Abstract

This study examined the verbal behavior of former president Richard M. Nixon under conditions of severe psychological stress. After noting Nixon's written comments on stress in his book Six Crises, two of his extemporaneous speeches which dealt with failure—the 1962 California gubernatorial concession speech and the 1974 farewell to his staff address—were subjected to voice stress analysis. This technique utilizes an electronic instrument to obtain graphic representations of physiological disturbances in the voice. The analysis presented in this article demonstrates that underlying substantive themes in a speaker's voice can be physiologically detected by remote analysis.

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