ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a series of studies in which the author quite directly investigated the effect of planned or "programmed" increases and decreases in the interviewer's own reaction time latency upon the reaction time latency of his interviewee-conversational partner. For a society that has extensively studied so many other facets of human behavior it may come as a surprise that the author know so little about speaking' behavior, an activity in which everyone probably engages in dozens of times daily. Since then many other investigators have plotted frequency distributions of such single utterances in order to discern the characteristics of the frequency of occurrence of speech units of different lengths. The very essence of human conversation—its content—is carried by acoustical events that constitute durations of communicative utterances. During the 12 approximately 50-minutes interviews the patient contributed 951 single utterances, while the psychotherapist contributed 909. In the two-person interviews "the individual nurse-interviewees responded with a mean reaction time of 2.4 seconds.
