Report on an innovative training program for child welfare workers designed to improve performance in empathy and concreteness. The program, based on association exercises and dyadic interchange with peer and trainer feedback produced promising results. (Author/CS)

Where the traditional view urges the study of what content through what channels will produce what effects on what audiences, we should be studying how societies process information. (Author/MB)

...synthesizeYsI a special type of communication research, in which source-receiver relationships are the units of analysis, in terms of a propositional inventory about homophily-heterophily in communication behavior." (Author)

Presents an exploratory study designed to provide some empirical basis from which to guide inquiry into the correlations between content and relationship dimensions of human communication. Illustrates the feasibility and potential for further research efforts to determine the interactions between these two dimensions. (JMF)

Groups of married couples (N=4) were studied using a measure of their marital communication habits and an intensive personal interview. Analysis of the data revealed that the quality of interpersonal communication between spouses significantly deteriorated across the groups as the degree of suicidal behavior increased. (Author)

Step-group therapy is a program designed to help adult impatients increase their interpersonal communications skills. Using microcounseling formats, psychiatric patients have been taught the skills of eye contact, verbal following, relaxed pasture and eventually, the use of feedback and self-disclosure. (Author)

This article examines various forms of communication systems for their "partner friendliness" and presents a model of different types of communication partners and their communication needs. Case examples illustrate how the forms of communication of two students who are deaf-blind were expanded to promote greater communication with a variety of…

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)

Hans-Georg Gadamer's development of the hermeneutic question points to the need for a hermeneutic consciousness in the United States appropriate for human communication research. Communication studies in the United States have taken a route very different from hermeneutics. They are based on attempts to understand the subjective intentions of a…

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…

This paper is an account of the theoretical and practical underpinnings of the Decision-Proposal Modification Coding System (DPM), which allows researchers to study more accurately the many aspects of group decision making in organizations. Following an introduction that reviews and supports arguments for process-oriented research on decision…

A study was conducted to examine patterns of information processing over time in self-analytic groups. Communication patterns in two 25-member groups of college students that met for 32 50-minute sessions were categorized by means of the Systems Information Processing Analysis (SIPA) category system. Messages were coded on four dimensions of…