The Psychological Assessment of Political Leadersability of a speaker to lose and then regain his or her verbal style dur-
ing the course of an interview or, even better, over the course of sev-
eral interviews spanning days or weeks. A vulnerable speaker may be
so traumatized by a failed verbal performance that his or her ability
to respond publicly to questions may be affected for a time. Richard
Nixon temporarily lost his usual speaking style during the Water-
gate scandal. His verbal behavior resembled that of a depressed
patient. Following the resolution of the crisis, he regained his cus-
tomary manner of speaking.
- Response to stress. This trait is best measured when the verbal
data have been gathered during stress interviews. The speaker's
responses to challenging questions are scored and compared with the
individual's other scores when answering more neutral questions. If,
for example, a speaker's use of both qualifiers and retractors increases
in response to stress questions, we may conclude that the speaker
becomes less decisive in crisis situations. If, in response to confronta-
tional questions, a speaker uses the pronoun / more and the pronoun
we less, it is likely that in crisis situations that individual will rely
more on his or her own resources and less on help from others. On the
other hand, a speaker who cannot accept sole responsibility for crisis
situations is apt to react in the opposite way, by using more of the
pronoun we and less of the pronoun I.