Communication Models and Competence

Communication Models

• Linear Model: Communication is a one-way process. A sender encodes a message and sends it through a channel to a receiver who decodes it. Noise can interfere.

• Interaction Model: Communication is a two-way process. Both sender and receiver exchange messages, and feedback is crucial. Context, like physical and psychological contexts, influences communication.

• Transaction Model: Communication is a simultaneous, ongoing process. Participants create meaning as they send and receive messages, taking into account multiple contexts (social, relational, cultural) and creating meaning together.

Competent Communication

• Competent communication is process-oriented, learned, ethically challenging, and appropriate, effective. It accounts for behavioral flexibility and context, prioritizing goal achievement.

Perception

• Perception is a cognitive process involving interpreting experiences with unique understandings. The perception process includes selection, organizing, and interpreting information.

• Schemata are mental filing systems used to explain others' behaviors.

Interpreting

• Schemata are mental filing systems.
• Explaining behaviors (e.g., kindergarten teacher's behaviors). Behaviours are interpreted differently depending on context

Attributions

• Internal attribution: connects to personality traits.
• External attribution: links to situational factors.
• Fundamental attribution error: mistakenly using internal factors instead of external factors for reasons of behaviours.
• Self-serving bias: attributing success internally and failures externally.

Impressions

• Primacy effect: first impressions have weight.
• Recency effect: recent impressions are influential.
• Halo effect: positive first impressions create further positive views.
• Horn effect: negative first impressions lead to negative judgments.

Perceiving the Self

• Self-concept: your perception of yourself—influences communication.

• Social comparison theory: comparing oneself to others.

• Self-efficacy: people's beliefs in their ability to perform tasks, affecting their success prediction and reaction to failures.

• Self-discrepancy theory: Comparing actual self to ideal self and ought self, creating potential incongruencies, leading to potential issues with self-esteem.

Language

• Phonological rules: govern sounds of language (e.g., grammar/punctuation).
• Syntactic rules: govern grammar/punctuation and credibility.
• High language: formal, low language: easy going
• Improving language: abstractions and meaning (low versus high levels), evasion, and equivocation and using euphemisms, ethical word use, civility and accountalbility
• Language is relational and situational, and language affects credibility.

Nonverbal Communication

• Kinesics: body language.
• Oculesics: eye contact (eye movement and behavior)
• Chronemics: the way people perceive and use time.
• Paralanguage: vocal cues in addition to verbal language
• Proxemics: how people use space.