Chapter 14-Power In Interpersonal Communication

This chapter discussed the importance of power in interpersonal relationships, emphasizing the nature of power and its principles, its types, and the ways to communicate power. Principles of Power What is power? What principles govern the operation of power in interpersonal relationships?

• Some people are more powerful than others; some are born to power, others learn it.
• Some people are more Machiavellian than others; people differ in their beliefs about the extent to which people can be controlled by others.
• Power can be increased or decreased; power is never static.
• Power follows the principle of less interest; generally, the less interest, the greater the power.
• Power has a cultural dimension; power is distributed differently in different cultures.
• Power is often used unfairly, as in sexual harassment and power plays.

Types of Power

What types of power can one person have over another?

• Referent: B wants to be like A.
• Legitimate: B believes that A has a right to influence or control B's behavior.
• Expert: B regards A as having knowledge.
• Information or persuasion: B attributes to A the ability to communicate effectively.
• Reward: A has the ability to reward B.
• Coercive: A has the ability to punish B.

Communicating Power

How can you communicate power?

• Speaking power includes, for example, avoiding hesitations, disqualifiers, and self-critical statements.
• Nonverbal power includes avoiding adaptors, using consistent packaging, and avoiding excessive movements.
• Listening power includes responding visibly, maintaining eye contact and an open posture, and avoiding interrupting.
• Compliance-gaining and compliance-resisting tactics enable you to influence others to do as you want or enable you to resist compliance attempts of others. Compliance-gaining tactics include expressing liking, making promises, and threatening. Compliance-resisting tactics include using identity management and negotiation.
• Empowering others enables them to gain power and control over themselves and over the environment. Empowering others has numerous advantages, for example, empowered people are more proactive and more responsible. Empowering others involves such strategies as being positive, avoiding verbal aggressiveness and abusiveness, and encouraging growth, and is especially helpful and most often greatly appreciated in cases of shyness or high communication apprehension.

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Chapter 13-Conflict In Interpersonal Communication

This chapter examined interpersonal conflict, one possible model to follow in trying to resolve conflicts, and some of the popular productive and unproductive conflict strategies Nature of Conflict What is interpersonal conflict?

• Interpersonal conflict is a disagreement between connected individuals who each want something that is incompatible with what the other wants.
• Interpersonal conflict is neither good nor bad, but depending on how the disagreements are resolved, the conflict can strengthen or weaken a relationship.
• Conflict can center on matters external to the relationship and on relationship issues such as who's the boss.
• Conflict and the strategies used to resolve it are heavily influenced by culture.
• Before the conflict: Try to fight in private, fight when you're ready, know what you're fighting about, and fight about problems that can be solved.
• After the conflict: Learn something from the conflict, keep the conflict in perspective, attack your negative feelings, and increase the exchange of rewards.

Conflict Resolution Stages

How do you go about resolving a conflict or solving a problem?

• Define the conflict: Define the content and relationship issues in specific terms, avoiding gunnysacking and mindreading, and try to empathize with the other person.
• Examine the possible solutions: Try to identify as many solutions as possible, look for win-win solutions, and carefully weigh the costs and rewards of each solution.
• Test the solution mentally and in practice to see if it works.
• Evaluate the tested solution from a variety of perspectives.
• Accept the solution and integrate it into your behavior. Or reject the solution and begin again, for example, defining the problem differently or looking in other directions for possible solutions.

Conflict Management Strategies

What are some of the strategies that people use that may help or hinder resolving the conflict?

• Become an active participant in the conflict; don't avoid the issues or the arguments of the other person.
• Use talk to discuss the issues rather than trying to force the other person to accept your position.
• Try to enhance the self-esteem, the face, of the person you're arguing with; avoid strategies that may cause the other person to lose face.
• Argue the issues, focusing as objectively as possible on the points of disagreement; avoid being verbally aggressive or attacking the other person.

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Chapter 12-Interpersonal Relationships: Friendship, Love, Family, and Workplace

This chapter explored some major kinds of interpersonal relationships, specifically friendship, love, family, and workplace relationships. Friendship What is friendship? What are the types of friendship? What purposes does it serve? How does friendship differ in different cultures and between men and women?

• Friendship is an interpersonal relationship between two persons that is mutually productive and characterized by mutual positive regard.
• The types of friendships are: ~Reciprocity, characterized by loyalty, self-sacrifice, mutual affection, and generosity. ~Receptivity, characterized by a comfortable and positive imbalance in the giving and receiving of rewards; each person's needs are satisfied by the exchange. ~Association, a transitory relationship, more like a friendly relationship than a true friendship.
• Friendships serve a variety of needs and give us a variety of values, among which are the values of utility, affirmation, ego-support, stimulation, and security.
• Friendship demands vary between collectivist and individualist cultures.
• Women share more and are more intimate with same-sex friends than are men. Men's friendships are often built around shared activities rather than shared intimacies.

Love

What is love? What are the major kinds of love? What is the effect of love on communication? How does love vary in different cultures and between men and women?

• Love is a feeling that may be characterized by passion and caring and by intimacy, passion, and commitment.
• Types of love: ~Eros love focuses on beauty and sexuality, sometimes to the exclusion of other qualities. ~Ludus love is seen as a game and focuses on entertainment and excitement. ~Storge love is a kind of companionship, peaceful and slow. ~Pragma love is practical and traditional. ~Mania love is obsessive and possessive, characterized by elation and depression. ~Agape love is compassionate and selfless, characterized as self-giving and altruistic.
• Verbal and nonverbal messages echo the intimacy of a love relationship. With increased intimacy, you share more, speak in a more personalized style, engage in prolonged eye contact, and touch each other more often.
• Members of individualist cultures are likely to place greater emphasis on romantic love than are members of collectivist cultures.
• Men generally score higher on erotic and ludic love, whereas women score higher on manic, pragmatic, and storgic love. Men generally score higher on romanticism than women.

Family

What is a family? What are the types of families? How do families communicate?

• Characteristics of Families ~Defined roles. Members understand the roles each of them serves. ~Recognition of responsibilities. Members realize that each person has certain responsibilities to the relationship. ~Shared history and future. Members have an interactional past and an anticipated future together. ~Shared living space. Generally, members live together. ~Established rules. The relationship is rule governed, rather than random or unpredictable.
• Family Types ~Traditionals see themselves as a blending of two people into a single couple. ~Independents see themselves as primarily separate individuals, an individuality that is more important than the relationship or the connection between the individuals. ~Separates see their relationship as a matter of convenience rather than of mutual love or connection.
• Communication in Families ~Equality. Each person shares equally in the communication transactions and decision making. ~Balanced split. Each person has authority over different but relatively equal domains. ~Unbalanced split. One person maintains authority and decision-making power over a wider range of issues than the other. ~Monopoly. One person dominates and controls the relationship and the decisions made.

Communicating in Workplace Relationships

What types of relationships occur in the workplace, and what influence does the workplace have on such relationships?

• Romantic relationships in the workplace, although having a variety of benefits, are often frowned upon and often entail a variety of problems that would not arise in other contexts.
• Mentoring relationships help you learn the ropes of the organization through the experience and knowledge of someone who has gone through the processes you'll be going through.
• Networking enables you to expand your area of expertise and enables you to secure information bearing on a wide variety of problems you want to solve and questions you want to answer.

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Chapter 11-Interpersonal Relationships: Growth and Deterioration

Relationship Development What are some of the major theories that explain why you develop the relationships you do?

• Attraction theory holds that you develop relationships with those you consider attractive (physically and in personality), who are physically close to you, and who are similar to you.
• Social exchange theory holds that you develop relationships that enable you to maximize profits, relationships from which you derive more rewards than costs.
• Equity theory holds that you develop and maintain relationships in which the ratio of rewards compared to costs is approximately equal to your partner's.

Relationship Maintenance

What are the reasons for relationship maintenance? What behaviors do people use to maintain their relationships?

• Reasons for maintaining a relationship include emotional attachment, convenience, children, fear, inertia, and commitment.
• Maintenance behaviors include being nice, communicating, being open, giving assurances, sharing joint activities, being positive, and improving yourself.
• Relationship maintenance can be achieved by following the rules for keeping the relationship, whether friendship or romance, together.

Relationship Deterioration

What is relationship deterioration? Why do relationships deteriorate?

• Relationship deterioration refers to the weakening of the bonds holding people together. It occurs when one or both parties are unhappy with the current state of the relationship.
• Among the causes of relationship deterioration are maintaining unrealistic beliefs about relationships, excessive intimacy claims, third-party relationships, relationship changes, undefined expectations, sex-related problems, work-related problems, and financial difficulties.

Relationship Repair

What is relationship repair? What strategies can you use to repair a relationship?

• Relationship repair refers to the process of correcting the problems that beset a relationship and bringing the relationship to a more intimate, more positive state.
• General repair strategies include: recognizing the problem, engaging in productive communication and conflict resolution, posing possible solutions, affirming each other, integrating solutions into normal behavior, and risking.
• Repair isn't necessarily a two-person process; one person can break unproductive and destructive cycles.

Relationship Dissolution

What is relationship dissolution? What strategies are used to dissolve relationships?

• Dissolution refers to the breaking or dissolving of the bonds that hold the relationship together.
• Among the strategies are positive tone, negative identity management, justification, behavioral de-escalation, and de-escalation.

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Chapter 10-Universals of Interpersonal Relationships

This chapter introduced interpersonal relationships and focused on three areas: the advantages and disadvantages of relationships, the stages you go through in developing and perhaps dissolving relationships, and the influence of culture on interpersonal relationships. Characteristics of Interpersonal Relationships How do interpersonal relationships differ from impersonal relationships?

• Among the differences are that interpersonal relationships are those in which the people base their predictions on psychological (rather than sociological) data, explanatory (rather than descriptive) knowledge, and personally established (rather than socially established) rules.
• Interpersonal relationships have both advantages and disadvantages. Some advantages are that interpersonal relationships help alleviate loneliness, enable you to secure stimulation, help you to gain self-knowledge and enhance your self-esteem, and enable you to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Some of the disadvantages are that interpersonal relationships put pressure on you to reveal yourself to others; impose significant financial, emotional, and temporal obligations; may lead to increased isolation from former friends; and may present difficulties in dissolving.

Stages in Interpersonal Relationships

What are the stages that a relationship goes through?

• At the contact stage you make perceptual contact and later interact with the person.
• At the involvement stage you test your potential partner, and if this proves satisfactory, you move on to intensifying your relationship.
• At the intimacy stage you may make an interpersonal commitment and later enter the stage of social bonding, where you publicly reveal your relationship status.
• At the deterioration stage the bonds holding you together begin to weaken. Intrapersonal dissatisfaction is experienced and later becomes interpersonal when you discuss it with your partner and perhaps others.
• At the repair stage you first engage in intrapersonal repair, analyzing what went wrong and perhaps what you can do to set things right; later you may engage in interpersonal repair, where you and your partner consider ways to mend your deteriorating relationships.
• At the dissolution stage you separate yourself from your partner and later perhaps separate socially and publicly.

Relationships in a Context of Culture and Technology

In what ways does culture influence interpersonal relationships?

• Culture influences the beliefs you have about relationships, the purposes and values you feel they should serve, the choices involved in developing and in dissolving relationships, the rules that relationships should follow, and the roles that are considered appropriate in relationships.
• Technology has now assumed a major role in all interpersonal relationships, especially their development and maintenance.

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Chapter 8-Nonverbal Messages

In this chapter we introduced nonverbal communication: body movements, facial communication, eye communication, touch, paralanguage and silence, spatial messages, artifactual messages, and temporal communication. Body Communication What meanings are communicated with body movements? What meanings can your general body appearance communicate?

• Among the body gestures identified are emblems, which translate words and phrases rather directly; illustrators, which accompany and literally illustrate the verbal messages; affect displays, which convey emotional meaning; regulators, which monitor or control the speaking of the other person; and adaptors, which serve some need and are usually performed only partially in public.
• General body appearance (height, weight, level of attractiveness, and skin color, for example) can communicate your power, attractiveness, and suitability as a friend or romantic partner.

Facial Communication

What meanings do facial movements communicate?

• Facial movements express emotions, such as happiness, surprise, fear, anger, sadness, disgust/contempt, interest, bewilderment, and determination.
• Some facial movements manage the meanings being communicated using these techniques: intensifying, deintensifying, neutralizing, and masking.

Eye Communication

What messages do eye contact, eye avoidance, and pupil dilation communicate?

• Eye contact: monitor feedback, maintain interest/attention, signal conversational turns, signal nature of relationship, compensate for physical distance
• Eye avoidance: give others privacy, signal disinterest, cut off unpleasant stimuli, heighten other senses
• Pupil dilation: indicate interest/arousal, increase attractiveness

Touch Communication

What meanings can you communicate by touching?

• Among the meanings touch can communicate are positive affect, playfulness, control, ritual, and task-relatedness.
• Significant gender and cultural differences are found in touching behavior and in the tendencies to avoid touch.

Paralanguage and Silence

What meanings do variations in paralanguage and silence communicate?

• Paralanguage cues are used for forming impressions, for identifying emotional states, and for making judgments of credibility, intelligence, and objectivity.
• Silence is used in widely different ways in different cultures: to provide thinking time, to inflict hurt, to hide anxiety, to prevent communication, to communicate feelings, or to communicate "nothing."

Spatial Messages

How do you communicate using space?

• The major types of distance that correspond to types of relationships are intimate distance (touching to 18 inches), personal distance (18 inches to 4 feet), social distance (4 to 12 feet), and public distance (12 or more feet).
• Theories about space include protection theory, which claims you maintain spatial distance to protect yourself; equilibrium theory, which claims that you regulate distance according to the intimacy level of your relationship; and expectancy violations theory, which explains what happens when you increase or decrease the distance between yourself and another in an interpersonal interaction.
• Your territories may be identified as primary (areas you own), secondary (areas that you occupy regularly), and public (areas open to everyone). Like animals, humans often mark their territories with central, boundary, and ear markers as proof of ownership. Your territory (its appearance and the way it's used) also communicates status.

Artifactual Communication

How do you communicate with artifacts, for example, with space decoration, color, clothing and body adornment, and scents?

• Space decoration influences perceptions of energy, time, status, and personal characteristics.
• Colors communicate different meanings depending on the culture.
• Clothing and body adornment serve especially as cultural display and communicate messages about status and social thinking.
• Scents can communicate messages of attraction, taste, memory, and identification.

Temporal Communication

What are the different time orientations and how do these influence behavior?

• Three main time orientations can be distinguished: past, present, and future.
• These orientations influence a wide variety of behaviors, such as your willingness to plan for the future, your tendency to party, and even your potential income.

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Chapter 7-Verbal Messages

This chapter covered some of the barriers to effective interpersonal communication. Language Symbolizes Reality What is intensional orientation and how can you combat it? What is allness and how can you correct it?

• Intensional orientation is the tendency to view the world in the way it's talked about or labeled. To combat intensional orientation, respond to things first; look for the labels second.
• Allness is the tendency to describe the world in extreme terms that imply one knows all or is saying all there is to say. To combat allness, remind yourself that you can never know all or say all about anything; use a mental and sometimes verbal "etc."

Language Expresses Both Facts and Inferences

How do facts and inferences differ? How can you distinguish them more clearly?

• Fact-inference confusion is the tendency to confuse factual and inferential statements and to respond to inferences as if they were facts.
• To combat such confusions, distinguish facts from inferences and respond to inferences as inferences, not as facts.

Language Expresses Both Denotation and Connotation

What is the difference between denotation and connotation?

• Denotative meaning is the dictionary-like, objective meaning of a word or sentence.
• Connotation is the subjective and personal meaning of a word or sentence.

Language Can Criticize and Praise

How can you more effectively communicate both criticism and praise?

• Excessive criticism or praise is talk that is basically dishonest and in many instances manipulative.
• The principle of honest appraisal calls for saying what you feel, but gently and kindly.

Language Can Obscure Distinctions

What are indiscrimination and ethnocentrism, and how can you reduce them? What is polarization and what can you do to eliminate it? What is static evaluation and how can you eliminate it?

• Indiscrimination is the tendency to group unique individuals or items because they're covered by the same term or label. To combat indiscrimination, recognize uniqueness, and index each individual in a group (teacher1, teacher2).
• Polarization is the tendency to describe the world in terms of extremes or polar opposites. To combat polarization use middle terms and qualifiers.
• Static evaluation is the tendency to describe the world in static terms, denying constant change. To combat static evaluation, recognize the inevitability of change; date statements and evaluations, realizing, for example, that Gerry Smith1991 is not Gerry Smith2001.

Language Can Confirm and Disconfirm What is disconfirmation and confirmation (and the related sexist, racist, and heterosexist communications)?

• Disconfirmation is communication that ignores another, that denies the other person's definition of self.
• Confirmation expresses acknowledgment and acceptance of others and avoids racist, sexist, and heterosexist expressions that are disconfirming.

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Chapter 6-Universals of Verbal and Nonverbal Messages

This chapter introduced the message system and examined some of the similarities and differences in verbal and nonverbal messages. Messages and Meanings What is meaning and what principles regulate the communication of meaning from one person to another?

• Meanings are in people, in their thoughts and feelings, not just in their words.
• Meaning is more than words and gestures; meaning includes what speaker and listener bring to interpersonal interaction.
• Meaning is unique; no two people experience exactly the same meaning.
• Meanings are context-based; the context heavily influences the meanings that words and gestures are given.

Message Characteristics

What are the major characteristics of verbal and nonverbal messages?

• Messages are packaged; they occur in clusters and usually reinforce each other but may also contradict each other.
• Messages are rule-governed; they follow the rules of the culture.
• Messages vary in abstraction; they vary from very specific to highly abstract and general.
• Messages vary in politeness from rude to extremely polite.
• Messages vary in inclusion and may include or exclude other people.
• Messages vary in assertiveness, a quality that may be increased by analyzing the communications around you, rehearsing assertive communication, and communicating with assertive messages.

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Chapter 4-Perception In Interpersonal Communication

This chapter examined perception, a fundamental process in all interpersonal communication encounters, and looked at the stages you go through in perceiving people, the processes that influence your perceptions, and some of the ways in which you can make your perceptions more accurate. Stages of Perception What is perception and how does it work?

• Perception is the process by which you become aware of objects and events in the external world.
• Perception occurs in five stages: (1) stimulation, (2) organization, (3) interpretation-evaluation, (4) memory, and (5) recall.

Perceptual Processes

What influences your interpersonal perceptions?

• Your implicit personality theory allows you to conclude that certain characteristics go with certain other characteristics.
• Your self-fulfilling prophecy may influence the behaviors of others.
• Perceptual accentuation may lead you to perceive what you expect to perceive instead of what is really there.
• Perceptions may be affected by primacy-recency. Your tendency to give extra importance to what occurs first (a primacy effect) may lead you to see what conforms to this judgment and to distort or otherwise misperceive what contradicts it. First impressions often serve as filters, as schemata, for more recent information. In some cases, you may give extra weight to what occurs last (a recency effect).
• The tendency to seek and expect consistency may influence you to see what is consistent and to not see what is inconsistent.
• A stereotype, a fixed impression about a group, may influence your perceptions of individual members; you may see individuals only as members of the group instead of as unique individuals.
• Judgments of attribution, the process through which you try to understand the behaviors of others (and your own behaviors, in self-attribution), particularly the reasons or motivations for these behaviors, are made on the basis of consensus, consistency, distinctiveness, and controllability. Errors of attribution include the self-serving bias, overattribution, and the fundamental attribution error.

Increasing Accuracy in Interpersonal Perception

How might you increase your accuracy in perception?

• Perceive critically: For example, recognize your role in perception, avoid early conclusions, and avoid mind reading.
• Check your perceptions; describe what you see or hear and ask for confirmation.
• Reduce uncertainty: For example, by lurking before actively participating in an Internet chat group, collecting information about the person or situation, interacting and observing the situation.
• Be culturally sensitive; recognize the differences between you and others and also the differences among people from another culture.

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Chapter 3-Self In Interpersonal Communication

This chapter looked at the self in interpersonal communication and focused on three basic topics: dimensions of the self (self-concept, self-awareness, and self-esteem), self-disclosure, and communication apprehension. Dimensions of the Self What are self-concept, self-awareness, and self-esteem and how do they influence interpersonal communication?

• Self-Concept ~Self-concept is the image you have of who you are. ~Sources of self-concept include others' images of you, social comparisons, cultural teachings, and your own interpretations and evaluations.
• Self-Awareness ~Self-awareness is your knowledge of yourself; the extent to which you know who you are. ~A useful way of looking at self-awareness is with the Johari window, which consists of four parts. The open self: information known to self and others; the blind self: information known only to others; the hidden self: information known only to self; and the unknown self: information known to neither self nor others. ~To increase self-awareness, ask yourself about yourself, listen to others, actively seek information about yourself, see your different selves, and increase your open self.
• Self-Esteem Self-esteem is the value you place on yourself; your perceived self-worth. To increase self-esteem, try attacking your self-destructive beliefs, seeking affirmation, seeking out nourishing people, and working on projects that will result in success.

Self-Disclosure

What is self-disclosure? What influences self-disclosure? What are its potential rewards and dangers? What guidelines are useful in making decisions to self-disclose and in listening to the disclosures of others?

• Self-disclosure is revealing information about yourself to others, information that is normally hidden.
• Self-disclosure is influenced by a variety of factors: who you are, your culture, your gender, your listeners, and your topic.
• Among the rewards of self-disclosure are self-knowledge, ability to cope, communication effectiveness, meaningfulness of relationships, and physiological health. Among the dangers are personal risks, relational risks, professional risks, and the fact that communication is irreversible; once something is said, you can't take it back.
• In self-disclosing consider your motivation, the appropriateness of the disclosure to the person and context, the disclosures of others (the dyadic effect), and the possible burdens that the self-disclosure might impose on others and on yourself.
• In responding to the disclosures of others, listen effectively, support and reinforce the discloser, keep disclosures confidential, and don't use disclosures as weapons.
• In some situations you'll want to resist self-disclosing by being determined not to be pushed into it, being assertive and direct, or being indirect.

Communication Apprehension

What is communication apprehension? How can you effectively manage your own apprehension? How can you help empower those who are apprehensive?

• Communication apprehension is a state of fear or anxiety about communication situations. Trait apprehension is a fear of communication generally. State apprehension is a fear of communication that is specific to a situation (for example, an interview or public speaking situation).
• Theories and management of communication apprehension include cognitive restructuring, systematic desensitization, and skill acquisition. ~Cognitive restructuring focuses on unrealistic beliefs and seeks to substitute more realistic ones. ~Systematic desensitization attempts to train you to respond without apprehension to increasingly more anxiety-provoking situations. ~Skill acquisition focuses on training you to master the skills involved in situations that normally provoke apprehension. To build skills: Prepare and practice, focus on success, familiarize yourself with the situation, and try to relax.

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