The Understudied Nature of Listening in Interpersonal Communication: Introduction to a Special Issue

Abstract

Although listening is highlighted as an essential component of success in interpersonal communication, this essay argues that interpersonal communication scholars have systematically ignored theorizing about listening. Out of this conundrum comes this special issue, which begins the process of taking listening seriously and theorizing about its nature within the larger corpus of interpersonal communication research.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Jim Honeycutt (The Louisiana State University) for reading a previous version of this manuscript and Laura Janusik (Rockhurst Universisty) whose persistence in asking me to propose a panel for NCA covering listening and interpersonal communication finally became profitable.

Notes

¹Quality comforting messages also exhibit other characteristics such as being evaluatively neutral, feeling centered, more accepting of the distressed other, and containing cognitively-oriented explanations of the feelings being experienced (Burleson, 1994). I do not suggest here that listener-centered is the only characteristic of sophisticated comforting messages, but I do argue that this aspect of comforting messages is often overlooked in favor of evaluating the verbal production of messages as opposed to investigating how “listening” is involved in comforting.

²This point was highlighted first by Sam Duker (1963), who claimed that “all studies having to do with communication have some bearing, directly or indirectly, on the subject of listening” but that most of these same studies fail to acknowledge this fact (p. 106).

³The six areas Berger highlights are uncertainty, interpersonal adaptation, message production, relationship development, deceptive communication, and mediated social interaction.

⁴ Berger's (2002) chapter on social knowledge comes closest to addressing this concern but is far from an exposition of the mechanisms underlying interpersonal listening.

⁵Other examples include research investigating the processes through which individuals make attributions about another's behavior in ongoing conversations (e.g., Berger, 1975; Burleson, 1986), how people remember elements of conversations (Stafford, Burggraf, & Sharkey, 1987; Stafford & Daly, 1984), and messages likely to be memorable (Knapp, Stohl, & Reardon, 1981). Space limitations precluded a thorough treatment of all the relevant theoretical perspectives that can be used to locate listening as a theoretical term, and others are encouraged to generate additional ideas that align with the theme of this issue.