21st Century COMMUNICATION A Reference Handbook SSAGE reference Listening, Understanding, and Misunderstanding Listening has been identified as one of the most used and one of the most important communication skills in personal, academic, and professional settings alike (Wolvin & Coakley, 1996, pp. 13–25). The vital role of listening in communication begins with the recognition that listening is the first language skill to be acquired. The fetus listens as it develops in the mother's womb; henceforth, this listening development plays a central role in one's language acquisition. Auditory and visual discrimination also are central to the child's early development of other (including survival, social, and intellectual) skills. Studies of time spent communicating (Emanuel Adams, Baker, Daufin, Ellington, Fitts, et al., 2008) suggest that people listen for as much as 55% of their day. The primacy of listening is not just a matter of time on the task. Listening is a critical factor in academic success. Federal initiatives to strengthen educational outcomes for secondary school and post-secondary-school students underscore the need for listening proficiency. The U.S. Department of Labor established a commission to identify what critical skills are essential for high school graduates to function effectively in the workplace. The basic skills of mathematics, reading, writing, speaking, and listening were determined to be at the core of preparation for graduates to enter the workplace. In the workplace, listening ability consistently ranks in the top three skills that employers seek in hiring for entry-level positions. Effective listening is recognized as a key to organizational success, because poor listening can be costly. The study of listening behavior in the field of communication is not a new focus. As early as 1948, Ralph G. Nichols, considered by many to be the "founder" of listening as a field of study, established some dimensions of what constitutes listening behavior, including inference making, listening for the main ideas, identifying the organizational plan, and concentration. Basic to any attempt to define listening, however, is a consideration of how listening is a unique behavior separate from other intellectual behaviors. Early listening research isolated a disparate listening comprehension factor, distinct from the students' performance in areas such as reasoning, verbal comprehension, attention, auditory resistance, and memory. The Listening Process As a communicator, the listener engages in a sequence of behaviors that are generally accepted to characterize the decoding process: receiving; attending; perceiving; interpreting; and responding. Receiving The listener receives messages. During reception, the listener employs auditory and visual sensory receptors. While the listening process can include hearing sounds, listening and hearing are not the synonymous functions that many individuals assume. The auditory reception of the message is itself a detailed process involving the intricate hearing mechanism. The sound must enter the middle ear, set into vibration the tympanic membrane, and be conducted through the inner ear to the brain. Problems with the hearing mechanism can compound the receptive process. Research at the National Institutes of Health suggests that as many as one out of every nine Americans has some type of hearing loss. Exposure to loud music, especially through headsets, has been 1 identified as a major contributor to this situation. While many researchers and practitioners have focused their definitions and models of listening on listening to auditory-only stimuli, listening also involves the visual channel when the source of the stimuli is in the presence of the listener. The visual channel is an influential communication media, and the other senses (smell, taste, touch) impact the listener as well. Attending After the message has been received through auditory and visual channels, it must be attended to in the working memory (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974). At this point, the listener is required to focus on the auditory and/or the visual stimuli and concentrate on the message received. While researchers differ as to how the short-term memory system receives and holds the information, they do agree that the attention span is quite limited. Cognitive psychologists recognize that attention is a limited resource of a fixed capacity of sensory systems and memory mechanisms combined. The human attention span today undoubtedly has been limited further by the impact of the media. Many people raised in the television generation, for example, have come to expect a 7- to 10-minute program format with time out for a commercial break. This shortened attention span affects one's capacity to listen to lectures, to participate in conversation, and generally to function as a listener in all sorts of settings. A listener's ability to attend to a message is influenced significantly by attention energy. Kahneman (1973) has determined that attention energy may be distributed according to (1) the difficulty of the mental task; (2) automatic, unconscious communication rules (such as focusing on the speaker who uses the listener's name); and (3) conscious decisions (such as focusing on one's supervisor's message rather than on that from a coworker). Perceiving Attention to the message is affected not only by the listener's energy in the short-term memory system but also by the listener's perceptual filter. The perceptual filter serves to screen the stimulus so that one's predispositions alter the message received. The listener's frame of reference—all of one's background, experience, roles, and mental and physical states-makes up the perceptual filter. The frame of reference establishes the perceptual expectations that listeners bring to the communication so that, essentially, we see and hear what we want to see and hear. The listener who understands how the frame of reference shapes his or her listening behavior can function at a more sophisticated level. This understanding should extend to understanding the other communicator(s)- why they are responding as they do. Getting to this level of empathic perception affords the listener a solid frame of reference for interpreting the message. Interpreting Once the message has been received and perceived by the listener through the auditory, visual, and attention processors, the message must be interpreted by the listener. This stage of the listening process involves fitting the verbal and/or nonverbal messages into the proper linguistic categories stored in the brain and then interpreting the messages for their meanings. Lundsteen (1979) describes this representational process as one of internal speech. Decoding the verbal and nonverbal language varies according to each individual's perceptual filter and linguistic category system, so the original intent of a speaker's message may be misinterpreted, distorted, or even completely changed as the listener's meaning is assigned. The assignment of meaning to the message is influenced not only by the linguistic category system but also by one's cognitive processing. This mental activity is framed by the hemispheric dominance of an individual; by his or her inductive, deductive, or intuitive orientation; and by the long-term memory. As the message is processed, it is analyzed, visualized, and associated according to the linguistic categories in the long-term memory store. As individuals are called on to handle a vast amount of information during the course of any given day, techniques to process and recall information become critical. 2 Some cognitive psychologists use schema theory to describe this complex task of decoding and interpreting messages. Schema theory posits that humans carry schemata—mental representations of knowledge—in their brains. These organized information structures consist of nodes (concepts, events, objects) and links (relationships of the nodes). New information that listeners receive is first run through existing schemata, or scripts, and then interpreted. Schemata represent the generic concepts that are stored in memory and relate persons or objects to attributes or relate actions to anticipated consequences. Smith (1982) suggests that schemata serve important listening functions in (1) telling us to what we should attend, (2) serving as the framework for interpreting incoming information, and (3) guiding the reconstruction of messages in memory. Cognitive responses to the message, thus, serve to frame the listener's interpretation of the information received. Responding After assigning one's own meaning to the message, the listener responds to it. This phase of the listening process involves moving the received, attended to, and interpreted message from the short-term memory into the long-term memory store for potential retrieval. As memory development specialists stress, retention requires strategy. Familiar techniques such as the use of mnemonic devices, linking, clustering, and chunking are considered by researchers studying the dynamics of short-term memory and recall. The listener's response also is external, manifested in the feedback that the listener provides to the source of the message. Though listening constitutes an intricate internal process, attention to feedback is essential to good listening. Research by Leavitt and Mueller (1968) demonstrates that with increased feedback, both listener and speaker gain confidence that the message is communicated with accuracy and experience satisfaction with the communication. Other communicators in an interaction base their assessment of a listener's effectiveness on the feedback, responses that might take the form of performance on a comprehension test, questions asked, attentive behaviors, or even compliance. Thus, while some listening scholars argue that feedback goes beyond listening and takes the listener back into a sender's role in the communication transaction, we rely on feedback, albeit unfairly at times, as an indicator of listening “accomplished.” The complex listening process, including reception, attention, perception, interpretation, and response, may be illustrated as a process model of overlapping circles (Figure 16.1). While the stages of listening occur in some sequence, in the listener's "real time,” the dimensions probably occur in close simultaneity. At the core of the process are communication influencers—variables of the speaker, message, channel, environment, and individual listener-that affect the outcome at every stage of this process. It should be apparent, then, that listening behavior is one of the most complex of all human behaviors-and certainly extends far beyond the auditory processing that has been the focus of so many of the earlier listening scholars. 3 taste visual focus smell energy auditory Reception Attention touch speaker message Influencers internal frame of reference environ- channel Response ment Perception listener external Figure 16.1 Listening Model verbal Interpretation cognitive non- verbal empathy Listening Variables As listeners receive, attend, perceive, interpret, and respond to messages, they are influenced by many variables that can enhance or impede effective listening. Listening researchers have focused on key physiological, social/psychological, and contextual influencers. Physiological Influencers Listening physiology certainly plays a major role in how listeners function. Sensory acuity, especially auditory and visual, is basic to listening. Age-related deterioration of sensory mechanisms can lead to loss of both the verbal content and the nonverbal dimensions of the communication. Additionally, the neurological makeup of the listener is a factor. Research on hemispheric specialization, for example, suggests that the left brain may be the more rational, objective, organizing processor, while the right brain is the more emotional, intuitive side. Age also is an important listening variable. In a body of research on listening across the life span, my colleagues and I have determined that what may characterize competent or effective listening can change as one physiologically, sociologically, and/or communicatively ages (Halone, Cunconan, Coakley, & Wolvin, 1998). A listener acquires differential listening experiences and gains a wider array of general knowledge throughout his or her life span. Significantly, children, adolescents, young adults, older adults, and elders report different 4 listening needs, different listening goals, and different listening strategies as they account for listening expectations and for listening experiences alike. Just as age is a listening variable, so too is gender. One of the highly perpetuated American stereotypes is that listening is, essentially, "women's work." Brain imaging research (Phillips, Lowe, Lurito, Dzemidzic, & Mathews, 2001) does demonstrate that men and women bring some very real differences in attention styles and cognitive processing styles to the communicative interaction. As these researchers explore more deeply the biological influence of the male/female genetic makeup, however, the social influence model continues to dominate our understanding of gender variables. Research reveals that men and women have been found to "learn to listen for different purposes and have different listening goals. The primary contrast appears in task versus interpersonal understanding: Males tend to hear facts, while females are more aware of the mood of the communication" (Booth-Butterfield, 1984, p. 39). Psychological Influencers In addition to the physiological influences on listening, listeners bring psychological variables to the communication. The listener's attitudinal state may well be one of the most significant influences on that person's listening behavior. A positive listening attitude, along with listening knowledge, is a critical ingredient of effective listening. Positive attitudes give the listener a willingness to listen. Positive attitudes that facilitate effective listening may be identified. Being interested is probably one of the most significant. Too frequently, listeners tune out with the excuse "Oh, this isn't interesting." A high level of interest combines with an active, responsible approach to listening. Unfortunately, Americans are conditioned to listening as a passive act. Good listeners recognize that they are partners in the communication and that they share in the responsibility for meeting the goals of the interaction. Effective listeners also remain open-minded, willing to listen to differing points of view and to speakers whose styles are not necessarily attractive or engaging. Positive listening attitudes are not directed only at the other communicator. Positive listening attitudes also influence one's self-concept as a listener. Sadly, listening is not a highly valued American communication skill; we seldom reward good listening. Rather, we reinforce negative listening behaviors in schools and families alike. "You're not listening." "You never listen to me." "Be quiet and listen." These admonishments are more prevalent in American speech than “Thanks for listening" or "You're a good listener." Listeners, like speakers, also suffer communication apprehension. Wheeless (1975) has pioneered some study of receiver apprehension, “the fear of misinterpreting, inadequately processing, and/or not being able to adjust psychologically to messages sent by others" (p. 263). Research on receiver apprehension suggests that listening anxiety stemming from stressful situations can lead to distorted messages and misunderstandings. Additionally, there is evidence that receiver apprehension can result from inadequate information processing. McReynolds (1976) hypothesizes that the processing of material that is difficult to assimilate tends to accumulate (resulting in "cognitive backlog") and to produce anxiety. Beatty (1981) has determined that receiver apprehension is a function of unassimilated information that results from processing difficulties because of the cognitive backlog. The listener who suffers receiver apprehension and/or negative attitudes toward listening is not going to be an efficient listener. Indeed, an unreceptive listener may not be a listener at all. Wheeless, Frymier, and Thompson (1992) have looked at receptivity-being open to influence—as it relates to the listening behaviors of responsiveness and attentive-ness. Extending this line of research, Roberts and Vinson (1998) determined that the importance of the topic is the crucial factor in establishing a listener's willingness to listen. 5/n1. Clearly list 2 guidelines that we, as therapeutic listeners, should follow for DISTINGUISHING between concerns/problems of a serious psychological nature and those within everyday boundaries. Thus, how do you know when a person's problems are beyond your scope/your abilities and he/she is in need of professional help? Provide an example that you can use to clarify your explanation. Where do you derive these guidelines (our online course readings, another source, personal experience, etc.)? Please explain.

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