Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, PhD: When I think about audiovisual heritage in the social and behavioral sciences, I would propose The Natural History of an Interview for consideration. It involved one of the earliest pieces of film whose analysis benefitted psychiatry, anthropology, linguistics, and communication. The Natural History of an Interview, or NHI, is the name given to a project established in 1955-56 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in California. The goal was to study face-to-face interaction, beginning with the analysis of a psychiatric interview. Noted psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann wanted to understand what was happening with her patients during a therapy session. Fromm-Reichmann's question sparked a decade of research, ultimately including multiple linguists, anthropologists, and other psychiatrists. When Gregory Bateson, an anthropologist, joined the group, he contributed a film from a separate project on families with a schizophrenic child, organized at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto. The Natural History of an Interview is important for the following reasons. First, it served as a model for combining academic disciplines to more fully address real life problems. Second, it developed new tools. NHI is one of the earliest attempts to study, the combination of verbal and non-verbal behavior occurring in everyday interaction, one sequence at a time. Third, NHI was one of the earliest projects to examine actual events rather than experimental manipulations, in order to study communication. It's now accepted practice to film or record interaction and search for patterns in participants' behavior. But at the time, this was still new, and it all started with one psychiatrist's question about how to understand what occurred when she worked with her patients.
