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INTERPERSOONLIJKE COMMUNICATIE
INTRODUCTION : Why a course on interpersonal communication?
PRELUDE : A personal perspective on interpersonal communication
PART I : Interpersonal communication foundations
• Introduction to interpersonal communication.
• Interpersonal communication and Self.
• Interpersonal communication and perception.
Addendum: some important biases that impact our perception of Self and the Other.
• Interpersonal communication and diversity: adapting to others.
PART II : Interpersonal communication skills
• Listening and responding skills.
• Verbal communication skills.
• Nonverbal communication skills.
Addendum: some more reflections on nonverbal communication.
• Conflict management skills.
PART III : Interpersonal communication in relationships
• Understanding interpersonal relationships.
• Managing relationship challenges and the dark side of interpersonal communication and
relationships.
• Interpersonal relationships: friendship and romance.
• Interpersonal relationships: family and workplace.
CONCLUSION
1. INTRODUCTION:
1.1. PART 1: WHY A COURSE ON INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION?
1.2. PART 2: WHY A COURSE ON IPC IN A MMC-CENTERED CURRICULUM?
- Why a course on IPC in a MMC-centered curriculum?
● MMC builds on IPC processes. It even often boils down to little more than mediated IPC.
● The borderlines between MMC and IPC are fading in a context of EMC (electronically mediated
communication) and especially MPC (mass-personal communication).
● Effects of MMC can be highly impacted by aspects of IPC.
- MMC builds on IPC processes. It even often boils down to little more than mediated IPC.
● Some food for thought: is it MMC or IPC?
⮚ Fiction: e.g. watching an episode of Friends: you are there with them through the identification
with the camera viewpoint, the arrangement of the Central Perk pub, of the apartments of
Monica and Rachel, etc.!
⮚ Non-fiction: e.g. a news anchor reading the news: regarding the camera – and thereby
regarding you – and not his sheet (cf. contrary to reading the news to a live public in the movie
News of the World).
⮚ Non-fiction: e.g. a talk show: you are sitting at the debate table too (via the identification with
the camera) and the host is talking to you too.
● One of my favorite definitions: HUMAN COMMUNICATION IS THE PROCESS OF ONE PERSON
STIMULATING MEANING IN THE MIND OF ANOTHER PERSON (OR PERSONS) BY MEANS OF VERBAL
AND/OR NONVERBAL MESSAGES DIRECTLY VIA IP OR INDIRECTLY VIA MMC
● IPC = a psychological meaning transfer process
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● MMC= a psychological meaning transfer process
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● Is MMC not just ‘mediated’ IPC (where the mediation provides some additional communication
devices such as camera angle, montage, lighting, etc.) ???
● Also, how could there be a different ‘psychology’ – since communication is first and foremost a
psychological process – we use for handling MMC compared to the psychological processes and
mechanisms we use for handling IPC? If so, then how on earth could these different psychological
mechanisms and processes have evolved into our brain so quickly, given the extremely recent rise of
modern mass media in human history (cf. chapter on the biological / evolutionary psychological
perspective on communication, infra) ?
- The borderlines between MMC and IPC are fading in a context of EMC (electronically mediated
communication) and especially MPC (mass-personal communication).
● Personal context: electronically mediated communication (EMC) of one person to one or to many
other persons via e.g. Outlook, Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok, SnapChat…
● Professional context: online classes or meetings via Teams, Zoom, …
● Some authors call EMC in which one sender makes his/her message available to many receivers
‘mass-personal communication’ (MPC).
● EPC / MPC = a psychological meaning transfer process
- Effects of MMC can be highly impacted by aspects of IPC.
● Cf. my experiments on advertising:
● Using faces (one of the main nonverbal IPC systems) in advertising helps to attract the attention of
the consumer.
⮚ Faces are used in advertising extremely often:
→ Quantitative content analysis of 39 Flemish magazines containing 883 unique
advertisements.
→ Trained encoders (Cohen’s Kappa = 0,682 / p=0,000) analysed the ads.
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→ 63% of all the ads contained a face (while you don’t exactly need a face to sell bank
services, insurances, cars, cell phones, butter, gasoline, newspapers, sneakers,
educational programs, mayonaise, jelly, sugar, fruit juices, soft drinks, liquors,
cigarettes, perfumes, jewelry, furniture, …).
1. Pretest
→ 200 images rated on likeability (N=80)
→ Goal: images with similar likeability
2. Eye Tracking
→ 15 screens with 4 images: only one of the four images contains a face
→ 3 seconds exposure to each screen
→ Participants: 140 young adults (aged 18-25 ; 70 males and 70 females)
→ Note: modern eyetracking
→ Example of a screen: four images, one with a face in it
→ Heatmaps: faces are visual magnets!
→ Areas Of Interest (AOI)= More precise measure, Calculated rate
▪ The relative attention that a face demands is much higher than its relative
size:
▪ Mean size of all faces = 2,53 % of the screen surface
▪ Mean attention to these faces = 11,28 % of the observation time
▪ -> Relative attention time is 4,45 times higher than relative size of the face
on the screen!
→ Note: fixations (including measures like time-to-first-fixation) and saccades
→ Faces are visual magnets because they contain lots of cues
→ Other applications: e.g. faces as visual magnets in packaging
● Nonverbal IPC cues in advertising have a clear impact on ad-likeability (that is, on liking-the-ad-more
or liking-the-ad-less), one of the main predictors of the advertising effectiveness to be expected from
the ad.
⮚ Experiment: YOU GET TO SEE TWO VERSIONS OF THE SAME AD. BOTH VERSIONS ARE
SHOWN AT THE SAME TIME FOR ONLY THREE SECONDS. PICK THE ONE THAT’S MOST
APPEALING TO YOU PERSONALLY: LEFT OR RIGHT?
⮚ Notice …
→ Some of these IPC cues are just unintentional cues, some are truly intentional
signals: communication can therefore be both intentional and/or unintentional.
→ Meaning of the IPC cues/signals (e.g. cues of high fertility like waist-to-hip ratio or
cues of good genes like symmetry) is often unconscious or unknown:
communication can therefore be both explicit (conscious) and/or implicit
(unconscious).
→ Many IPC cues are used as signals in deceptive ways (e.g. push-up bras, aesthetic
surgery, hair dying, etc.): communication can therefore be both informative (honest,
truthful) or manipulative (dishonest, mendacious).
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→ To understand why some IPC cues ‘work’ (e.g. black versus gray hair), and some
don’t ‘work’ (e.g. black versus brown hair) we will need evolutionary psychology (the
‘new science of the mind’) as a new perspective on communication processes.
- Conclusion: a course on IPC is essential in a curriculum dominated by MMC !
1.3. INTRODUCTION PART 3: LEARNING OBJECTIVES OF THE COURSE
1.4. INTRODUCTION PART 4: THE GENERAL RELEVANCE OF THIS COURSE IN YOU LIFE
1.5. INTRODUCTION PART 5: STRUCTURE OF THE COURSE
1.6. INTRODUCTION PART 6: SOME PRACTICAL INFO
2. PRELUDE: A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE ON INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION (INSPIRED BY EVOLUTIONARY
PSYCHOLOGY)
2.1. PRELUDE PART 1: DEFINING (INTERPERSONAL) COMMUNICATION
- Different perspectives on interpersonal communication
● The classic perspective: communication is a linear process of information delivery from a sender
to a receiver.
● The modern perspective: communicaton is an interactional/transactional process of meaning
making by communicators.
- Defining ‘communication’ the classic way: Lasswell’s approach: some problems
●een van de eerste die communicatie op wetenschappelijke manier gaat analyseren
●zender die boodschap nr ontvanger stuurt
●Rather unidirectional, while IPC generally is bidirectional or even multidirectional.
●Concepts like ‘channel’ or ‘medium’: rather vague.
●‘Effect’ is more than merely feedback.
●No attention to the ‘context’ in which the communication process is taking place.
●Focus on who (sender & receiver), what (message), where & when (medium/channel), but no
attention is paid to how and why we communicate.
● Communication is seen as an information transfer from a sender to a receiver, yet the mind is not
an information processor, but a meaning processor.
- Some modern definitions of (interpersonal) communication
● Adler, Rosenfeld & Proctor
● Adler, Rodman & Du Pré
● Rothwell
● Beauchamps & Baran
● Turner & West
● Punches & Salazar
● Harrison, Firari & Miller
● Gamble & Gamble
● Solomon & Theiss
● Guerrero & McEwan
● McCormack & Ortiz
● Burgoon, Manusow & Guerrero
● Remland
