Louis A. Gottschalk

Goldine C. Gleser

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1969.

The Measurement of Psychological States Through the Content Analysis of Verbal Behavior

Fernando Lolas

Linda L. Viney

The psychological states of patients with diabetes mellitus were compared with those of patients suffering from other chronic diseases and people with no diagnosed chronic diseases. These states were assessed by applying content analysis scales to transcripts of their descriptions of their current experiences. Analyses of the diabetics' scale scores re vealed a pattern characterized by much anxiety, depression, anger expressed both direct ly and indirectly, together with feelings of helplessness. The sources of anxiety which proved to be of most importance to them were fears of death and bodily mutilation, as weIl as guilt and shame. They experienced little sense of sharing with most people around them, although they showed considerable enjoyment of dose relationships with family and friends. This pattern of psychological states did not vary with the sex of the patients or whether they were interviewed in a hospital or at horne nor with recency of onset or multiplicity of health problems. It was similar to the pattern of patients with other chronic diseases but differed significantly from that of the healthy group. Acknowledgment The authors wish to acknowledge the contribution ofCarol Preston to the collection and analysis of these data which were made available, inpart, by patients of the Wollongong Hospital and members of the Illawarra Branch of the Diabetic Association of N ew South Wales. References 1. Strong JA, Baird JD (1971) Diseases ofthe endocrine system. In: Davidson S, McLeod J (eds) The principles and practice of medicine.

Significance in Clinical Medicine and Psychiatry

Content Analysis of Verbal Behavior

How to Understand and Analyze Your Own Dreams

The prospective reader may well ask about the particular merits of this volume, especially in view of several dozen similar offerings, each with its own excellences, and of the easy availability of symposia, conferences, con ventional reviews, abstract journals, and serial research reports. In spite of such other attractions, it seems to me that these 34 essays are among the most informative and stimulating which are now available in the areas cov ered. The editors have been successful in attracting new articles from many of the most prominent investigators now actively working at research in psychotherapy, who can therefore speak for themselves about what they are doing. Several of the articles have been in the preparatory stage for numerous years. Not only do they represent the vanguard of research, but because of the introduction of relatively new concepts in communication theory in the clinical setting which can be implemented by the new tech nology (specifically the use of sound-films and tape), they probably presage the shape of much that is to come. It is commonplace that the history of a science is closely allied to the history of the tools available. Here we see the concepts, attitudes, and working methods on this frontier being set forth frankly and concretely in ways which avoid many of the deficiencies and evasions of previous clini cal research.

Louis A. Gottschalk

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