The authors' work at Johns Hopkins University is concisely correlated with psychoanalytic findings. Freud's concepts of the superego, ego, and id, and also the unconscious, preconscious, and conscious are correlated with their conceptions of autokinesis and schizokinesis. Phenomena, based on childhood experiences, which appear in adult life (fixation, Oedipus complex, transference, and the complex, human sexual relationships), are reflected in the phenomenon of autokinesis. The discrepancy between emotional and specific components of the conditioned reflex is called schizokinesis.

In their experience, cardiovascular response supports their concepts more than other conditioned reflexes. In fact, they mention that a dog reacted with bradycardia and a fifty per cent drop in blood pressure, which persisted for eight minutes, simply by being exposed to the clothes which had been worn five years previously by the experimenter.