exam 1

Question 1

communication

Answer 1

the process through which people use messages to generate meanings within and across contexts, cultures, channels, and media

Question 2

5 features that characterize communication:

Answer 2

o 1st Communication is a process that unfolds overtime through a series of interconnected actions carried out by the participants
o 2nd Those engaged in communication use messages to convey meaning.
o 3rd communications occurs in a seemingly endless variety of contexts, or situations
o 4th people communicate through a variety of channels

o 5th to transmit information, communicators use a broad range of media tools for exchanging media

Question 3

• Models of communication

Answer 3

o Linear communication model: communication is an activity in which information flows in one directions, from a starting point to an end point. The linear model contains several components.
o Interactive communication Model: communications is a process involving senders and receivers. However accordin to this model, transmission is influenced by 2 additional factors: feedback and field of experience

• Transactional communication Model: suggests that communication is fundamentally multidirectional. That is, each participant equally influences the communication behavior from the other participants.

Question 4

• McCornack’s def. of IPC

Answer 4

a dynamic form of communication between 2 or more people in which the messages exchanged significantly influence their thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and relationships

Question 5

4 important implications (McCornack’s def. of IPC)

Answer 5

 its dynamic (always in motion and changing over time)
 is transactional, both parties contribute to the meaning
 is primarily dyadic—it involves pairs of people, or dyads.
•
 creates impact: it changes participants thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and relationships

Question 6

• M&S’s 3 levels of information on which people base predictions

Answer 6

o 3 levels of analysis are used in making predictions: cultural, sociological, and psychological
o
 Cultural level of analysis: culture is the sum of characteristics, beliefs, habits, practices, and language shared by a large group of people, usually living in a definable geographic area. people in a culture are united through norms and values
 Sociological level of analysis: groups contain fewer members than an entire culture so the rules are more specific
 Psychological level of analysis: when predictions of others responses to our communication behaviors are based on analysis of unique individual learning experiences, they are grounded in a psychological level of analysis.

Question 7

• M&S’s def. of IPC

Answer 7

when people communicate, they make predictions about the effects, or outcomes, of their communication behavior, that is, they choose among various communicative strategies on the basis of predictions about how the person receiving the message they respond

Question 8

o I-thou

Answer 8

when we embrace the fundamental similarities that connect us with others, strive to see things from others points of views, and communicate in ways that emphasize honesty and kindness, we feel closer to others. We don’t have to completely agree with everything that everyone says , but we need to approach them with an open mind giving them the same respect that we expect

Question 9

o I-it

Answer 9

when we focus on our differences, refuse to accept or even acknowledge rival view points as legitimate, and communicate in ways that emphasize our own supposed superiority over others, the distance between us and others “thickens” to the point where it becomes impenetrable

Question 10

• Content & relationship dimensions of IPC

Answer 10

during every interpersonal encounter, people simultaneously exchange 2 types of info:
o Content information: actual meaning of the words
o Relationship information: consists of signals indicating how each of you views your relationship
o You convey content information directly through spoken or written words, but you communicate relationship information primarily through nonverbal cues

Question 11

• Metacommunication

Answer 11

communication about communication. Includes any message, that has as its central focus the meaning of communication. Everything from discussion of previous comments to exchanged glances between friends questioning how a message should be interpreted

Question 12

• Inevitability, irreversibility, & dyanamic nature of IPC

Answer 12

o During interpersonal encounters, people attach meaning to nearly everything you say and do—weather you intend to send a message or not
o Irreversible: Everytime you communicate interpersonally, you and the other person affect you future communication and the quality of your relationship
o Dynamic: when you interact with others, your communication and all that influences it—perceptions, thoughs, feelings, and emotions—are constantly in flux

Question 13

• Goals: self-presentation, instrumental, & relationship (def. & implications for IPC)

Answer 13

o self-presentation: desires you have to present yourself in certain ways so that others perceive you as being a particular type of person
o instrumental: practical aims you want to achieve or tasks you want to accomplish througha particular interpersonal encounter
o relationship: building, maintaining, or terminating bonds with others

Question 14

• Components of IPC competence

Answer 14

o Appropriate: communication follows accepted norms
o Effective: your communication enables you to achieve your goals
o Ethical: you communication treats people fairly

Question 15

• Self-monitoring

Answer 15

the process of observing our own communication and the norms of the situation in order to make appropriate communication choices

Question 16

• Self

Answer 16

evolving composite of self-awareness, self-concept, and self-esteem. Self is made of 3 distinct yet integrated, components that evolve continually over time, based on life experiences

Question 17

• Self-awareness

Answer 17

the ability to step outside yourself, view yourself as a unique person distinct from your surrounding environment; and reflect on your thoughts, feelings and behaviors

Question 18

• Self-concept

Answer 18

overall perception of who you are. Based on the beliefs, attitudes, and values you have about yourself
o Beliefs: convictions that certain things are true
o Attitudes: evaluative appraisals
o Values: represent enduring principals that guide your interpersonal actions

Question 19

• Looking-glass self

Answer 19

defining our self-concepts through thinking about how others see us
• Self-fulfilling prophecies: predictions about future interactions that lead us to behave in ways that ensure the interaction unfolds as we predicted

Question 20

• Self-esteem

Answer 20

the overall value, positive or negative, that we assign to ourselves

Question 21

• Self-discrepancy theory

Answer 21

: ideal self, ought self, & how these interact to explain self-esteem: suggests that your self-esteem is determined by how you compare 2 mental standards.
o The first is ideal self: the characteristics you want to possess based on your desires
o Ought self: the person others wish and expect you to be

Question 22

• Attachment anxiety & avoidance (def. & how dimensions combine to create secure, preoccupied, dismissive, & fearful attachment styles):

Answer 22

o Attachment anxiety: the degree to which a person fears rejection by relationship partners. If you experience high attachment anxiety, you perceive yourself as unlovable and unworthy
o Attachment avoidance: The degree to which someone desires close interpersonal ties. If you have high attachment avoidance, you’ll likely experience little interest in intimacy, preferring solitude instead
 Secure attachment: individuals are low on both anxiety and avoidance: they are comfortable with intimacy and seek close ties with others
 Preoccupied attachment: people that are high in anxiety and low in avoidance. They desire closeness but are plagued by fear of rejection.
 Dismissive attachment: people with low anxiety but low avoidance. They view close relationships as comparatively unimportant, instead prizing and prioritizing self-reliance
 Fearful attachment: people high in both attachment and anxiety. They fear rejection and tend to shun relationships

Question 23

• Face

Answer 23

public self, what you want others to see and know

Question 24

• Mask

Answer 24

a public self designed to strategically veil your private self

Question 25

• Warranting theory

Answer 25

degree to which the informations is supported by other people and outside evidence

Question 26

• Social penetration theory (basic concepts & how they explains relationship development):

Answer 26

the idea that revealing the self to others involves pealing back or penetrating layers o Peripheral layers: outermost, demographic characteristics including birthplace, age, gender, and ethnicity. o Intermediate layer: reside your attitudes and opinions about music, politics, food, entertainment and other such matters o Central layers: core characteristics such as self-awareness, self-concept, self-esteem, personal values, fears and distinctive personality traits

Question 27

• Self-disclosure

Answer 27

when we reveal private information about ourselves to others

Question 28

• Johari Window

Answer 28

some “quadrants” of our selves are open to self-reflection and sharing with other people, while others remain hid-den The Johari Window thus provides us with a useful alternative meta-phor to social penetration

Question 29

• Perception (def. & explain components of def., i.e., selection, organization, punctuation, interpretation):

Answer 29

o Perception: the process of selecting, organizing, and interpreting information from our senses. o Perception begins when we select information on which to focus our attention. We thenorganize the information into an understandable pattern inside our minds and interpret its meaning. Each activity influences the other:our mental organization of information shapes how we interpret it, and our inter-pretation of information influences how we mentally organize it. o The first step of perception, selection, involves focusing attention on certain sights, sounds, tastes, touches, or smells in our environment  The degree to which particular people or aspects of their communication attract our attention is known as salience o Once you have selected something as the focuas of your attention, you take that information and structure into a coherent pattern inside your mind this is known as organization  During organization, you engage in punctuation, structuring the information you’ve selected into a chronological sequence that matches how you experienced the order of events o As we organize information we have selected into a coherent mental model, we also engage in interpretation, assigning meaning to that information

Question 30

• Schemata

Answer 30

the knowledge we draw on when interpreting interpersonal communication resides in schemata, mental structures that contain information defining the characteristics of various concepts, as well as those characteristics are related to each other

Question 31

• Attributions

Answer 31

we create explanations for others comments or behaviors, known as attributions

Question 32

• Fundamental attribution error

Answer 32

the tendency to attribute others behavior solely to internal causes rather than the social or environmental forces affecting them.

Question 33

• Actor-observer effects

Answer 33

the tendency of people to make external attributions regarding their own behavior

Question 34

• Self-serving bias

Answer 34

we typically take credit for the success by making an internal attribution

Question 35

• Uncertainty reduction theory

Answer 35

our primary compulsion during initial interactions is to reduce uncertainty about our communication partners by gatering enough information about them so their communication becomes predictable and explainable.

Question 36

• Perception-checking 5 step process

Answer 36

``` o Check your punctuation o Check you knowledge o Check your attributions o Check perceptual influences o Check your impressions ```

Question 37

• Emotion, feelings, moods (defs. & what distinguishes each)

Answer 37

o Emotion: an intense reaction to an event that involves interpreting event meaning, becoming physiologically aroused, labeling the experience as emotional, managing reactions, and communicating through emotional displays and disclosures o Feelings: short term emotional reactions to events that generate only limited arousal o Mood: low intensity states that are not caused by particular events and typically last longer than feelings and emotions

Question 38

• Emotional contagion

Answer 38

when experience of the same emotion spreads through people

Question 39

• Display rules

Answer 39

: when people in a given culture agree about which forms of emotion management and communications are socially desierably and appropriate

Question 40

• Emotional intelligence (def. & 4 component skills):

Answer 40

the ability to interpret emotions accurately and to use this information to manage emotions, communicate them competently, and solve relationship problems. 4 component skills: o Acute understanding of emotions o Ability to see things from others perspectives and have a sense of compassion regarding others emotional states o Aptitude for constructively managing their own emotions o Capacity for harnessing their emotional states in ways that create competent decision making, communications, and relationship problem solving

Question 41

• Suppression

Answer 41

involves inhibiting thoughts, arousal, and outward behavioral displays of emotion

Question 42

• Venting

Answer 42

allowing emotions to dominate our thoughts and explosively expressing them

Question 43

• Encounter avoidance

Answer 43

staying away from people places or activities that you know will provoke emeotions you don’t want to experience

Question 44

• Encounter restructuring

Answer 44

intentionally avoiding specific topics that you know will provoke unwanted emotion during encounters with others

Question 45

• Attention focus

Answer 45

intentionally devoting your attention only to aspects of an event or encounter that you know will not provoke and undesired emotion

Question 46

• Deactivation

Answer 46

systematically desensitizing yourself to emotional experience

Question 47

• Reappraisal

Answer 47

actively changing how you think about the meaning of emotion eliciting situations so that their emotional impact is changed

Question 48

• Anger

Answer 48

: a negative primary emotions that occurs when you are blocked or interrupted from attaining an important goal by what you see as an improper action of an external agent

Question 49

• Catharsis

Answer 49

openly expressing emotions enables you to purge them

Question 50

• Jefferson strategy

Answer 50

if someone does or says something that makes you angry count to 10 before you speak or act

Question 51

• Passion

Answer 51

is a blended emotion, a combination of surprise and joy coupled with a number of positive feelings such as excitement, amazement, and sexual attraction

Question 52

• Listening (def. & major components: receiving, attending, etc.):

Answer 52

involves receiving, attending to, understanding, responding to and recalling sounds and visual images o Receiving: critical to listening o Attending: involves devoting attention to the information you received

Question 53

• Mental bracketing

Answer 53

systematically putting aside thoughts that aren’t relevant to the interaction at hand

Question 54

• Back-channel cues

Answer 54

: verbal and nonverbal behaviors that signal you have paid attention to and understood specific comments

Question 55

• Paraphrasing

Answer 55

summarizing others comments after they have finished

Question 56

• Recalling

Answer 56

remembering information after you have received, attended to, understood, and responded to it

Question 57

• Mnemonics

Answer 57

devices that aide memory

Question 58

• Bizarreness effect

Answer 58

causes us to remember unusual information more readily than commonplace information

Question 59

• 5 functions of listening

Answer 59

o Comprehend: obvi o Discern: focus on distinguishing specific sounds from each other o Analyze: carefully evaluate the message your receiving and you judge it o Appreciate: goal is to simply enjoy the sights and sounds your experiencing then respnd by expressing you appreciation o Support: suspend judgement, taking in what someone says without evaluating it, and openly expressing empathy

Question 60

• 4 listening styles

Answer 60

o Action-oriented: want brief, to the point, and accurate messages from others, information they can use tomake decisions or initiate courses of action o Time-oriented: prefer brief and concise encounters o People-oriented: view listening as an opportunity to establish commonalities between themselves and others o Content-oriented: prefer to be intellectually challenged by the messages they receive during interpersonal encounters. They enjoy receiving complex and provocative information

Question 61

• Selective listening

Answer 61

taking in only those bits and pieces of information that are immediately salient during an interpersonal encounter and dismissing the rest

Question 62

• Eavesdropping

Answer 62

when people intentionally and systematically set up situations so they can listen to private conversations

Question 63

• Pseudo-listening

Answer 63

behaving as if you are paying attention though you really aren’t

Question 64

• Aggressive listening

Answer 64

attending to what others say solely to find an opportunity to attack their conversational partners

Question 65

• Narcissistic listening

Answer 65

self-absorbed listening: the perpertrator ignores what others have to say and redirects the conversation to their own interests

Question 66

• Symbols

Answer 66

items that represent other things (words)

Question 67

• Constitutive vs. regulative rules –

Answer 67

o Constitutive rules: define word meaning: they tell us what words represent what objects o Regulative rules: govern how we use language when we verbally communicate

Question 68

• Personal idioms

Answer 68

words or phrases that have unique meaning to them

Question 69

o High context cultures

Answer 69

people presume that listeners share extensive knowledge in common with them. As a result, the don’t feel a need to provide a lot of explicit information to gain listeners understanding

Question 70

o Low context cultures

Answer 70

people tend not to presume that listeners share their beliefs, attitudes, and values, so they tailor their verbal communication to be informative, clear and direct. They openly express their own viewpoints and attempt to persuade others to accept them

Question 71

o Denotative meaning

Answer 71

what you find in dictionaries

Question 72

o Connotative meaning

Answer 72

additional understanding of a words meaning based on the situation and the knowledge we and our communication partners share

Question 73

o Linguistic determinism

Answer 73

language defines the boundaries of our thinking. Our ability to think is at the “mercy “of language

Question 74

o Linguistic relativity

Answer 74

people from different cultures perceive and think about the world differently because of the language they use

Question 75

o Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Answer 75

A hypothesis holding that the structure of a language affects the perceptions of reality of its speakers and thus influences their thought patterns and worldviews.

Question 76

• Naming

Answer 76

creating linguistic symbols for objects

Question 77

• Performing actions

Answer 77

speech acts : the actions we perform with language

Question 78

• 4 properties of conversations

Answer 78

o Interactive: at least 2 people must participate in the exchange for it to count as a conversation, and participants must take turns exchanging messages o Local management: we make decisions regarding who gets to speak when, and for how long, each time we exchange turns o Universal: conversation forms the foundation for most forms of interpersonal communication and for social generally o Scripts: rigidly structures patterns of talk

Question 79

• Cooperative verbal communication

Answer 79

you produce messages that have 3 characteristics: o You speak in ways that others can easily understand, using language that is informative, honest, relevant and clear o You take active ownership for what you are saying by using I language o Youmake others feel included rather than excluded

Question 80

• Grice’s Cooperative Principle

Answer 80

making our conversational contributions as informative, honest, relevant, and clear as is required given the purposes of the encounters in which were involved

Question 81

o You language

Answer 81

phrases that place the focus of attention and blame on other people

Question 82

o I language

Answer 82

phrases that emphasize ownership of your feelings, opinions, and beliefs

Question 83

o We language

Answer 83

wordings that emphasize inclusion

Question 84

• Communication accommodation theory

Answer 84

people are especially motivated to adapt their language when they seek social spproval, when they whish to establish relationships with others, and when they view others language usage as appropriate

Question 85

• Defensive communication (def. & 4 types)

Answer 85

impolite messages delivered in response to suggestions, criticism, or perceived sights o Dogmatic meggages: a person dismisses suggestions for improvement or constructivev criticism, refuses to consider other views, and continues to believe that his or her behavior is acceptable o Superiority messages: the speaker suggests that he or she posses special knowledge, ability, or status far beyond that of another individual o Indifference messages: a person imples the suggestion or criticism being offerd is irrelevant, uninteresting, or unimportant o Control messages: a person seeks to squelch criticism by controlling the other individual or the encounter