Daena J. Goldsmith

How the comforting process works: Alleviating emotional distress through conversationally induced reappraisals

Publisher Summary For everyday hurts and hassles, the informal communicative assistance one receives from the network of personal relationships can be effective at helping one overcome various forms of distress. This chapter discusses the features of more and less effective comforting messages; reviews the appraisal theories of emotion focusing particularly on how affective distress is conceptualized by appraisal theories; and then presents a reformulation of the comforting process from the perspective of appraisal theory, specifying how supportive conversations can assist distressed persons in coping with their emotions. Analyses of emotional distress, the comforting process, and, especially, psychological effects of comforting efforts can be developed most productively in the context of appraisal theories of emotion. Associated with each particular emotion is a core relational theme, a specific appraisal pattern, and a distinct action tendency. The chapter also describes how a variety of conversational behaviors and message strategies can help accomplish critical functions in constituting and conducting effective supportive interactions.

Managing Conflicting Goals in Supportive Interaction An Integrative Theoretical Framework

Supportive interactions often pose conflicting goals: Speakers want to give or receive support, simultaneously conveying and receiving acceptance and preserving the autonomy of both parties. Previous research on the presence or absence of supportive communication has overlooked how support is conveyed and how some message characteristics accomplish multiple goals. By highlighting these multiple goals, politeness theory integrates previous research on dilemmas of supportive communication and characteristics of helpful and unhelpful messages. Face work is a critical part of a theoretical framework for identifying and explaining characteristics of effective supportive communication. The heuristic value of this framework is demonstrated in a series of research questions.

Soliciting advice: The role of sequential placement in mitigating face threat

Brown and Levinsons (1987) politeness theory emphasizes threats to face that arise from the defining features of speech acts. In contrast, the two studies reported here demonstrate how the sequencing of acts affects type and degree office threat. By exploring these issues as they apply to the solicitation of advice, these studies also shed light on the practical problem of how to give face‐sensitive advice. Study 1 proposes a typology of six advice sequences derived from ethnographic observation of 93 advice‐giving episodes among white, middle‐class, college educated Americans. Study 2 tests whether the six types of sequence differ in perceived advice solicitation and regard for face by asking 420 college students to rate sample dialogues. Results show the sequential placement of advice has a significant and substantial effect on the degree to which advice is seen as solicited and this, in turn, is associated with perceived regard for face.

Helpful, Supportive and Sensitive: Measuring the Evaluation of Enacted Social Support in Personal Relationships

Several recent studies have sought to identify characteristics of better and worse attempts at support provision; however, there has been little explicit theoretical attention to the ways in which recipients evaluate enacted support. We developed a multidimensional scale to measure these evaluations. Study 1 asked 122 adults to interpret the meaning of three adjectives (helpful, supportive, sensitive) used in previous research. Although the meanings of these terms overlap, respondents associated helpful with problem-solving utility, supportive with relational assurance, and sensitivity with emotional awareness. Study 2 asked 396 students to rate a recalled conversation on 30 semantic-differential-type scales derived from Study 1. These ratings provided a basis for selecting 12 items to form valid and reliable scales of problem-solving utility, relational assurance, and emotional awareness. Study 3 provides independent validation of factor structure, scale reliability and validity, and conceptual distinctiveness. We discuss a variety of research questions for which this multidimensional scale may be a useful tool.

Sex Differences and Similarities in the Communication of Social Support

A popular view holds that men and women differ in the types of social support they provide to distressed others: women provide emotional support and empathy while men offer instrumental support or try to minimize the importance of problems. Despite the prevalence of this view, there is limited evidence to support it. The present study sought to empirically assess the merit of this view. A total of 119 college students responded to seven situations involving a distressed other. Although womens responses were longer and contained more talk about emotions, women also talked more about instrumental actions than did men. Men devoted a greater proportion of their responses to talk about the problem and a larger proportion of their problem talk involved denying the problem. However, there were substantial similarities between men and women in the relative frequencies of different types of supportive responses used, and sex differences accounted for small percentages of variance. In contrast, situation exerted a strong, consistent influence on the responses of men and women alike.

Openness and Avoidance in Couples Communicating About Cancer

Open communication and avoidance are fundamental communication processes that have been studied across a range of communication contexts. Couples in which one person has cancer are a theoretically and practically important site for examining openness and avoidance. We review the cancer-related topics that couples find challenging, couples reasons for communicating openly or avoiding talk about cancer-related topics, outcomes of communication, features and strategies of communication, and individual, relational, and illness-related factors that may influence communication. The application of theories of open and avoidant communication suggests new directions for cancer research and has practical implications for interventions designed to assist couples. We also discuss needed changes in how we conceptualize and measure openness and avoidance. These suggested refinements are relevant across a wide range of contexts in which researchers study openness and avoidance.

A dialectic perspective on the expression of autonomy and connection in romantic relationships

A dialectic perspective illuminates the contradictory nature of autonomy and connection in romantic relationships and the various ways in which this contradiction is expressed over the course of a relationship. In an extension of past applications of a dialectic perspective, this study focuses on qualitative change in the experience of autonomy‐connection dialectic tensions. Descriptive histories of 10 premarital romantic relationships illustrate sequences of five different types of tensions, including concerns about getting involved and getting to know ones partner, dating others, trade‐offs between the relationship and other activities, fairness and tolerance, and commitment. These findings highlight the ways in which gradual quantitative changes in romantic connection may come about through a process of cumulative yet qualitatively different dialectic tensions between connection and autonomy.

“You Just Don’t Have the Evidence”: An Analysis of Claims and Evidence in Deborah Tannen’s: You Just Don’t Understand

This chapter separates fact from fiction in Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand (1990b), a book widely cited by scholars as an authoritative source for claims about the communicative differences between men and women. The authors determined that Tannen’s claims are treated as factual generalizations based on their outline of claims and evidence in the text, their analysis of citations to the book, and other information within the text. When they tested the evidence for these factual generalizations, they discovered problems with the adequacy, sufficiency, relevance, and consistency of Tannen’s evidence and with her use of empirical studies. Consequently, scholars and policy makers should be cautious about relying on Tannen’s book as a source of empirical generalizations about men’s and women’s communicative behavior.

Cultural terms for communication events among some American high school adolescents

Through ethnographic interviewing, participant observation, and cluster analysis of perceptual judgment data, this study examines the natural language descriptions employed by some American high school adolescents in talking about the kinds of communication events they experience in everyday life and the underlying semantic dimensions by which these adolescents perceptually organize this domain. Adolescents described communication events through use of setting, participant, speech act, and purpose marker terms. Nine basic clusters of communication events were differentiated along five underlying semantic dimensions.

The impact of supportive communication networks on test anxiety and performance

Test anxious students experience worries and fears that prevent them from performing well on exams. In this study we describe the communication networks of students in a large lecture course and test the hypothesis that naturally occurring supportive communication reduces uncertainty and helps test anxious students improve exam performance. Findings indicate the relationship between support and test performance depends on a students level of test anxiety and on the source of support. For students with high test anxiety, support from people outside of class is positively related to exam grades, and support from peers in class is negatively related to exam grades. The reverse is true for students with low test anxiety. The mediating role of uncertainty was not supported.