The Role of “Active Listening” in Informal Helping Conversations: Impact on Perceptions of Listener Helpfulness, Sensitivity, and Supportiveness and Discloser Emotional Improvement

Abstract

Undergraduate students were randomly assigned to disclose a recent upsetting problem to either a trained active listener (n = 41) or an untrained listener (n = 130). Active listeners were trained to ask open questions, paraphrase content, reflect feelings, and use assumption checking as well as be nonverbally immediate. Verbal and nonverbal active listening behaviors were rated as signaling more emotional awareness and promoting a greater degree of emotional improvement but did not affect perceptions of relational assurance or problem-solving utility. On average, the set of verbal behaviors were more important in the prediction of outcomes compared to the nonverbal behaviors. Results contribute to the larger literature on enacted support, suggesting particular roles for active listening techniques within troubles talk.

Keywords:

• Comforting
• Emotional Support
• Empathy
• Stress
• Supportive Listening

Notes

Perhaps the most sustained attention to active listening is within tests of marital enrichment programs (Bowling, Hill, & Jencius, 2005). While many of these programs have produced evidence of success, they are not without their critics (Gottman, Coan, Carrere, & Swanson, 1998; Hafen & Crane, 2002). Most relevant to our argument, these programs include active listening as one of several components to marital therapy and do not tease out the effects of active listening behaviors. Moreover, most of these programs are situated in the context of marital conflict rather than providing beneficial support.

Those themes were “being there” (n = 40), “gives advice” (n = 38), “perceptive” (n = 30), “touch” (n = 18), “asks questions” (n = 14), “eye contact” (n = 9), and “friendly” (n = 7). See Bodie, St. Cyr, et al. (2012) for reference to how these themes align with lay notions of good listening and Bodie et al. (2013) for similar results suggesting the terms supportive person and supportive listener are reported as virtually isomorphic.

Research assistants were trained to use a script to maintain consistent instructions to listeners and disclosers. Disclosers were told by the research assistant to “talk about the event that you and I identified. Talk about what happened and what made this particular event so distressing, how the event made you feel, and why it's still painful/distressing now. Take your time and make sure to provide your conversational partner, (Listener name) with as much information as is necessary and as you feel comfortable disclosing.” Listeners were told to “respond as you normally would respond in a conversation about emotionally distressing events with your friends. So this is just a regular conversation meaning that, (Listener name), you talk too; it is just that we focus on (discloser's name) topic.” The full script is available from the first author upon request.

We additionally conducted a discriminant function analysis to predict group membership from the coded nonverbal immediacy and verbal active listening responses. Using the aggregate data for each behavior group, 87.5% of original grouped cases were correctly classified. Using the individual behaviors, 93% of the original grouped cases were correctly classified. Thus, listener behaviors (verbal and nonverbal) seem to discriminate between trained and untrained listeners (i.e., trained and untrained listeners are enacting support differently). Details of these analyses are available from the first author upon request.

This method defines relative importance as “[the] proportionate contribution each predictor makes to R², considering both its direct effect (i.e., its correlation with the criterion) and its effect when combined with the other variables in the regression equation” (p. 240). Their relative importance analysis consists of (a) transforming the original predictors to their “maximally related orthogonal counterparts” (p. 249); these counterparts are (b) “then used to predict the criterion” (p. 249). The formula for the raw relative weight (ϵ_j) is the sum of all the products of (c), the relative contribution of the original criterion to each orthogonal criterion, and (d), the relative importance of the transformed criterion variables to the dependent variable. When these weights are “rescaled by dividing them by the model R² and multiplying by 100, they may be interpreted as the percentage of the model R² associated with each predictor” (p. 251).

In their study, Jones and Guerrero (2001) used 14 bipolar adjective pairs to assess comforting quality. These items included those more appropriately classified as assessing only one of the three ratings assessed in this study.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Graham D. Bodie

Graham D. Bodie is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College and Visiting Associate Professor in the School of Media and Communication, Korea University, Seoul, South Korea.

Andrea J. Vickery

Andrea J. Vickery and Kaitlin Cannava are doctoral candiates at LSU A&M.

Susanne M. Jones

Susanne M. Jones is Associate Professor and Donald V. Hawkins Professor of Communication in the Department of Communication Studies, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.