Examines compliance-gaining strategies among undergraduate students. Finds that friends comply more with requests than strangers and that their compliance is constant across message types. Notes that among strangers, the pregiving message produced more compliance than the direct request. (SR)

Demonstrates that conversation occurs so quickly and yet so skillfully that neither current cognitive models for mindfulness or mindlessness can account for it. (SR)

Presents Information Manipulation Theory to describe the different ways that information can be manipulated in the production of deceptive messages. Suggests that deceptive messages covertly violate principles governing conversational exchanges regarding quantity, quality, manner, and relevance of information that should be presented. (SR)

Tests Information Manipulation Theory by evaluating messages for perceived deceptiveness and competence. Finds that manipulations of amount, veracity, relevance, and clarity of information all significantly influence perceived message deceptiveness and perceived message competence. (SR)

Responds to an article in an earlier issue of this journal. Discusses the state of theorizing in the field of organizational communication. (SR)

Discusses how weekly supermarket tabloids report and write their stories, the relationship tabloid writing has to "straight" journalistic practice, and how tabloid writers relate to such journalistic tenets as objectivity and credibility. Finds that tabloid journalism belongs on the same storytelling continuum as daily newspaper…

Delimits the pedagogical usefulness of the question "What is communication?" Shows that it leads students to a reductionist or essentialist mode of thinking that impedes rather than fosters appreciation of the complexity and heterogeneity of communicative events. Maintains that communication can be analyzed and improved without reducing it to a…

Investigates how mode of imagery affects imagined interactions and the relationship between affective processing and imagined interaction. Shows that (1) verbal imagery is associated with self-dominance, rehearsal, and understanding whereas visual imagery is associated with more pleasantness; and (2) pleasant imagined interactions are lower in…

Finds that people with external locus of control found communication to be less rewarding and less satisfying, tended to avoid communication, and were motivated to communicate more ritualistically than internals. (SR)

Analyzes research productivity of communication studies faculty to provide a yardstick for gauging productivity. Finds that a "productive" currently active scholar is one who has published six or more times (were in the top 5% of all publishers) in journals listed in the Speech Communication Association "Index to Journals in Communication Studies…

Challenges an ideology hidden within the history of rhetoric that privileges one form of the art over another--one approach moves outward toward the social world of public affairs, the other inward toward the center of the human soul. Recounts several "moments" in the creation, repression, and eventual recovery of a rhetoric of the…

Investigates differences in comforting behavior that are associated with dimensions of empathy and exposure to film. Finds that fictional involvement and empathic concern were important predictors of comforting behavior and that, after accounting for the influence of these dimensions of empathy, film condition explained further differences in…

Provides an overview of work on cultural studies in Latin America, which is virtually unknown outside the continent and has only recently begun to be translated into English. Concludes that this new work often seems to be less politically engaged than Latin American critical communications research of the 1970s. (RS)

Finds that people with communication apprehension (CA) who were exposed to visualization reported lower trait and state CA as well as higher attraction levels than those in control or placebo conditions. (SR)

Outlines the elements of the human rhetorical potential, arguing for a psychologically plausible theory of meaning. Examines recent work in cognitive neural science to see if the human rhetorical potential is biologically, or neurologically, plausible. Suggests further research on the human rhetorical potential as it relates to discourse…