ABSTRACT
In chapter 8, I stated that we started to study speech disturbances in search of a nonphysiological measure of transitory variations in the patient’s anxiety during psychotherapy interviews. I also presented there our rationale for selecting this particular aspect of speech for this purpose. That rationale included the clinical experience of using episodes of “flustered” or “confused” speech as cues of anxiety in the patient. Having developed measures of speech disturbances and replacing clinical perceptions of the patient’s speech with these measures, we were faced with crucial questions: Does our measure of speech disturbance really reflect moment-to-moment changes in the speaker’s anxiety? Or is it a monstrous artifact of quantification? To answer these questions we conducted the studies reported in this and the next four chapters.
