Planning Improves Vocal Fluency and the Appearance of Concern When Communicating Emotional Support

Abstract

Emotional support is often conveyed to people with cancer; however, not all support messages are effective, leading some potential supporters to fear appearing incompetent when communicating support. Additionally, nonverbal behaviors, such as vocal fluency, pitch variety, eye contact, and conveying concern, have previously been associated with support recipients’ outcomes and perceptions of speaker competence. This experiment determines whether these nonverbal behaviors can be increased through message planning. Participants were randomly assigned to either a planning condition or a distraction task condition before recording emotional support messages for a friend hypothetically diagnosed with cancer. Results showed that planners spoke with significantly more vocal fluency and conveyed significantly more nonverbal concern than nonplanners. Planners also used more eye contact and pitch variety than nonplanners, but these differences were not statistically significant. Results suggest that planning may improve some nonverbal aspects of communicating support, which may in turn improve perceptions of supporters’ competence.

Keywords:

• Cancer
• Emotional Support
• Nonverbal Communication
• Planning Theory
• Vocal Fluency

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Nikki Truscelli, Emi Hashi, Cris Tietsort, Anna Marie Campbell, Alaina Veluscek, Rosalie Fisher, and Dayna Kloeber for conducting numerous laboratory sessions during data collection and Nicole Richards and Victoria Mudd for their help during the preparation of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the The Arizona State University Graduate College; The Graduate and Professional Student Association in conjunction with the Office of Knowledge Enterprise Development at Arizona State University; and The Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University.