Commencement Addresses

http://www.onlinecolleges.net/2012/04/25/the-10-commencement-speeches-were-most-excited-for-this-spring/
Those who cover special occasion speaking in a public speaking course should find this little piece interesting. It covers a wide variety of commencement addresses that are up and coming.

Cohabitation

In a recent NYTimes article (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/opinion/sunday/the-downside-of-cohabiting-before-marriage.html?pagewanted=all) Meg Jay, a clinical psychologist at the University of Virginia and the author of The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter — and How to Make the Most of Them Now, notes that cohabitation has increased from 1960 with 450,000 cohabitating couples, to the present with 7.5 million cohabitation couples. More than 50% of marriages will be preceded by cohabitation and approximately 2/3rds of the respondents in a survey conducted in 2001 said that cohabitating was a good way to avoid divorce. But, says Jay: “Couples who cohabit before marriage (and especially before an engagement or an otherwise clear commitment) tend to be less satisfied with their marriages — and more likely to divorce — than couples who do not. These negative outcomes are called the cohabitation effect.”

Perhaps the most interesting conclusion Jay draws and the one that would make the most interesting class discussion is this: men and women often have different reasons for cohabitating: “Women are more likely to view cohabitation as a step toward marriage, while men are more likely to see it as a way to test a relationship or postpone commitment, and this gender asymmetry is associated with negative interactions and lower levels of commitment even after the relationship progresses to marriage. One thing men and women do agree on, however, is that their standards for a live-in partner are lower than they are for a spouse.”

           A thorough statistical analysis of first marriages by the US Department of Health and Human Services, perhaps the most recent analysis, is available at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr049.pdf.

Factors Influencing Self-Disclosure

Many factors influence whether or not you disclose, what you disclose, and to whom you disclose. Among the most important factors are who you are, your culture, your gender, who your listeners are, and your topic and channel.

Who You Are Highly sociable and extroverted people self-disclose more than those who are less sociable and more introverted. People who are comfortable communicating also self-disclose more than those who are apprehensive about talking in general. Competent people engage in self-disclosure more than less competent people. Perhaps competent people have greater self-confidence and more positive things to reveal. Similarly, their self-confidence may make them more willing to risk possible negative reactions.

Your Culture Different cultures view self-disclosure differently. Some cultures view disclosing inner feelings as a weakness. Among some groups, for example, it would be considered “out of place” for a man to cry at a happy occasion such as a wedding, whereas in some Latin cultures that same display of emotion would go unnoticed. Similarly, it’s considered undesirable in Japan for workplace colleagues to reveal personal information, whereas in much of the United States it’s expected. Important similarities also exist across cultures. For example, people from Great Britain, Germany, the United States, and Puerto Rico are all more apt to disclose personal information—hobbies, interests, attitudes, and opinions on politics and religion—than information on finances, sex, personality, or interpersonal relationships. Similarly, one study showed self-disclosure patterns between American males to be virtually identical to those between Korean males.

Your Gender The popular stereotype of gender differences in self-disclosure emphasizes males’ reluctance to speak about themselves. For the most part, research supports this view; women do disclose more than men. Women disclose more than men about their previous romantic relationships, their feelings for close same-sex friends, their greatest fears, and what they don’t like about their partners. Women also increase the depth of their disclosures as a relationship becomes more intimate, whereas men seem not to change their self-disclosure levels. In addition, for women, there are fewer taboo topics. Finally, women self-disclose more to members of their extended families than men. One notable exception occurs in initial encounters. Here, men will disclose more intimate information than women, perhaps “in order to control the relationship’s development”. Still another exception may be found in a study of Americans and Argentineans; here males indicated a significantly greater willingness to self-disclose than females.

Your ListenersSelf-disclosure occurs more readily in small groups than in large groups. Dyads, or groups of two people, are the most hospitable setting for self-disclosure. With one listener you can monitor your disclosures, continuing if there’s support from your listener and stopping if not. With more than one listener, such monitoring becomes difficult, because the listeners’ responses are sure to vary.

Research shows that you disclose most to people you like and to people you trust.You also come to like those to whom you disclose. At times, self-disclosure occurs more in temporary than in permanent relationships—for example, between strangers on a train or plane, in a kind of “in-flight intimacy”. In this situation two people establish an intimate, self-disclosing relationship during a brief period of travel, but they don’t pursue the connection beyond that point.

      You are more likely to disclose when the person you are with discloses. This dyadic effect (what one person does, the other person also does) probably leads you to feel more secure and reinforces your own self-disclosing behavior. Disclosures are also more intimate when they’re made in response to the disclosures of others. This dyadic effect, however, is not universal across all cultures. For example, although Americans are likely to follow the dyadic effect and reciprocate with explicit, verbal self-disclosure, Koreans aren’t. As you can appreciate, this easily results in intercultural differences; for example, an American may be insulted if his or her Korean counterpart doesn’t reciprocate with self-disclosures that are similar in depth.

Your Topic and Channel You also are more likely to disclose about some topics than others. For example, you’re more likely to self-disclose information about your job or hobbies than about your sex life or financial situation. Further, you’re more likely to disclose favorable rather than unfavorable information. Generally, the more personal and negative the topic, the less likely you are to self-disclose.

     In recent years research has addressed differences in self-disclosure depending on the channel—on whether communication is face-to-face or computer-mediated. Some researchers have pointed to a disinhibition effect that occurs in online communication; people seem less inhibited communicating by e-mail or in chat groups, for example, than in face-to-face situations. One reason may be that in online communication there is a certain degree of anonymity and invisibility. Research also finds that reciprocal self-disclosure occurs more quickly and at higher levels of intimacy online than it does in face-to-face interactions.

Perceptual Organization

Here is a brief discussion of that stage of perception concerned with organizing what we sense. In the next editions of Essentials of Human Communication (8e) and Interpersonal Messages (3e)—, this material will be collapsed (as always, to make room for new material). But, I thought that some instructors and students may prefer this somewhat more complete discussion.

Organization by Rules 

In the organization of perceptions by rules, one frequently used rule is that of proximityor physical closeness: Things that are physically close to each other are perceived as a unit. Thus, using this rule, you will tend to perceive people who are often together, or messages spoken one immediately after the other, as units, as belonging together.

Another rule is similarity: Things that are physically similar (they look alike) are perceived as belonging together and forming a unit. This principle of similarity may lead you to see people who dress alike as belonging together. Similarly, you may assume that people who work at the same jobs, who are of the same religion, who live in the same building, or who talk with the same accent belong together.

The rule of contrast is the opposite of similarity: When items (people or messages, for example) are very different from each other, you conclude that they don’t belong together; they’re too different from each other to be part of the same unit. If you’re the only one who shows up at an informal gathering in a tuxedo, you’ll be seen as not belonging to the group, because you contrast too much with the other people present.

Organization by Schemata 

Another way you organize material is by creating schemata, mental templates that help you organize the millions of items of information you come into contact with every day (as well as those you already have in memory). A stereotype—discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2—is a type of schema. Schemata, the plural of schema (though schemasseems to be used in many texts), may thus be viewed as general ideas about people (e.g., about Pat and Chris, Japanese people, Baptists, Texans); about yourself (your qualities, abilities, liabilities); or about social roles (the characteristics of a police officer, professor, multibillionaire CEO).

You develop schemata from your own experience—actual as well as via television, reading, the Internet, and hearsay. You might have a schema for college athletes, for example, and this might include an image of college athletes as strong, ambitious, academically weak, and egocentric.

Organization by Scripts 

A scriptis really a type of schema, but because it’s a different type, it’s given a different name. A script is an organized body of information about some action, event, or procedure. It’s a general idea of how some event should play out or unfold; it’s the rules governing events and their sequence. For example, you probably have a script for eating in a restaurant, with the actions organized into a pattern something like this: Enter, take a seat, review the menu, order from the menu, eat your food, ask for the bill, leave a tip, pay the bill, exit the restaurant. Similarly, you probably have scripts for how you do laundry, how an interview is to be conducted, the stages you go through in introducing someone to someone else, and the way you ask for a date.

As you can see rules, schemata, and scripts are useful shortcuts to simplify your understanding, remembering, and recalling information about people and events. They also enable you to generalize, make connections, and otherwise profit from previously acquired knowledge. If you didn’t have these shortcuts, you’d have to treat every person, role, or action differently from each other person, role, or action. This would make every experience a new one, totally unrelated to anything you already know. As you’ll see in the next stage, these shortcuts may mislead you; they may contribute to your remembering things that are consistent with your schemata (even if they didn’t occur) and to your distorting or forgetting information that is inconsistent.

Confirmation Examples

Here's an interesting piece that is intimately related to much of what we talk about in interpersonal communication. Unfortunately its title may lead those interested in communication to ignore--"10 things your girlfriend needs to hear you say". Briefly, the suggestions are: I'm proud of you, I love being with you, thank you, can I help you, I missed you, have fun, you look beautiful, you can do it, I'm sorry, and please. These are all perfect examples of confirmation and "cherishing behaviors" and should help make concepts that are often overly abstract, more concrete and useful. Many are also good examples of politeness--another indication that politeness is an essential component of interpersonal communication, though ignored in many of our textbooks.
http://www.bestdatingsites.org/blog/2011/10-things-your-girlfriend-needs-to-hear-you-say/