Friendship

[BARNETT WEISS]

Dear Adam and all:

What is the usefulness of any of this in the long run?
What can it do for me as a practioner or community
organizer or teacher or head of a company or life
trainer for example.  Are happy folks preventable? and
is being happy such a great thing for everyone? I'm
not being facetious or however you spell it here.     
                                       

I think that the most important aspect of all of this
is for wwhat purpose and how it can predict both about
the person in terms of their future actions and
ability to influence people, possible job performance
in a specific kind of job or group. For example, for
the people who are just wanting to manipulate people
for their organization's "benefit" you don't want
someone who is going to be doing certain kinds of jobs
which require high levels of technical information
work to be too closely related with others as it would
get in the way of their being efficient and
maintaining secrecy. 
Of course in working to develop either a program or
educational process or organizing a group or
community, knowing how these social atoms and the
sociometric groupings make a difference in terms of
placement and therapy is what it is all about.

IN psychotherapy, either we have research to show that
people having "good Tele" of a certain count is
desireable to be healthy both physically and mentally,
or it isn't an issue so why worry about it.  
I am fairly sure that there was some decent research
done about people who are both prone to accidents and
poor health in terms of poor sociometric status.  for
accident proness, I think it is pretty much straight
forward concordance and interestingly on the other
hand, people who are isolates may be at greater risk
for suicide, and they may, like schizophenics be less
prone to certain diseases like Cancer. 

That's my 3 cents just now. 

Of course, Adam, I know you are going to ask for the
references and rightly so. Maybe someone has that at
their finger tips.  Jim Sacks is in transit just now I
believe, and I will see about asking him if he can
give me a reference.  Anyone else who may have a
direct reference to some research on this point would
be appreciated. 
Blessings, Bud