THE EDITOR FINDS The Study of Spontaneous Talk a fascinating experience. How infrequently does the opportunity arise to witness from almost the very beginning the exploration of a true scientific terra incognita! And when this unknown is so familiar in a fragmentary and intensely personal way, the fascination is surely enhanced. The authors describe their data as "at once rare and complicated," and comment that this "precluded the formulation of hypotheses at the outset." They liken their problem to that of "going forth to see what a jungle consists of" rather than "making one's way through a jungle to find a particular village." We have here, then, a record of the stream of discovery paralleling the specific study of the stream of talk.

IN A preceding investigation (1, 2) an effort was made to study the rater bias or set found in personality appraisals based on projective tests and other types of personal documents by comparing such appraisals with others based on more extensive information and observation. In this earlier study the criterion consisted of a series of trait ratings arrived at by a three-man team after five days of study of the individual through objective and projective tests, interviews, various personal documents, and observations of behavior in standard situations. However, inasmuch as the criterion ratings consisted of a series of judgments of traits, i.e., of certain abstractions currently familiar in personality studies, the validity of the appraisals which were investigated was pointed out to be a "relative validity" contingent upon the validity of the judgments of the team making the criterion ratings. Since the consensus of "experts" may or may not correlate satisfactorily with an external criterion of validity, an effort was made to conduct an analogous investigation in which the appraisals could be evaluated against a more rigorous criterion, viz., a criterion test dealing more directly with specific behaviors of the subject which had occurred in the past rather than with the appraisal of so-called traits. The present report deals with this effort. METHODCriterion test. As the criterion for this study a postdiction test was constructed consisting of an array of multiple-choice items which were built primarily around incidents known to have happened in tie recent past history of a single subject (5), hereafter called "Linda." Although the majority of items concerned specific situational behaviors, some items were developed from commonly shared characterizations of 5

As the preceding article by Starheather indicates, many research workers have recognized that human speech contains more information than that contained in the words themselves. The present paper presents the rationale, the methodology of two experiments, the results of these studies in the area of nonverbal communication, and a brief discussion of the findings. * Mr. Soskin is research psychologist at McLean Hospital and Mr.Kauffman is the director of research at Hawthorn Center. The work which they report here was carried out while both writers were at the University of Chicago.

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