COM 102: Chapter 5

narcissistic listening

ignoring what the other person is saying and directing the conversation back to one self.

understanding

involves interpreting the meaning of another person's communication by comparing newly received information against our past knowledge.

Listening

involves receiving, attending to, understanding, responding to, and recalling sounds and visual images.

listening style

is your habitual pattern of listening behaviors, which reflects your attitudes, beliefs, and predispositions regarding the listening process.

listening functions

or purposes for listening, we experience daily.

selective listening

perhaps the greatest challenge to active listening is overcoming _____, taking in only those bits and pieces of information that are immediately salient during an interpersonal encounter and dismissing the rest.

time-oriented listeners

prefer brief and concise encounters. They tend to let others know in advance exactly how much time they have available for each conversation.

content-oriented listeners

prefer to intellectually challenged by the messages they receive during interpersonal encounters. They enjoy receiving complex and provocative information. _____ often take time to carefully evaluate facts and details before forming an opinion about information they've heard. Out of the four listening styles, ____ are the most likely to ask speakers clarifying or challenging questions.

listening to support

providing comfort to a conversational partner is another common purpose for listening. to prove support through listening, you must suspend judgement--talking in what someone else says without evaluating it, and openly expressing empathy

The five-step process (RAURR)

receiving, attending, understanding, responding, recalling

brain plasticity

Cognitive scientists have discovered that our brains adapt to the tasks we regularly perform during our waking hours, an effect known as _____. -In simple terms, we "train our brains" to be able to do certain things, through how we live our daily lives.

mental bracketing

If you find your attention wandering, practice_____, systematically putting aside thoughts that aren't relevant to the interaction at hand.

aggressive listening

People who engage in _____ (also called ambushing) attend to what others say solely to find an opportunity to attack their conversation partners.

provocateurs

Some people engage in aggressive listening online. People known as ____ post messages designed solely as "trolls" (from the fishing technique of trolling) to annoy others.

recalling

The fifth stage of listening is ____, remembering information after you've received, attended to, understood, ad responded to it. _____ is a crucial part of the listening process because we judge the effectiveness of listening based on our ability to accurately recall information after we've listened to it.

seeing

These nerves become stimulated, sending information to your brain, which translates the information into visual images such as your friend smiling or shaking her head, an effect called ____.

receiving

Together, seeing and hearing constitute____, the first step in the listening process. ____ is critical to listening-- you can't listen if you don't "see" or hear the other person.

noise pollution

Unfortunately, our ability to receive is often hampered by _____, sound in the surrounding environment that obscures or distracts our attention from auditory input.

eavesdropping

When people intentionally and systematically set up situations so they can listen to private conversations, they are ____.

short-term memory

Whenever you receive and attend to new information you place it in your_____, the part of your mind that temporarily houses the information while you seek to understand its meaning

long-term memory

While the new information sits in your short-term memory, you call up relevant knowledge from your _____, the part of your mind devoted to permanent information storage.

Four different primary styles

action-oriented listeners, time-oriented listeners, people-oriented listeners, content-oriented listeners

pseudo-listening

behaving as if you're paying attention though you're really not. ____ is obviously an ineffective way to listen because it prevents us from attending to or understanding information coming from the other person.

responding

communicating their attention and understand to you. ____ is the fourth stage of the listening process. When you actively listen, you do more than simply attend and understand. You also convey your attention and understand to others by clearly and constructively _____ through positive feedback, paraphrasing, and clarifying.

feedback

critical to active listening is using verbal and nonverbal behaviors known as ____ to communicate attention and understanding while others are talking.

mnemonics

devices that aid memory

hearing

sounds waves generated by her voice enter your inner ear, causing your eardrums to vibrate. These vibrations travel along acoustic nerves to your brain, which interprets them as your friend's words and voice tone, an effect known as ____.

paraphrasing

summarizing others' comments after they have finished ("My read on your message is that..." or "You seem to be saying that...")

salience

the degree to which it seems especially noticeable and significant. -When it's visually or audibly stimulating, unexpected, or personally important

hearing impairment

the restricted ability to receive sound input across the humanly audible frequency range.

attending

the second step in the listening process, involves devoting attention to the information you've received.

multitasking online

using multiple forms of technology at once, each of which feeds you unrelated streams of information -multitasking erodes your capacity for sustaining focused attention

back-channel cues

verbal and nonverbal behaviors such as nodding and making comments---like "uh-huh," "yes," and "that makes sense"-- that signal you've paid attention to and understood specific comments.

people-oriented listeners

view listening as an opportunity to establish commonalities between themselves and others. When asked to identify the most important part of effective listening, ____ cite concern for other people's emotions. _____ tend to score high on measures of extraversion and overall communication competence.

action-oriented listeners

want brief, to-the-point, and accurate messages from others--information they can then use to make decisions or initiate course of action.

listening to comprehend

when you listen for this purpose, you work to accurately interpret and store the information you receive, so you can correctly recall it later.

bizarreness effect

which causes us to remember unusual information more readily than commonplace information

listening to analyze

you carefully evaluate the message you're receiving, and you judge it.

listening to discern

you focus on distinguishing specific sounds from each other. The most common form is to listen carefully to someone's vocal tone to assess mood and stress level

listening to appreciate

your goal is simply to enjoy the sounds and sights you're experiencing and then to respond by expressing your appreciation.