A model of conversational distance violations that claims that these violations mediate communication outcomes such as source credibility, source attraction, and learning was examined in a study involving 136 undergraduate students. The students were tested in small group settings using eight confederates, four rated highly and four lowly in…

Recent research on the role of personal space has demonstrated the effects of violating or not violating a spatial norm on the perceived persuasiveness, credibility, and attractiveness of the message source. The persuasive impact of personal space violations has been difficult to interpret because of the failure to effectively manipulate source…

The proposed study will examine some critical therapist characteristics (skin color, speech rhythm, expertise levels, and counseling approach) possessed by present Chicano mental health personnel. One hundred and sixty lower division Mexican American college students will be asked to rate the therapist on expertness, attractiveness,…

In every advanced culture, there exists some kind of understanding between a profession and the people it serves. In the case of mass communication, such an understanding is for the most part an informal compact whose terms are understood more or less tacitly. As the terms of this agreement are renegotiated from time to time--disagreements…

This article reviews research conducted on the interpersonal influence process in counseling, specifically those studies relating to counselor expertise, attractiveness, and trustworthiness. The review is organized and analyzed in terms of variables affecting the client's perception of critical counselor characteristics and effects of the…

This report of the investigation into East European newspaper treatment of the accident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in the spring of 1979 focuses on the Czech and Slovak media, particularly on the Slovak Communist Party's daily newspaper, "Pravda." The response of the media of other East European countries to…

Drawing on personal observations and on a study of patient reactions, this paper considers the problem of doctor/patient communication failure in the inner city clinic. It first discusses the role of dialect variation in communication failure, causes of communication failure in the medical interview, factors contributing to doctor/patient…

This research aimed to identify the school district characteristics that seem to explain the way districts adapt to pressures for change. The author hypothesized that all school districts can be characterized by one of three states: maintenance (they change practices and technologies but are stable in beliefs and structures that truly affect…

The nonverbal components of dramatic art, namely costuming, setting, atmosphere, lighting, and blocking, can work as rhetorical determinants in the conversion process of the Unification Church in that they alter the frame of reference (the body of settled convictions, attitudes, and values) of certain individuals. The clean-cut costuming of church…

Two hundred forty college undergraduates participated in a study of the effect of camera angle on an audience's perceptual judgments of source credibility, dominance, attraction, and homophily. The subjects were divided into four groups and each group was shown a videotape presentation in which sources had been videotaped according to one of four…

The basic premise in the study of the mass media and media credibility was that the medium is a major factor in the determination of the credibility of information by receivers. Relationships between media credibility and sociolinguistic theory were explored, and the factor analysis was used to organize patterns of perception of media credibility…

The purpose of this study was to develop and validate an instrument to collect student judgments regarding their teacher's credibility. Items were developed and evidence of content validity generated. A pilot sample and a final sample of high school students were administered the Source Credibility Measure (SCM) so that actual response data could…

Using stepwise multiple regression, voting behavior was predicted from semantic differential scale evaluations of the winning candidate in four voting situations: the 1972 Presidential race in Illinois and Missouri and the gubernatorial races in the two states. "Image" was defined in terms of the semantic differential scales, and "image voters"…

This study investigated the effect of the sex of an oral interpreter and the sex of the dramatic character portrayed on audience evaluation of performer effectiveness and audience comprehension of the passage presented. Two interpreters, one male and one female, each performed six monologues, three of which were feminine and three of which were…

This paper reports on the results of two empirical studies which attempt to cast the source credibility variable in communication into a human information processing paradigm. The subjects for the studies were college students in an introductory communication course. The first study deals with the degree to which the processes of source…