The encoding and decoding of verbal and nonverbal cues is basic to the process of social interaction. A method of teaching about verbal and nonverbal communication--the Interpersonal Perception Task (IPT)--consists of a videotape divided into 30 brief scenes. After each scene viewers answer an interpretive question by decoding the verbal and…

Exploratory research was conducted to generate hypotheses regarding behaviors of a 2-year-old subject during social interaction with multi-age partners. The subject of the study was a female child age 2 years and 4 months. Interactions observed were limited to those occurring with a number of partners who were members of the subject's social…

Memory for everyday conversational speech may be influenced by the nonverbally communicated emotion of the speaker. In order to investigate this premise, three videotaped scenes with bipolar emotional perspectives (joy/fear about going away to college, fear/anger about having been robbed, and disgust/interest regarding a friend's infidelity) were…

The willingness to manipulate others has been called Machiavellianism. The purpose of the present study was to acquire a preliminary answer to the question: what verbal communicative strategies do people with high Machiavellian characteristics employ which permit them to influence and control the group process? (Author)

Two Supreme Court cases are analyzed with reference to lower court decisions and their implications: Pickering v. Board of Education, which concerned teachers' expression outside the school, and Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, which involved students' expression inside the classroom. (JT)

Compares findings of four similar studies that analyzed patterns of teachers' verbal and nonverbal communication with different types of student populations. (JG)

Two studies of 7-, 8- and 9-year-olds assessed the effect on cognitive development produced by varying degrees of physical isolation of family dwellings and the consequent variation in the amount of verbal communication children had with peers and adults. (JMB)

Investigated the effectiveness of modeling procedures alone and complemented by the appropriate rule statement on the production of plurals. Subjects were 20 normal and 20 retarded children who were randomly assigned to one of two learning conditions and who received either affective or informative social reinforcement. (Author/SDH)

The treatment of a 10-year-old elective mute boy is reported in detail. A learning principles based approach was used in a one-to-one therapeutic setting. Relatively normal speaking patterns were established after 15 months of treatment. (Author)

This book analyses how racism is reproduced through everyday talk and how ethnic prejudices become shared and may form the cognitive basis of ethnic or racial discrimination in intergroup interaction. The study, based on interviews conducted in California and Amsterdam, focuses on how ethnic attitudes expressed in discourse exhibit sociocultural,…

A marital argument over the content of a previous conversation is analyzed using an interactive discourse analysis approach. The analysis focuses on the frequency and use of particular discourse strategies to show how marked use of these strategies may not only typify speakers who share similar "high involvement" conversational styles,…

Although verbosity in normal, healthy adults is a phenomenon that has been noted by researchers, the development of verbosity and its significance in relation to human aging has not been systematically examined. Verbosity is described as a pattern of off-target conversation characterized by intrusion of inappropriate information. Two studies were…

Extending earlier findings of the effects of socioeconomic status (SES) on child outcomes, this study investigated the variables of mothers' language complexity (levels of distancing) and degree of involvement in interactions with their children in order to clarify the relationship of the variables to each other and their relationship to their 4-…

Grinder and Bandler (1978) assert that if counselors communicate with their clients using verbal predicates that match the modality of their clients' primary representational system (PRS), it will be easier for the clients to understand the counselor and to feel that they are understood by the counselor. This study investigated this claim of a…

When a person encounters a problem, the character, form, and content of his or her response provides psychologists with useful and interesting information about processes of challenge and their relationship to intellectual development. In essence, challenge is a developing relationship that is defined on the one hand by objective factors (a person…