[New strategies in psychiatric diagnosis through the use of audio-visual technics. 2. Importance of verbal and non-verbal information for assessment of depressive patients].

Sections of 150 seconds duration were taken on a random basis out of TV stored interviews of day 0, 10 and 20 of a double-blind antidepressive drug trial. Not identical sections were selected for the isolated audio and video channel and for the combined presentation in such a way that for each of the 20 patients three times three parts were presented for evaluation. It was the two rater's task to rank each patient's tapes in terms of the degree of depression. They were blind regarding the day of recording the interview (day 0, 10 or 20). The best results were reached with the combined presentation of the audio-video-channel while each channel taken seperately rendered less diagnostic information. The raters evaluated the material in two different modifications: a) Video, audio and than audio-video-channel or b) audio, video and audio-video-channel. The first version (a) was evaluated in a better way than the second one with respect to the content of diagnostic information. Furthemore we found that the evaluation of the visual information became less safe if the audio presentation preceded as in version b.