SCOM 123 Final Exam JMU

What are the most common myths about communication?

Communication is a cure-all, communicating is just common sense, communication quantity equals quality,

Linear Model

Sender sends a message through a channel to a receiver in an atmosphere of noise.

Interactive model

Addition of feedback, senders become receivers and receivers become senders, "The Ping Pong Model"

Transactional model

Sender-receivers, message goes both ways, both parties input feedback, communication affects all parties involved.

Channel

Medium through which a message travels, such as oral or written

Sender

Initiator and encoder

Receiver

Decoder of message

Message

Stimulus that produces meaning

Encode

To convert from one system of communication to another

Decode

Extracting the meaning of a message

Context

The environment in which communications occurs

Fields of experience

Cultural background, ethnicity, geographic location, extent of travel and general personal experiences accumulated over the course of a lifetime.

Noise

Interference with effective transmission and reception of a message.

Feedback

Response of a party to a message

Content

What is actually said and done

Relationship

How the message defines or redefines the association between individuals

Communication Competence

Engaging in communication with others that is perceived to be both effective and appropriate in a given context

What are the skills needed to be an appropriate communicator?

Knowledge, skills, sensitivity, commitment, ethics

Explain the role of rules in communication contexts

Creates expectations for appropriate behavior

List the characteristics of an ethical communicator

Respect, Honesty, Fairness, Choice, Responsivility

Perception

The process of selecting, organizing, and interpreting sensory data

Selecting

Choosing which stimuli to notice

Organizing

The creation of schemas

Schemas

The mental frameworks that create meaningful patterns from stimuli.

Prototype

The most representative or "best" example of something.

Stereotype

A generalization about a group or category of people

Script

A predictable sequence of events that indicates what we are expected to do in a given situation

Self-concept

The sum total of everything that encompasses the self-referential term "me"

Reflected appraisal

messages you receive from others that assess your self-concept

What are some of the influences on perception

Gender, culture, past experiences, mood, and context

What is self-disclosure

The process of purposely revealing to others personal information about yourself that is significant and that others would not know unless you told them

Breadth

The range of subjects discussed

Depth

How personal you become when discussing a particular subject

What are the rules for constructively and appropriately self-disclosing and responding to self-disclosure?

Trust, Reciprocity, Cultural Appropriateness, Situational Appropriateness, Incremental Disclosure

Why is reciprocal sharing important?

It demonstrates that trust and risk-taking are shared.

Self-serving bias

The tendency to attribute our successful behavior to ourselves (personal traits) but to assign external circumstances (situations) to our unsuccessful behavior.

First impressions

The mental image of a person that is formed upon first meeting them

Primacy effect

The tendency to be more influenced by initial information about a person than by information gathered later

Negativity bias

The tendency to be more influenced by negative information than positive information.

Attribution error

The tendency to overemphasize personal traits and underemphasize situation as causes of other people's behavior.

Self-fulfilling prophecy

A prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behavior.

What are the 3 dimensions related to communicating "empathy"

Perspective taking, emotional understanding, concern for others

Perspective taking

Trying to see as others see

Emotional understanding

Trying to participate in the feelings of others, feeling the same as others

Concern for others

Trying to care about what happens to others

Culture

A learned set of enduring values, beliefs, and practices that are shared by an identifiable, large group of people with a common history

Ethnocentrism

Judging another culture solely on the values of one's own culture

Cultural relativism

An individual's beliefs and activities should be understood by others in the terms of that individual's own culture

Multiculturalism

The existence, acceptance, and promotion of multiple cultural traditions within a single jurisdiction

Low-context communication

A style of communication that is verbally precise, direct and explicit

High-context communication

A style of communication that uses indirect verbal expressions, relying on contextual clues.

Individualistic culture

A society characterized by individualism, putting the individual before the group

Collectivist culture

A society characterized by a "we over me" mentality, putting the group over the individual

Low power-distance culture

A culture that values relatively equal power sharing and discourages attention to status differences and ranking in society

High power-distance culture

A culture that places a strong emphasis on maintaining power differences

Feminine culture

A culture that exhibits stereotypic feminine traits such as affection, nurturance, sensitivity, compassion, and emotional expressiveness

Masculine culture

A culture that exhibits stereotypic masculine traits such as male dominance, ambitiousness, assertiveness, competitiveness, and drive for acievement

Structure

Grammar; the set of rules that specify how the units of language can be meaningfully combined

Productivity

The capacity of language to transform a small number of phonemes into whatever words, phrases, and sentences that you require to communicate your abundance of thoughts and feelings

Displacement

The ability to use language to talk about objects, ideas, events, and relations that don't exist in the physical "here and now"

Self-reflexiveness

The ability to use language to talk about language

Abstracting

the process whereby we formulate increasingly vague conceptions of our world by leaving out details associated with objects, events and ideas

Sense experience

Experiences derived from the senses

Description

Verbal reports that sketch what we perceive from our senses

Inference

Conclusions about the unknown based on the known

Judgements

Subjective evaluations of objects, events, or ideas

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

The claims of linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity

Linguistic Deteminism

People are the prisoners of their native language, unable to think certain thoughts or perceive in certain ways because of the grammatical structure and lexicon of that native language

Linguistic Relativity

The grammar and lexicon of one's native language powerfully influence but don not imprison one's thinking and perception

Connotative meaning

Personal meaning

Denotative meaning

Shared meaning

Nonverbal communication

The sharing of meaning with others non-linguistically; multichanneled

Verbal communication

The sharing of meaning with others linguistically; single-channeled

How does nonverbal communication function in relationship with verbal communication?

Repetition, substitution, regulation, contradiction, accentuation

Repetition

Nonverbal cues repeat the verbal message

Accentuation

Nonverbal cues accent emphasize parts of the verbal message

Substitution

Nonverbal cues replace a verbal message

Regulation

Nonverbal cues regulate and guide conversation.

Contradiction

Nonverbal cues are the opposite of the verbal message

What are the major types of nonverbal communication?

Kinesics, paralanguage, territoriality, proxemics, haptics

Kinesics

Use of facial communication and gestures

Haptics

Use of touch in communication

Paralanguage

Use of vocal cues

Proxemics

Influence the distance and territoriality has on communication

Territoriality

The predisposition to defend a fixed geographical area or territory as one's exclusive domain

What are listening's basic elements?

Comprehending, retaining, responding

Comprehending

A shared meaning between or among parties in a transaction, begins the listening process

Retaining

The information we take in

Responding

Key determinant of effective listening, providing feedback

What are the 3 types of listening?

Informational, critical, empathetic

Informational

Comprehend the speaker, goal is to understand material speaker presents

Critical

The process of evaluating the merits of claims, separating facts from fantasies

Empathetic

Requires to take perspective of other person, to listen for that person's needs and wants

What are the problems that can interfere with competent informational listening?

Conversational narcissism, competitive interrupting, glazing over, pseudo-listnening, ambushing

Conversational narcissism

Tendency of listeners to turn the topic to themselves, to turn ordinary topics without showing interest to others

Competitive interrupting

Occurs when we dominate the conversation by seizing the floor from others who are speaking

Glazing over

attention wanders and day dreaming occurs

Pseudo-listnening

Faking listnening

Ambushing

When one listens for weakness and ignores strength

What are the problems that interfere with competent critical listening?

Skepticism, true-belief, cynicism