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by John Kord Lagemann
AFrER a visit from a friend, my mother would review the conversation in her mind, the pauses, inflections and choice of words, then announce the real news the caller never mentioned:
“Henry wants to sell his hous&.”“Frank is going to marry Janie.”“Young Mrs. Cole thinks she’s pregnant but isn’t sure.”
Mother was no mind reader, she was practicing a technique we now call “content analysis.” ft’s a kind of systematic search for the small verbal clues that, when put together, reveal a larger meaning: attitudes, intentions, behavior patterns, underlying strategy. As Ben Jonson wrote more than 300 years ago, “Language springs out of the inmost parts of us. No glass renders a man’s likeness so true as his speech.”
Experts in business and science use highly developed content-analysis techniques to measure changes in consumer attitudes and to diagnose emotional conflicts. Governments keep corps of analysts monitoring other nations’ broadcasts and printed materials to extract useful intelligence. Details that seem trivial by themselves have a way of adding up, when classified and counted, to vital information. I’ve found—as have many other people—that certain tricks of content analysis help you to read between the lines of ordinary conversation.
Fingerprint Words. A word or group of words that recurs frequently is one of the surest clues to who or what is on a person’s mind. As any parent knows, you can easily tell which of your daughter’s boy friends is becoming the new favorite— sometimes before the girl herself is really aware of it-.–simply by counting the number of times the name is mentioned.
But the technique can have more subtle applications. For example, verbal fingerprinting helped a young lawyer handle .a difficult clientwith whom other members of the firm had been unable to get along. The young man collected all letters and memos from the client in his firm’s files. As he read them he was struck by recurrent expressions and allusions typical of a certain period of English literature. Further investigation revealed the client as a prodigiously well-read amateur scholar, a shy man who hid his sensitivity behind a cantankerous manner. With this key to the client’s personality, the lawyer had no trouble in gaining his confidence.
The Big Pronoun. We instinctively notice how often someone says, “I,”“me,”“my” and “mine.” To most of us, excessive use of the first person singular simply means that the person is a bore—but it can mean something more. “When one’s automobile is out of order,” says social psychologist 0. Hobart Mowrer, “one is likely to refer to it oftener. Likewise, when a person’s psychic equipment is grating and squeaking, it is understandable that his attention should be directed toward it much of the time.”
Counts made at the University of Iowa and the University of Cincinnati demonstrate that hospitalized mental patients use “I” oftener thn any other word—about once every 12 words, three times as often as normal people. As these patients recover, their use of “1” and “they” goes down, and their use of “we” goes up.
The Judgment Test. One way ‘1 recognizing a person’s values is by cataloguing the particular adjectives he uses to express approval and disapproval. With one of my friends the fun4amenta1 criterion is practicality: good things he describes as “feasible,”“applicable,”“functional”; things he doesn’t like are “unworkable.”
Several years ago a close friend of ours became engaged to a man whose usual words of praise were “powerful,”“strong,”“overwhelming.” Things he disliked were “weak,”“tiny” or “insignificant.” He seemed to judge everything on the basis of size and power. Our friend, on the other hand, was a woman of artistic interest* ‘whose value judgments were mainly in terms of “beautifur versus “ugly.” it was no great surprise when they found they “did not see eye to eye,” and broke the engagement.
Images and Themes. The metaphors, similes and analo‘gics a person uses not only reflect his life experience but tell you how he thinks. Individuals have certain dominant themes. highly revealing of character. One man I know constantly uses images that suggest he is steering toward a distant landfall through buffeting winds. His main concern is to “Iceep his bearings” and “stay on course.” He urges friends to “state their position” and to be su.re they “know where they arc going.” A nautical background is indicated—but, more than that, a whole philosophy of life.
How Do You Feel? The late psychologist Dr. John Dollard of Yale and Dr. Mowrer devised a sort of emotional barometer by comparing the number of words a person uses expressing discomfort of any kind—ill health, annoyance or boredom— with the number of words which express relief, comfort, fun or satisfaction. They use this “Discomfort-Relief Quotient” to measure progress in the emotional adjustment of a patient undergoing treatment. If in the course of a few minutes’ casual conversation a man has used no comfort words at all but has mentioned the “horrible” weather, the “appalling” headlines, the “dull” plays being written these days and the “aggravating” traffic situation, he doesn’t have to add that he is feeling out of tune with the world.
A similar formula was developed years ago by Dr. Harold Lasswdll• of the Yale School of L..aw. He counted the number of favorable self-rcferences in a person’s speech and the number of self-derogatory references, and used the raio as a measure of self-esteem. Dr. Lasswell also counted the favorable and unfavorable references to others. Comparing the two sets, he found that the person with high self-esteem tends to be well disposed toward others, too.
Grammar Counts. Verb tenses can provide a hint as to how much a person dwells in the past as compared with his concern for the present and his plans and hopes for the future. When the past tense predominates it may indicate melancholy or depression.
Passive versus active is another clue. A decided preference for passive constructions—”l found myself there” instead of “I went there”—may reflect a feeling of impotence, active constructions a sense of power and responsibility. Er… Ah…. A doctor friend told me once that in taking the history of a new patient he sometimes learns as much from the hesitations as from the direct answers. “Occupation?” The
person who’s happy with his job usually answers promptly. A
long pauses a cough, laugh, throat clearing or sniffle may
indicate trouble in that department. “Married or single?” Again,
in this doctor’s experience, a hesitation can be meaningful.
Pauses may indicate tension or anxiety associated with the
words that follow. “1, er, ah, .love you” means something very
different from a forthright “I love you.
Using clues like these, my friends and I have gained a surer
understanding of one another, and even of ourselves. Content
analysis will never replace reason or common sense, of course. But it can supplement them, and sometimes reveal messages we would otherwise miss completely.

health, science & technology, self improvement self improvement

by Sydney J. Hams
I WALKED with my friend, a Quaker. to the newsstand the other night, and he bought a paper, thanking the newsie politely. The newsie didn’t even acknowledge it.
‘A sullen fellow, isn’t her’ 1 commented.
“Oh, he’s that way every night.” shrugged my friend.
“Then why do you continue to be so polite to him?” I asked.
“Why not?” inquired my friend. ‘Why should I let him decide how I’m going to act?”
As I thought about this incident later, it occurred to me that the important word was “act.” My friends acts toward people; most of us react toward them.
He has a sense of inner balance which is lacking in most of us; he knows who he is, what he stands for, how he should behave. He refuses to return incivility for incivility, because then he would no longer be in command of his own conduct.
When we are enjoined in the Bible to return good for evil, we look upon this as a moral injunction—which it is. But it is also a psychological prescription for our emotional health.
Nobody is unhappier than the perpetual reactor. His center of emotional gravity is not rooted within himself, where it belongs, but in the world outside him. His spiritual temperature is always being raised or lowered by the social climate around him, and he is a mere creature at the mercy of these elements.
Praise gives him a feeling of euphoria, which is false, be-cause it does not last and it does not come from self-approval. Criticism depresses him more than it should, because it confirms his own secretly shaky opinion of himself. Snubs bun him, and the merest suspicion of unpopularity in any quarter rouses him to bitterness.
A serenity of spirit cannot be achieved until we become the masters of our own actions and attitudes. To let another determine whether we shall be rude or gracious, elated or depressed, is to relinquish control over our own personalities, which is ultimately all we possess. The only true possession is self-possession.

health, science & technology, self improvement self improvement

FOR almost seven years. Mrs. Andrews had been unable to move her head. Her condition—known as wryneck—had started with painful muscle spasms, which grew worse until her head was always pulled to the left. After years of going to doctors, including psychiatrists, she was referred to New York’s lCD Rehabilitation and Research Center to learn a new technique of sensory feedback (also called biofeedback) training.
“Now look at me!” Mrs. Andrews said after her fourth treatment. She slowly moved her head from side to side, then held it proudly eyes-forward. “First, the doctors explained that I could learn to relax the major muscle that turns my head. I was skeptical, but willing to try. Electrodes from a small machine were attached to my neck, and the machine made loud clicks. My job was to lower the number of clicks by relaxing my neck muscle. I can’t tell you how I did this, but I did, and the next thing I knew, I could hold my head straight.” Having leaz1ed how to relax this muscle, Mrs. Andrcws is now able to do it without the aid of the machine.
Biofeedback training is based on the premise that we can modify or gain control over a range of bodily functions once thought to be totally automatic. We all use natural forms of feedback to perfect skills. For example, in learning to serve a tennis ball, we throw it in the air, hit it, and watch where it lands. If the ball sails 15 feet past the service line, seeing that constitutes a feedback on our actions. Accordingly, we modify our swing and footwork until we make the ball land where it should. Learning such a skill requires only making an effort, then seeing, hearing or feeling the results.
In many instances—if we want to relax a back muscle at will, or move a paralyzed ann, say—we cannot carry out the intention. Either nature has not provided us with a feedback mechanism, giving us signals we can use to learn that skill, or disease has destroyed a feedback system. Now, however, researchers have developed a host of sensory instruments that can help bridge the gsp.
For example, an instrument called an electromyograph tG) picks up electrical activity within muscles. Other devices monitor galvanic skin response (GsR)— the resistance that skin offers a minute amount of electricity. Other instruments detect minute temperature changes. The signals that are picked up are converted into sounds or visual aids for the patient to hear or see, and to use as signposts in controlling specific processes.
The list of chronic ailments being treated—experimentally, at least—with biofeedback includes asthma, back pain, migraine and tension headache, to name a few. Some favorable results have been achieved in the areas of stroke and, to a lesser extent, epilepsy.
“The potential is quite encouraging, and some results are truly amazing, especially in treating neuromuscular problems,” says Dr. Joseph Brudny, former director of the Sensory Feedback Therapy Unit at the lCD Center. “But I see it as a useful adjunct to our present medical tools, not as a panacea.”
“It may not, always work,” a New York University professor of neurology, Dr. Julius Korein, says. ‘But it doesn’t seem to have any harmful side effects—something you can’t say about many drugs or surgical trcatments.”
Just how the technique works may be seen at Denver’s National Jewish Hospital and Research Center, where researchers arc refining EMO bic feedback to help patients control asthma attacks. Although asthmatics suffer because they arc sensitive to environmental agents like dust, fumes, cold, foods and certain plants. their attacks arc sometimes complicated by their psychological reaction to such potential threats. An asthmatic enrolled in the hospital’s biofeedback program is placed in a
comfortable, soundproof room and electrodes are connected to his forehead, to detect electrical activity in the muscles just above the eyebrow. If relaxed, he hears only slow, lethargic clicks. If he is tense, his forehead muscles knot up, and the machine bursts into frantic clicking.
The patient is asked to visualize flowers, trees, dust—whatever threatens him with an asthma attack. As he reacts instinctively to the image, the biofeedback equipment, reflecting his mounting anxiety, clicks like a Geiger counter. Hearing the crescendo, the patient knows he is laying the groundwork for an intensified asthma attack. Over the course of several training sessions, he learns to keep the click rate slow by keeping his tension down. (Just how he does this, he cannot explain, any more than he can explain exactly how he learns to ride a bicycle.) In time, patients learn to relax even without the machine.
Many doctors, especially those who deal with chronic pain and pain that defies medical analysis, are eagerly embracing biofeedback training as a way of inhibiting nonspecific pain feelings in the brain. One is Dr. Stuart H. Mann, an associate clinical professor in the Department of Rehabilitation at the University of Southern California School of Medicine. After tests are run to rule out a discernible cause for pain (a tumor, for example), the patient is attached to a GSR device, which emits a shrill, piercing sound. “We tell the patient the sound is the pain,” Dr. Mann says. “He has to turn it off.”
In time, a large percentage of Dr. Mann’s patients learn to “think” the sound down. Then, after intensive practice, even without the machine, they are able to sit down when they feel the pain coming and “work it down.” They are very proud when they can get themselves off drugs.
Even the crippling pain of migraine headache has proved amenable to biofeedback training. An instrument, highly sensitive to temperature changes, is attached to the patient’s hand and emits increasingly higher sounds as hand temperature rises—the result of increased blood flow. Patients have learned to increase blood flow to the hand enough to raise its temperature ten degrees in two minutes. As this happens, relaxation takes place—and as a side effect the migraine is aborted. Researchers who discovered this biofeedback technique at the Menningcr Foundation, in Topeka, Kari., helped 80 percetfi of the migraine patients they first treated with it.
Physicians who deal with stroke and paralysis are also using biofeedback to help patients regain muscle function. To move an arm, there must be sensory input to the brain as well as motor output. Without input we cannot monitor our actions. A basketball player who loses his sight, for example, will not be able to make baskets consistently from a set spot on the floor. However, if a buzzer goes off every time the ball goes ‘in. by substituting his hearing fqr his sight he can eventually releai-n the skill. Similarly, for some stroke and paralysis patients with brain injury, whose normal feedback system has been disrupted, biofeedback instruments can serve as a substitute. The patient learns to monitor an activIty through another, undamaged pathway. The instruments are used to pick up muscular electrical activity in the paralyzed limb and make it audible or visible to the patient. The patient works with the signals until he can actually begin to use the muscle.
In an initial study by Dr. Brudny and his colleagues, involving 36 patients with varying degrees of paralysis or other neuromuscular disorders, 34 achieved improvement ranging from meaningful functional gains to full recovery. One patient was a young electrician who had been left seemingly para1yzd from the neck down. With several weeks of painstaking training, .the young man slowly regained use of his arms and hands to the point where he could shave, feed himself, even do leacherwork.
“I wore a leg brace for iwo and a half years,” says a former stroke patient of Dr. Herbert E Johnson, former medical director and a psychiatrist at Casa Colina Hospital for Rehabilitative Medicine in Pomona, Calif. “But I had read about biofeedback training at Casa Colina, and asked to be taught it. I had to practice every day, one hour in the morning and one at night. I would practice starting and stopping the noise from the machine 100 times every ten minutes—about 600 times an hour. In three or four weeks, I had been able to strengthen my ankle and get rid of the brace”
About 1000 medical researchers are now working with biofeedback at some of the nation’s leading medical centers, and many more ire involved in clinical research outside the hospital.
If you think biofeedback may be the answer for your problem, ask your doctor if it can help you. He may be able to refer you to acceptable programs in your area. But avoid any so. called “expert” who uses the devices indiscriminately and shuns proper medical supervision. The Federal Drug Administration cautions that biofeedback devices used for diagnosis or treatment of disease conditions be used only by or after consulting a physician or other licensed practitioner.
Bear in mind that biofeedback is still in its early stages, not a magic cure-all or a substitute for other treatment. It is simply an adjunct which, as one research psychologist points out in connection with asthma, may help the patient feel he is back in the driver’s seat.

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