Communication apprehension can lead to professional challenges for individuals, teams, and organizations. This is the first study of communication apprehension that involved a randomized national survey of working adults in the United States and captured broad representation in terms of age, gender, race/ethnicity, managerial status, and other…

Three related studies conducted on the role of emotional transfer in email messages were studied in order to better understand Japanese college students' online communications and their broader participation in online communications. The first study investigated users' initiatives in preventing emotional misunderstandings when sending email.…

The believability and importance of rumors were studied with three samples of college students (n=93) who were deaf. The study analyzed the effects of how frequently the student transmitted rumors and the amount of information students had about a rumor on anxiety level, extroversion orientation, and ratings of believability and importance. (SW)

Eighty deaf college students listed the current rumors they knew and number of people to whom they typically transmit rumors. These two variables were then related to anxiety level, extraversion, gender, preferred mode of communication, and type of high school attended. More anxious students knew more rumors than did less anxious deaf students.…

Examined whether the apparent absence of an egocentric bias among shy individuals is reflected in their excuse making following poor performance and whether anticipating a challenge to one's excuses would dissuade even nonshy individuals from making excuses. Shy individuals refrained form making consistency-lowering excuses regardless of…

This ERIC digest focuses on students who are commonly described as shy (inhibited, lacking in confidence, socially anxious) or withdrawn (unresponsive, uncommunicative, or daydreaming). Symptoms of shyness or withdrawal may appear as part of the student's overall personality or as a situation-specific response to a particular stress factor.…