Interpersonal Communication Report

Interpersonal Communication Report

I stand very corrected on how important interpersonal communication is after participating in this class. It is pretty much everything we do, verbal and nonverbal, we are always communicating something. Without having ever thought much about it, I kind of just perceived interpersonal communication as dialogue between two people. But there is so much more to it. There are different types of it, different elements to it, different strategies for healthy communication, and a huge part of it is actively listening. "Without a knowledge of interpersonal communication, it would be impossible to understand a large part of human interaction and human relationships" (DeVito 2).

There are eight fundamental elements of the communication process. The first one is source-receiver, which is where two people send and receive messages. The second is encoding-decoding, which is the action of producing and understanding those messages. The next element is feedback and feedforward messages. There is also the channel, which is how messages pass, such as the five senses. Noise is anything that interferes with a message. Context is the influence on messages and include the physical dimension, temporal dimension, social-psychological dimension, and the cultural dimension. Another element is ethics, which is important because everyone should use morals and communication carries consequences. The last element is competence. Competence is how effectively one can communicate something. One of the best ways to achieve competence in communication is to develop effective listening habits and skills because listening consumes a large part of our lives. "Just think of your own listening behavior during an average day. You wake up to the alarm radio, put on the television to hear the weather and the news, check your computer and listen to the latest entries on YouTube and the advertising pop ups, go to school while talking on your cell phone, listen to fellow students and instructors, listen to music or watch television and listen to family members at dinner" (DeVito 79). Listening is a circular process that includes receiving, understanding, remembering, evaluating, and responding. Skills can be developed to be more effective at it. Having empathy to the speaker is important, try to realize where they are coming from. It is also very important to be nonjudgmental and not jump to conclusions without hearing them out completely. The most important skill is listening actively. One can do this by demonstrating understanding of the speaker and collaborating with any questions one has.

There are many things that can influence communication, such as self-concept and perception. Self-concept is developed from four sources. The first is others' images, which is the most important people in one's life telling them their views of that person. The second is social comparisons which is where one compares themselves to others in similar situations. The next is cultural teachings. This refers to the standards that each culture has identified as what is successful for one to measure against. The last one is self-evaluation, and that includes the standards that one sets for themselves as what makes them feel good or bad about themselves. "Perception is the process by which you become aware of objects, events, and especially people through your senses" (DeVito 61). There are five stages to this, the first one being stimulation. This is where the senses are first touched and noticed. Then there is organization, which is where we organize the stimulation either by rules, schemata, or scripts. Interpretation-evaluation is influenced by one's beliefs and experiences. Next is memory, which is storing all the information that has been processed so far. The last stage is recall. Recall allows pulling up the recent memories at any time.

One thing I never fully understood before was the importance of verbal and nonverbal communication both. Sometimes, nonverbal communication can be stronger than verbal. Someone can say one thing, but if their face says something different, then their words did not matter. Nonverbal cues include things like hand gestures, affect displays, body appearance, facial communication, and touch communication. These can easily cause communication problems, especially when people from different cultures are involved. A hand gesture that is nice and normal in one culture might be completely offensive in another. The same goes for body appearance. "Some children are actually developing social anxiety because they cannot understand or the misread nonverbal communication like facial expressions, and that psychologists are trying to figure out ways to teach this to help avoid these issues" (homework 2). The bottom line is that nonverbal messages can be misinterpreted (along with verbal messages for that matter). "I've learned that some