exam 1 Flashcards
communication
the process through which people use messages to generate meanings within and across contexts, cultures, channels, and media
5 features that characterize communication:
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
• Models of communication
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.
• McCornack’s def. of IPC
a dynamic form of communication between 2 or more people in which the messages exchanged significantly influence their thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and relationships
4 important implications (McCornack’s def. of IPC)
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
• M&S’s 3 levels of information on which people base predictions
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.
• M&S’s def. of IPC
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
o I-thou
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
o I-it
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
• Content & relationship dimensions of IPC
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
• Metacommunication
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
• Inevitability, irreversibility, & dyanamic nature of IPC
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
• Goals: self-presentation, instrumental, & relationship (def. & implications for IPC)
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
• Components of IPC competence
o Appropriate: communication follows accepted norms
o Effective: your communication enables you to achieve your goals
o Ethical: you communication treats people fairly
• Self-monitoring
the process of observing our own communication and the norms of the situation in order to make appropriate communication choices
• Self
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
• Self-awareness
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
• Self-concept
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
• Looking-glass self
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
• Self-esteem
the overall value, positive or negative, that we assign to ourselves
• Self-discrepancy theory
: 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
• Attachment anxiety & avoidance (def. & how dimensions combine to create secure, preoccupied, dismissive, & fearful attachment styles):
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
• Face
public self, what you want others to see and know
• Mask
a public self designed to strategically veil your private self
• Warranting theory
degree to which the informations is supported by other people and outside evidence
• Social penetration theory (basic concepts & how they explains relationship development):
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
• Self-disclosure
when we reveal private information about ourselves to others
• Johari Window
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
• Perception (def. & explain components of def., i.e., selection, organization, punctuation, interpretation):
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
• Schemata
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
• Attributions
we create explanations for others comments or behaviors, known as attributions
• Fundamental attribution error
the tendency to attribute others behavior solely to internal causes rather than the social or environmental forces affecting them.
• Actor-observer effects
the tendency of people to make external attributions regarding their own behavior
• Self-serving bias
we typically take credit for the success by making an internal attribution
• Uncertainty reduction theory
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.
• Perception-checking 5 step process
o Check your punctuation o Check you knowledge o Check your attributions o Check perceptual influences o Check your impressions
• Emotion, feelings, moods (defs. & what distinguishes each)
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
• Emotional contagion
when experience of the same emotion spreads through people
• Display rules
: when people in a given culture agree about which forms of emotion management and communications are socially desierably and appropriate
• Emotional intelligence (def. & 4 component skills):
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
• Suppression
involves inhibiting thoughts, arousal, and outward behavioral displays of emotion
• Venting
allowing emotions to dominate our thoughts and explosively expressing them
• Encounter avoidance
staying away from people places or activities that you know will provoke emeotions you don’t want to experience
• Encounter restructuring
intentionally avoiding specific topics that you know will provoke unwanted emotion during encounters with others
• Attention focus
intentionally devoting your attention only to aspects of an event or encounter that you know will not provoke and undesired emotion
• Deactivation
systematically desensitizing yourself to emotional experience
• Reappraisal
actively changing how you think about the meaning of emotion eliciting situations so that their emotional impact is changed
• Anger
: 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
• Catharsis
openly expressing emotions enables you to purge them
• Jefferson strategy
if someone does or says something that makes you angry count to 10 before you speak or act
• Passion
is a blended emotion, a combination of surprise and joy coupled with a number of positive feelings such as excitement, amazement, and sexual attraction
• Listening (def. & major components: receiving, attending, etc.):
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
• Mental bracketing
systematically putting aside thoughts that aren’t relevant to the interaction at hand
• Back-channel cues
: verbal and nonverbal behaviors that signal you have paid attention to and understood specific comments
• Paraphrasing
summarizing others comments after they have finished
• Recalling
remembering information after you have received, attended to, understood, and responded to it
• Mnemonics
devices that aide memory
• Bizarreness effect
causes us to remember unusual information more readily than commonplace information
• 5 functions of listening
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
• 4 listening styles
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
• Selective listening
taking in only those bits and pieces of information that are immediately salient during an interpersonal encounter and dismissing the rest
• Eavesdropping
when people intentionally and systematically set up situations so they can listen to private conversations
• Pseudo-listening
behaving as if you are paying attention though you really aren’t
• Aggressive listening
attending to what others say solely to find an opportunity to attack their conversational partners
• Narcissistic listening
self-absorbed listening: the perpertrator ignores what others have to say and redirects the conversation to their own interests
• Symbols
items that represent other things (words)
• Constitutive vs. regulative rules –
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
• Personal idioms
words or phrases that have unique meaning to them
o High context cultures
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
o Low context cultures
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
o Denotative meaning
what you find in dictionaries
o Connotative meaning
additional understanding of a words meaning based on the situation and the knowledge we and our communication partners share
o Linguistic determinism
language defines the boundaries of our thinking. Our ability to think is at the “mercy “of language
o Linguistic relativity
people from different cultures perceive and think about the world differently because of the language they use
o Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
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.
• Naming
creating linguistic symbols for objects
• Performing actions
speech acts : the actions we perform with language
• 4 properties of conversations
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
• Cooperative verbal communication
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
• Grice’s Cooperative Principle
making our conversational contributions as informative, honest, relevant, and clear as is required given the purposes of the encounters in which were involved
o You language
phrases that place the focus of attention and blame on other people
o I language
phrases that emphasize ownership of your feelings, opinions, and beliefs
o We language
wordings that emphasize inclusion
• Communication accommodation theory
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
• Defensive communication (def. & 4 types)
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
