GRAY BEHAVIORAL-INHIBITION SYSTEM - A PSYCHOMETRIC EXAMINATION

Gray has posited a neurologically anchored emotion system-the behavioral inhibition system (BIS). He has further posited that to stable individual differences in the sensitivity/reactivity of this system there corresponds a major dimension of personality/temperament-specifically a dimension of fearfulness-fearlessness, i.e. of trait anxiety. Comparisons of the MMPI item-response rates of three samples of female putative normals and of purified samples of female psychiatric outpatients and prostitutes (which were selected to represent the extremes of fearfulness and fearlessness, respectively) resulted in the location of 30 items that displayed the relationship: psychiatric outpatients > putative normals . prostitutes. The psychometric properties of the scale comprised of these 30 items, its relationship to Eysenck's scales of Neuroticism and Extraversion as well as to other scales, and the marked correspondence between the manifest contents of its constitutive items and a set of experiential and behavioral expectations derived from the functions which have been attributed to the BIS combine to provide strong support for the existence of a dimension of personality/temperament of the sort which Gray has proposed. © 1991.