ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to relate the non content variables of duration of utterance, reaction time latency, and interruptions to indexes of the some emotional, attitudinal, or motivational states of the subjects. It reviews a program designed to investigate the relationships among the speech variables of duration of utterance, reaction time latency, and interruptions to a variety of independently assessed content-derived motivational and personality variables characteristic of the same interviewee. The study utilized an interviewer who was asked to vary his delivery or style of speaking, neutral versus interpretive statements, of relatively standardized content in his interviews with two groups of student-nurse interviewees. In one part of the interview the interviewer used a neutral non-judgmental style of open-ended nondirective interviewing; in the second part, appropriately counterbalanced for possible order or sequence effects, the interviewer, continuing to talk about the same content, made interpretations about the student-nurse interviewee's motivations and life style.
