Some years ago I had become a kind of perpetual student in France, coming there on the GI Bill from my native Virginia and America. I was a curious man in his early twenties, and was interested in medicine, but had not chosen a field therein.
I was 22 years old and had a BS/BA in pre-med and a major in foreign Languages.
I was interviewed by a leading professor in a research-oriented medical school, who posed to me this question: Have you heard anything about the new field of psycholinguistics?

I hadn't heard , so I listened to his explanation that it was a MEDICAL field leaning toward PSYCHOLOGY in which one might accurately determine the real meaning of a person's linguistic emissions, verbal and written and viewed, by his selection of words, his face and body movements, his general and specific behaviors.
Captivated by the appeal of this new science, I put a very long period of study into it, even unto the present.
My thesis is: Can we depend upon an expertise in psycholinguistics to know its target's truths, beliefs, physical condition, mental condition, veracity, politics and level of threat to society from viewing or reading him?

My own belief is that yes, we can believe in the science and rely on it, but only on the most rigorous self-scrutiny as we operate in the field. It is NOT a form of psychotherapy, but a form of psycho-scrutiny.

What are its applications?

The most obvious and most used form of psycholinguistics assaults us hundreds of times a day. Advertising! Though most of it is crude in creation, and thoughtless in application, every product we see offered on television, radio, newspapers,and bill-boards has had somewhere and by somebody an application of a plan to influence us to want to buy, and thus to buy, its products.
This use of psycholinguistics, persuasion in the marketplace, is the most unscrupulous example. There is little use of truth, and overwhelming searching for a vulnerability in the sales target. Just last evening there was a news announcemet of a drug for lowering cholesterol that had sparked a billion prescriptions and a million advertisements but had been found to have no effect at all on cholesterol.

What Other Fields Does Psycholinguistics Touch?

If you have need of psychological counseling and visit a psychologist or psychiatrist, when you are interviewed and talk of your problem, your doctor is subjecting you to an intense psycholinguistic scrutiny,

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