Research shows that people comply more frequently to threats when the credibility of the source is high rather than low and that compliance is directly related to punishment magnitude. To examine the impact of an advisor on a target of threats, male college students (N=74) participated in an experiment that included high or low threatner…

A factor analytic study which sought to discover the dimensions of credibility in the context of subordinate and supervisor interaction is reported in this paper. It was hypothesized that perceived supervisor credibility is a function of subordinate part participation in decision making, communication reciprocity, feedback perceptiveness, feedback…

The purpose of this study was to determine the predicted differences in the effectiveness of social approval and disapproval cues. Three hypotheses were tested to determine what the effect on communication is if the source of the cue is a peer, family member, or society and what the response will be when a message advocates a position discrepant…

This study was designed to test the effects of speech analysis (television commentary) on audience responses to televised political speeches. Six hypotheses on the so-called instant analysis phenomenon were tested. Subjects for the study were 115 adults drawn from the Fort Collins, Colorado, community. While it was concluded that instant analysis…

Recent research indicates that fourteen linguistic and paralinguistic patterns--thought to measure uncertainty, vagueness, dependence, and negative affect--discriminate between men's truth telling and deceptive language behavior. This study sought to determine if these same patterns also discriminate between women's truth telling and deceptive…

The relationships between feedback, its source, and the increases or decreases of the behavior associated with it were investigated to apply predictions of the credibility gap regarding the effects of feedback on the acquisition of an individual skill. Subjects (N=45) were randomly assigned to one of five treatment conditions and provided…

This paper offers the hypothesis that in times of low collective excitement rumors in a complex society whose content is beyond normal social discourse (a spectral rumor, for instance) will increasingly exhibit one or the other, or both, of two legitimizing agents--authority and mass media--as a means of gaining greater plausibility and…

Using stepwise multiple regression, voting behavior was predicted from semantic differential scale evaluations of the winning candidate in four voting situations: the 1972 Presidential race in Illinois and Missouri and the gubernatorial races in the two states. "Image" was defined in terms of the semantic differential scales, and "image voters"…

Questionnaires completed by 607 middle school and high school students provided data about the learning of selected advertising-related cognitions among adolescents and on the short-term effect of these cognitions and other communication variables on adolescent consumption behavior. Among the findings were the following: susceptibility to…