Abstract Three studies are described. They are based on the hypothesis that the individual's responses to members of a set of stimuli are based on his internalized conception of them and that this internalized conception can be revealed by multidimensional scaling analysis of his judgments of interstimulus similarity. Other responses were expected to be systematically related to the structure so revealed. In a study of facial expressions it was found that judgments of their intensity seemed to represent the expression's distance in two-dimensional space from a point representing no emotion. A study of semantic meaning showed that favorableness of adjectives was represented by a direction in 2-space and different kinds of favorableness were somewhat different directions. In a study of simulated air-raids, the degree of threat posed by a raid corresponded to a direction in the space and the action appropriate to counter it was an area of the space. The results were taken to support the validity of the hypothesis and the usefulness of multidimensional scaling.
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