Jaffe In Memorium | Beatricebeebe

Joseph Jaffe died of heart failure in New York City on August 2, 2012. He is survived by his two
children, Lenore and Kenneth, his partner Barbara Boyd, his nephew Bill Jaffe, and his

childhood and lifelong friend Richard Blacher. His wife, Nora Jaffe, painter and sculptor, pre-
deceased him in 1994; his brother Dr. Julian Jaffe, an American Historian, predeceased

him in 1973 at age 43.

He was born April 13, 1924 to Benjamin and Anna Jaffe, both school teachers, who
co-founded Camps Mohican and Rina in Palmer Massachusetts, which later became Camp
Ramah of New England.

He received his B.A. from Columbia College (1944) and his M.D. from New York University
School of Medicine (1947). He was drafted into the Army as a physician in World War II. He
held a United States Public Health Service Research Fellowship in Neurology, 1950-1951 at
Bellevue Hospital with Morris Bender. In 1953 he was certified by the American Board of
Examiners in both psychiatry and neurology. He served as a physician in the Air Force during
the Korean War. He received his Certificate in Psychoanalysis from The William Alanson White
Institute (1958), where he worked with Clara Thompson, among others, and where he was
Director of Research, 1960 – 1971. He held a Research Fellowship in Cognitive Studies 1963-
1965, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, where he worked with George Miller. He came to
New York State Psychiatric Institute, Columbia University Medical School, in 1961 under
Lawrence Kolb, and by 1967 he became Chief of the Department of Communication Sciences.
When his friend Clay Dahlberg had a stroke in 1977, Dahlberg and Jaffe coauthored Stroke: A
Doctor’s Personal Story of his Recovery. Jaffe used his neurology background to explain what
was happening in his friend’s brain during the stroke and the course of recovery.

Jaffe was Associate Editor, with Robert Rieber, of the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
(1992 – present). His research interests included the biological foundations of language, speech
pathology, theoretical biology, biomathematics, infant development, speech rhythms and

automated interaction chronometry, and the genetics of cerebral laterality. He authored or co-
authored over 100 research papers and 3 books. His lifetime research collaborators included

Stanley Feldstein, Beatrice Beebe and Samuel Anderson. Other collaborators included Jacob
Cohen, Daniel Stern, Louis Gerstman, Alex Heller, Donald Ross, Patricia Cohen, Karen Buck,
Henian Chen, Howard Andrews, Amie Ashley Hane, and Howard and Miriam Steele. His
postdoctoral fellows included Joseph Schwartz, Louis Casotta, Steve Breskin, Michael Natale,
and Imran Kahn.

Joseph Jaffe is known for his “Dyadic Systems View of Communication.” In the 1960’s Jaffe
wanted to quantify timing disruptions in the psychotherapy process. He considered the dyad to
be the unit of analysis. In his view, any action in face-to-face communication is jointly defined
by the behavior of both partners (“it takes two to tango,” as he would say). He held an
interpersonal feedback control model in which sending and receiving are reciprocally evoked;
each can modify the other’s behavior simultaneously. His view opposed the reigning
psychological model in the 1960s, stimulus response (S-R) theory, which conceptualized
communication as a one-way process. Jaffe’s model of monologue was published in Science
(1964), and his model of dialogue in Nature (1967). This dyadic systems view of communication

was the foundation of his work on rhythms of dialogue, described below, and influenced the
subsequent studies of mother-infant interaction by Daniel Stern and Beatrice Beebe.

Jaffe and Feldstein are known for their study of the rhythms of dialogue, the temporal structure
of the sounds and silences of conversation. They believed that the words were not enough: they
needed the music. They correctly intuited that the temporal structure of conversation would
reveal as much or more about relationships than the words. Jaffe realized that the analysis of
temporal structure had to be done by computer. He asked Dr. Louis Cassotta, an engineer and his
postdoctoral fellow, to write a program which performed an analogue to digital conversion,
which was named the Automated Vocal Transaction Analyzer (AVTA). It represented a
significant advance in the analysis of language processing and nonverbal aspects of
communication. It facilitated the translation of dyadic systems approaches into data analytic
strategies. Using this AVTA program, they discovered that the way partners exchange speaking
turns, specifically the degree to which they match the durations of the pauses at the point of the
turn switch, is correlated with empathy, interpersonal attraction, field independence/ dependence,
and partner novelty. Moreover, interruptive speech, without pauses at the moment of the turn
switch, leads to the breakdown of effective dialogue. The coordination of speech rhythms also
distinguished patients taking LSD-25, amphetamine and a placebo. Based on these findings,
Jaffe and Feldstein co-authored Rhythms of Dialogue (1970), still in print, in collaboration with
Jacob Cohen, the statistician. These discoveries led to Lawrence Kolb’s invitation to Jaffe to join
New York State Psychiatric Institute. At that time, Jaffe had the first computer at the Institute.
In the 1970’s, in collaboration with Daniel Stern and Beatrice Beebe, Jaffe’s department began
the study of mother-infant vocal and kinesic (movement) communication. There was no easy
way to measure movements such as facial expression or gaze changes. Videotape and computers
were still uncommon. Stern and Beebe studied film frame-by-frame. Once video was available,
there still was no automated system to quantify behavior. Thus in the 1970’s research on
nonverbal behavior (kinesics) was theoretically and technologically years behind the computer
analysis of the sounds and silences of verbal conversation. Nevertheless, Beebe and Jaffe

produced a body of work on mother-infant interaction across the next 4 decades using hand-
coding of videotapes, assisted by armies of students.

In the 1990’s Jaffe’s lab used the automated method of vocal rhythm analysis with infants and
mothers, and infants and novel partners, during face-to-face play at 4 months. In Rhythms of
Dialogue in Infancy (2001), Jaffe, Beebe, Feldstein, Crown and Jasnow showed that the degree
to which the partners matched durations of pauses at the point of the turn switch predicted 12-
month infant attachment and infant cognition. Sara Markese, collaborating with Beebe and
Feldstein, predicted 4-year attachment representations with this same measure. Thus in infancy
as well as adulthood, the way partners exchange turns provides a potent assessment of the
emotional quality of the relationship.

In the last decade under the leadership of Beebe, the Jaffe lab turned to a focus on the social
transmission of maternal psychopathology (depression/anxiety/self-criticism/ dependency) and
the origins of infant insecure attachment. Beebe, Jaffe and co-authors published a research
monograph, The origins of 12-month attachment: A microanalysis of 4-month mother-infant
interaction. The last decade’s body of work identifies precise individual and dyadic social

mechanisms organizing early mother-infant relatedness and communication disturbances, with
direct implications for early intervention.

After September 11, 2001, Jaffe opened his lab to Beebe’s combined clinical and research
project addressing risk and resilience in women pregnant and widowed on that day, and their
infants and young children. Jaffe’s enthusiasm was a sine qua non for this project. It yielded a
book written by the 8 therapists of the project, as well as Jaffe: Beebe, Cohen, Sossin and
Markese (Eds.), (2012), Mothers, infants and young children of September 11, 2001: A primary
prevention project. This project was informed by the lab’s work with video microanalysis, which
is a powerful research, training, and treatment tool. It identifies rapid and subtle patterns often
lost to the naked eye. By watching videotapes with an experienced clinician, parents can learn to
observe the infant’s “nonverbal language,” and the effects of each partner on the other. This
“therapeutic video feedback” method was used in the primary prevention project.

Joseph Jaffe’s passion for research will live on in the colleagues and students he so generously
mentored.

Joe Jaffe and Beatrice Beebe

Patricia Cohen and Joseph Jaffe