INTELLIGENCE RATING AND EMOTIONAL PATTERN OF ALLERGIC CHILDREN

For many years it has been a popular conception that allergic persons possess superior mental traits, which for a time were considered to result directly from the allergic constitution. Balyeat,¹ in 1929, strongly supported the theory of the superior mental ability of the allergic person. He based his conclusions on the results of the Otis self-administering test, which was given to 80 allergic and 80 nonallergic children.

In 1937 Piness² and his associates made a similar study and reported their findings, which gave evidence that allergic children are similar in intelligence to normal children. Since these findings flatly contradicted those of Balyeat, we decided to study a group of allergic children in a similar manner, that we might secure further evidence on their mentality by comparing their intelligence quotients with those of the public school children of New York city. We also attempted to compare the emotional pattern