The past two decades have seen an explosion in research in the fields of violence and trauma and behavior genetics. These two fields came into direct conflict when Lisabeth Fisher DiLalla and Irving I. Gottesman outlined a fundamental conceptual limitation of trauma and violence research: that rather than being causal, the well-documented…

Uses genre and genre repertoire to investigate a community's structuring of communicative practices. Examines communications exchanged by a group of distributed knowledge workers in a multiyear, interorganizational project conducted primarily through electronic mail. Results reveal rich, varied communications shaped in response to community norms,…

Examined whether couples could accurately report on asymmetrical interaction patterns and whether particular patterns were associated with relationship distress. Undergraduate couples (N=55) completed a questionnaire describing interaction patterns. Agreement on pattern occurrence between couples was low but significantly greater than chance.…

Systems descriptions vary in two essential ways. First, they vary in terms of the kinds of behaviors used in describing the system. Second, they vary in terms of the way the data are handled. The analysis of interaction patterns in dyads, groups, and larger systems has been difficult to describe. In this paper, an attempt is made to present a…

Discusses assumptions and criticisms of rule-governed approaches to interpersonal communication research and theory. Outlines a definition of rules that does not require sole reliance on interpersonal actors' statements about their behavior or assumptions of communicator self-awareness. Suggests consideration of rules-based concomitants of…

This study investigated the merits of various theoretical rationales for predicting viewers' affective responses to the expressed emotions of a protagonist. (Editor)

Network analysis, a research methodology that uses interpersonal relationships as the unit of analysis in identifying communication structures, was used in a study of college classroom communication to determine what communication network factors were associated with student grades. Questionnaires asking for student perceptions of their…

Studies based on models of interpersonal coorientation have discovered regularities in communication behavior that coorientation theory cannot explain. On the other hand, rules-based theories of communication contain explanatory concepts seemingly applicable to these phenomena, but have not been articulated sufficiently to be applied to the…

An experimentl was designed to replicate and confirm previous research findings which suggest that the way persons communicate is related to their perceptions of communication behavior. The experiment was successful. Subjects with low Communicator Style Measure (CSM) scores do not report perceiving a significant difference. Three raters evaluated…

Human communication research has identified and tested numerous aspects of interpersonal transactions, but at present there exists no empirically verifiable data as to how people end these transactions. This study is concerned with the rhetoric of goodbye--determining and assessing the peculiar behaviors, both verbal and non-verbal, with which…

Describes study which examines undergraduates' sensitivity to children's behavior and the extent to which students' behavior changes as a result of a "sensitivity to children" course. Research explored whether students' Interpersonal Perceptual Style (IPS: the extent to which a person is sensitive to another's negative and positive behavior) was a…

In the first of a series of papers describing social relationships among mentally disabled adults who worked in four sheltered workshops, procedures for observing and interviewing clients and for interviewing staff members are reported and data on reliability and general levels of social behavior are cited. (Author/SBH)

Discusses Erving Goffman's work on public places with regard to how that work represents women's experience in public places. Reviews strategies that women devise to manage appearances in public places in order to illustrate how gender-conscious appraisal is necessary to appreciate the character of public places. (Author/LS)

The continuing inability of measures of personality to predict communicative or other types of behaviors has forced researchers to seek alternative ways of measuring. One alternative consists of a measure of four types of causal attribution in hypothetically crucial situations in five types of relationships of humans. The type of relationship in…

This study details three methods developed during the course of an investigation for describing adult-child interaction: (1) the "VINEX" category system for coding the actual language of the adult and the child; (2) a coding system for describing nonverbal behavior; and, (3) "Interaction Language," for the use of an observer in…