Teamwork and interpersonal communication are indispensable skills for business workers, and most companies are promoting diversity in teams to gain a competitive edge. Although findings suggest that diversity may not be as valuable as it seems for most teams, business workers need to manage diversity successfully. Therefore, the present authors…

Employed contextual analysis to examine the meaning of touches reported in daily interaction. Found 18 categories of meanings of touch such as support, appreciation, inclusion, greeting, departure, attention-getting, etc. Discusses results in terms of the nature of tactile communication, comparing results with past research. (PD)

Twenty students participated in this study in which white lies were collected and coded for analysis. Overall, findings confirm previous findings that lies are often used to cope with difficulties in unequal power relationships. (PD)

Assessed the relationship of conversational involvement and loneliness among college students. Found that lonely participants in this study had lower rates of talkativeness, interruptions, and attention than the nonlonely; they were also perceived as less involved and less interpersonally attractive. (PD)

Relationships--categorized as no growth, low growth, or high growth--were monitored over a two-week period with structured diaries kept by one party to the relationship. Overall differences were found between males and females, primarily on the four variables of satisfaction, importance, effectiveness, and personalness. (PD)

Results of this investigation suggest that the greater an individual's cognitive sophistication about conversation, the better his or her performance in, and memory for, social interaction. (Auth/PD)

Examines the taken-for-granted assumptions students make about selection interviews and how these assumptions affect the interview process. (PD)

Investigated the impact of sexual composition and competitive/cooperative orientation on interaction patterns in same-sex and mixed-sex dyads. Found that the competitive or cooperative orientation of the interactants exerts a far greater impact on the communication behavior of dyads than does their sexual composition. (PD)

A study was conducted to examine the presence and composition of nonverbal cues exhibited in a spontaneous dyadic interaction and to investigate the assumption that cue variation is inconsequential to the effect of nonverbal behavior implicit in methods that aggregate cue incidence across interactions. Subjects, 110 college undergraduates, worked…

Interpersonal communication competence has been conceptualized as a function of impressions of competence formed in the context of a dyadic relationship, and also in terms of individual behaviors. The Measure of Relational Competence, along with individual self-reports for empathy, role taking, and self-monitoring, were administered for 36…

Three related studies clarify and extend the meaning of interaction involvement: (1) examines the factor structure of the Interaction Involvement Scale; (2) reports a correlation of analysis of newly interpreted involvement factors, including neuroticism, extraversion, communication competence, etc.; and (3) reports initial findings of the…

Investigated effects on group member satisfaction and communication behavior when male and female leaders either maintained or lost reward power during problem-solving sessions. Found group member communication was more substantive and positive when leaders maintained reward power than when they lost it; communication behavior was also affected by…

A need exists for focusing on the development of social interaction skills across the college curriculum. Eight basic assumptions should be followed when attempting to develop students' skills: social interaction (1) is a major vehicle for learning; (2) assists students in developing a flexible range of effective behavior; (3) requires abilities…

Analysis of instructor (n=1) and student (n=61) postings on an electronic forum during a one-semester undergraduate phonetics course found students wrote about 340 topics in 143 postings, and the instructor wrote about 124 topics in 23 postings. Analysis of topics identified four interactive communicative categories that show interaction trends…

This study used ethnographic techniques to observe and analyze the communication patterns of two Latina college students in order to better understand the poor performance of many Latino students in college-level composition classes. Both students experienced frustration, anger, suspicion, and mistrust. They felt that school was trying to change…