CH 7
Types of Listening Responses
The Challenge of Listening
Components of Listening
The Nature of Listening
Quote often said is "close your ears and open your mouth.'"
55% of college students communication is spent listening.
Listening is so important and is at the top of the list for communication activities.
Important to listen well with family and friends, poor listening can lead to poor relationships becasue they feel you dont care about them.
Listening to one anothers personal narratives is fundamental to our human lives. We turn our attention to defining this skill.
Listening: The process of recieving and responding to others messages.
Hearing: The proccess of sound waves striking the eardrum and cause vibrations that are transmitted to the brain.
Listening is not automatic, many times we hear, but dont listen or put it into thought. We block things out sometimes.
Mindless listening: when we react to other peoples messages automatically and routinely, without much investment.
"superficial" and "cursory" describe mindless listening better than terms such as "ponder" and "contemplate."
Mindless listening: Giving careful and thoughtful attention and responses to themessages we receive. You tend to listen mindfullly when a message is important to you.
Silent listening: staying attentive and nonverbally responsive without offering any verbal feedback.
Listening is actually more difficult than we think. including information overload, personal concerns rapid thought, and noise.
Information overload is when theirs too much information and we do not have enought time to process it all.
Personal concerns: when we cant listen becasue we are to worried about are own difficulties.
Rapid thought: our mind is too active while someone is talking, the average person talks 100-140 words per minute. we have a lot of "spare time" to spend out minds while someone is talking.
All listeners do not recieve the same messages, we all view different things differnt ways.
Pseudolistening: when people are only interested inexpressing their ideasand dont care about what anyone els has to say.
Selective listening: people respond to only the parts that interesr them and are rejecting everything els.
Filling in the gaps: they like to think that what they remember makes the whole story.
Insultated listiening: opposite of selective listening, instead of looking for something els, these listeners avoid it.
Defensive Listening: take innocent comments
Hearing is vital to listening because it ids the starting point of the process
Attending: is a psychological one, it is hard to focus on messages even important ones when we are bombarded by information.
We would go crazy if we attended to everything that we hear, so we filter out some of them.
Understanding: is composed of several elements, first be aware of syntactic and grammatical rules of the language.
Listening fidelity; researchers use this to describe the degree of fcongruence between what a listener understands and what the message sender was attempting to communicate.
Remembering: the number of times the information is heard or repeated. how much information there is to store in the brain, and wheather the information may be "rehearsed or not"
Questioning: when the listener asks the speaker for additional information.
To clarify meanings by asking "what did you mean when you said he was being unfair?"
Open questions: allow a variety of extended responses. ex "how do you feel?" is an open question.
Closed questions: onlly allow limited range of answers. ex "do you feel angry" is a closed question.
Counterfeit questions: disguised attempts to send a message, not recieving one.
Paraphrasing: feedback that restates in your own words the message you thought the speaker sent.
Empathizing: response style listeners use when they want to show that they identify with a speaker.
Empathy involves perspective taking, emotional contagion, and genuine concern.
Empathizing identifies with the speakers emotionns and perceptions more than paraphrasing does. but offers less evaluation and agreement and supporting responses.
Women who rant skillful at offering emotional support to their female friends are at risk of being shunned by same-sex peers.
Analyzing: A situation, the listeneroffers an interpretation of a speakers message. example: "I think whats really bothering you is.." Communicators who do this use the analytical listening style described earlier.
Evaluting: appraises the senders thoughts or behavior in some way. The evaluation may be favorable. Ex. " Thats a good idea." or "You're on the right track now."