotional and conative from those in which intellect is mainly emphasized is also well recognized by those who have been making broad studies of tests in other fields than that of feeble-mindedness. Hart and Spearman (123), for example, call attention to the fact that tests passed under the stimulus of test conditions represent what the subject does when keyed up to it rather than what he would do under social conditions. We cannot be sure that speed ability as tested will represent speed preferences. The subject may be able to work rapidly for a few minutes, but in life consistently prefer to work deliberately. Regarding the eighteen tests which they studied with normal and abnormal adults they say: “These tests have been arranged so as to be confined to purely intellectual factors. But in ordinary life, this simplicity is of rare occurrence. For the most part, what we think and believe is dominated by what we feel and want.” Kelley (130) finds by the regression equation that the factor of effort amounts to two-thirds of the weight of that of the intellectual factor in predicting scholarship from teachers' estimates. Webb (217) thinks that he finds by tests a general conative factor comparable to Spearman's general intellective factor.

With the change in point of view that has come from the adoption of the biological conception of the mind the discrimination of the different forms of feeble-mindedness must be recognized as a distinction in the emphasis on intellectual, emotional and conative processes, not a distinction between actually separable forms of mental activity. On account of the organic nature of the mind it is well established that various mental processes are mutually dependent. Any disturbance of the emotional processes will tend to affect the thinking and vice versa. Even if we believe that emotions are complex facts, involving vague sensations as well as feelings, and that terms like emotion, memory, reasoning and will are names for classes of mental facts rather than for mental powers, it still remains important to distinguish between feeling, intellect and will, as well as to recognize the interdependence of the mental processes. Common sense seems to agree with psychological descriptions in regarding mind as a broader term than intellect, and feeble-mindedness as a broader term than intellectual feebleness.

Since tests at present tend to reach the intellectual processes more surely than the emotional, we describe those who fail in them as intellectually deficient. The term “intellect” seems to be better than “intelligence” because the latter seems to include information as well as capacity, while the aim of measuring scales has been to eliminate the influence of increasing information with age. To be thoroughly objective, of course, one should talk about “feebleness in tested abilities;” but we would then fail to point out the important fact about our present scales that they detect mainly intellectual deficiency, that they do not reach those forms of feeble-mindedness in which the weakness in such traits as stability, ambition, perseverance, self-control, etc., is not great enough to interfere with the brief intellectual processes necessary for passing tests. Intellectual deficiency will be used hereafter to refer to those social deficients whose feebleness is disclosed by our present test scales.

In the opinion of Kuhlmann these cases of disturbed emotions and will which shade off into different forms of insanity should not be classed as feeble-minded at all, although he recognizes that they are commonly placed in this group. He regards them as an intermediate class between the feeble-minded and the insane. He says: “They readily fail in the social test for feeble-mindedness and because of the absence of definite symptoms of insanity are often classed as feeble-minded. In the opinion of the present writer they should not be so classed, because they require a different kind of care and treatment, and have a different kind of capacity for usefulness” (140). So long as this group of what we shall term “conative cases” is discriminated from the intellectually deficient it matters less whether they be regarded as a sub-group of the feeble-minded or as a co-ordinate class. In grouping them with the feeble-minded we have followed the customary classification. An estimate of the size of this group will be considered later in Chapter III.