The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaderspassive and softer "Mary was loved by John." In fact, some of our pre-
vious work indicates that inactive or helpless psychiatric patients do
have a preference for certain passive grammatical structures.
Collecting Verbal Data
If verbal mannerisms are to be used as a way of determining how an
individual copes with stress, it is important to gather samples of
speech under moderately stressful conditions. Subjects exposed to
minimal or extreme levels of stress will not provide us with the ver-
bal data we are seeking. An example will illustrate this point. Sup-
pose we wished to test a baseball player's ability to catch fly balls.
We would not hit balls beyond his reach since nobody, not even the
most skillful player, could meet such a challenge. Nor would we hit
balls directly to our player since almost anyone could catch them. To
properly test a player's catching skills, we would hit difficult but
catchable fly balls. Requiring a subject to speak uninterruptedly for
ten minutes on any subject or subjects he wishes is a difficult but
manageable task for most people between the ages of five and eighty-
five. Normal as well as emotionally disturbed people can speak unin-
terruptedly for ten minutes. Researchers use the term free speech to
refer to verbal data gathered under the experimental conditions just
described.
When dealing with the remarks of public figures from a distance,
it is necessary to modify the data collection method. To obtain spon-
taneous speech samples, transcribed news conferences and personal
interviews are used. Their use is based upon the assumption that the
stress generated by such encounters is roughly comparable to what
subjects experience when speaking without interruption for ten min-
utes. To make the interview data as comparable as possible to the
subjects' ten-minute monologues, only responses to questions that
exceed thirty words are used. The first sentence of a response is not
counted in order to minimize the effect of dialogue.Verbal Reflections of Personality
Prior to 1975, attempts to correlate speech and personality were lim-
ited to groups of psychologically impaired patients sharing patterns
of symptomatic behavior. During that year, a psycholinguistics