Listening to Another's Distress in Everyday Relationships

Abstract

Talking about a difficult event may reduce discloser distress, but it may increase it in the listener. This essay offers a model that assesses some antecedent and interactional variables proposed to be involved with listening and connected with listeners' negative distress. Based on 82 reports of interactions with close relational others, levels of negative distress correlated positively with the amount of responsibility people felt for the other and time reported listening to the others' disclosure. Those who reported validating the other also reported more negative distress than did those who said their response style was to give advice. This article offers possible modifications to the model based in these results.

Keywords:

• Disclosure
• Interaction
• Listening
• Relationships
• Trauma

This article is based on Tiffany Lewis's undergraduate honors thesis, for which Valerie Manusov served as advisor. A single-authored version of this article received the top debut article award in 2005 from the Interpersonal Communication Interest Group of the Western States Communication Association in San Francisco, CA. We thank the editor and the two reviewers for their help on this article.

Notes

∗p = .05. ∗∗p = .01.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tiffany Lewis

Tiffany Lewis (MA, University of Montana, 2008) is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland.

Valerie Manusov

Valerie Manusov (PhD, University of Southern California, 1989) is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington.