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The joint investigations of linguistics and psychiatry have established, in point of fact, that no matter what the subject of conversation is or what words are involved, it is impossible for people to talk at all without telling over and over again what sort of people they are and how they relate to the rest of the world.

Since interviewing is the basic therapeutic and diagnostic instrument of modern psychiatry, the recording of interviews for playbacks and study has been a boost of Redstone proportions in new research and training.

Some of the earliest recordings, made in the 1940's demonstrated that psychiatrists reacted immediately to anger and anxiety in the sound track, whereas written records of the same interview offered far fewer cues to therapy which -- if they were at all discernible in print -- were picked up only by the most skilled and sensitive experts.

In a general way, psychiatrists were able to establish on a wide basis what many of them had always felt -- that the most telling cues in psychotherapy are acoustic, that such things as stress and nagging are transmitted by sound alone and not necessarily by words.