| Abstracting | The process of selective perception whereby we formulate increasingly vague conceptions of our world by leaving out details associated with objects, events, and ideas.
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| Accommodating style | Yielding to the needs and desires of others during a conflict.
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| Ad hominem fallacy | A personal attack on the messenger to avoid the message.
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| Ad populum fallacy | Basing a claim on popular opinion.
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| Advising response | Listeners telling individuals how they should act.
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| Agenda-setting function | The news media telling us not so much what to think but what to think about.
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| Alliteration | The repetition of the same sound, usually a consonant sound, starting several words in a sentence.
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| Ambushing | When we listen for weaknesses and ignore strengths of a speaker's message.
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| Analogy | Alleges that two things that resemble each other in certain ways also resemble each other in further ways as well.
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| Anchor attitude | A preexisting attitude on an issue that serves as a reference point for how close or distant other attitudes and positions are.
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| Antithesis | A stylistic device that uses opposites to create impact.
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| Appropriateness | The avoidance of violating social or interpersonal norms, rules, or expectations.
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| Assertiveness | The ability to communicate the full range of thoughts and emotions with confidence and skill.
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| Assimilation | The absorption of one group's culture into the dominant culture.
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| Attention | Focused awareness on a stimulus at a given moment.
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| Attitude | A learned predisposition to respond favorably or unfavorably toward some attitude object.
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| Attribution | Assigning a cause, either situations or personal characteristics, to people's behavior.
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| Avoiding | Sidestepping or ignoring conflict.
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| Behavioral interviewing | Interviewers ask for specific examples of behavior by an applicant that illustrate an answer given to a question.
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| Belief | What we think is true or probable.
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| Bilateral symmetry | The right and left sides of the human body match; eyes are straight across from each, not one higher than the other, and so forth.
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| Brainstorming | The creative problem-solving process characterized by encouragement of even zany ideas, freedom from initial evaluation of potential solutions, and energetic participation by all group members.
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| Breadth (of self-disclosure) | The range of subjects discussed.
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| Burden of proof | The obligation of the claimant to support a claim with evidence and reasoning; whoever makes the claim has the burden to prove it.
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| Central idea (of a speech) | Identifies the main concept, point, issue, or conclusion that a speaker wants an audience to understand, believe, feel, or do.
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| Channel | Medium through which a message travels, such as oral or written.
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| Charisma | Constellation of personal attributes that people find attractive and that they accord influence to a person perceived to have such attributes.
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| Chilling effect | A person low in power avoids discussing issues with another person higher in power from fear of an abusive response.
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| Claim | A generalization that requires support.
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| Closedness | An unwillingness to communicate with others.
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| Coalitions | Temporary alliances formed by individuals to enhance their power relative to others.
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| Co-culture | A group of people who live in a dominant culture yet remain connected to another cultural heritage that typically exhibits significant differences in communication patterns, perceptions, values, beliefs, and rituals from the dominant culture.
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| Cognitive dissonance | The unpleasant feeling produced by seemingly inconsistent thoughts.
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| Cohesiveness | The degree of liking we have for members of a group, and the level of commitment to the group that this liking produces.
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| Cohesiveness | The degree to which members identify with a group and wish to remain in the group.
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| Collaborating | Style of conflict management in which parties work together to maximize the attainment of goals for all involved in the conflict.
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| Collectivist culture | A culture that has a "we" consciousness; individuals see themselves as being closely linked to one or more groups and are primarily motivated by the norms and duties imposed by these groups.
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| Commitment | A conscious decision to invest time and energy in improving our communication with others.
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| Common couple violence | The occasional violence that arises out of strong reactions to the escalation of a particular disagreement.
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| Communication | A transactional process of sharing meaning with others.
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| Communication climate | The emotional atmosphere, the pervading or enveloping tone that we create, by the way we communicate with others.
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| Communication competence | Communicating effectively and appropriately in a given context.
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| Communication orientation | Public speakers focusing on making their message clear and interesting to listeners.
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| Communication skill | The successful performance of a communication behavior and the ability to repeat such a behavior.
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| Communication style of conflict management | A typical way an individual addresses a conflict.
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| Competence (of speaker) | An audience's perception of a speaker's knowledge and experience on a topic.
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| Competition (MEGA) | Mutually exclusive goal attainment; for you to win others must lose.
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| Competitive interrupting | When we dominate the conversation by seizing the floor from others who are speaking.
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| Composure | A speaker's emotional stability, confidence, and degree of control over himself or herself when under stress.
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| Comprehension | Shared meaning between and among parties in a transaction.
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| Compromising | Attempting to resolve a conflict by giving up something to get something in return.
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| Confirmation bias | The psychological tendency to look for and listen to information that supports our beliefs and values and to ignore or distort information that contradicts our beliefs and values.
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| Conflict | The expressed struggle of interconnected parties who perceive incompatible goals and interference from one or more parties in attaining those goals.
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| Conformity | The inclination of group members to think and behave in ways that are consistent with group norms.
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| Confrontation | A strategy of the collaborating style of conflict management in which there is an overt recognition of a conflict and a direct effort is made to find creative ways to satisfy all parties in the conflict.
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| Connecting bid | An attempt to engage another person in a positive transaction, sometimes at a deep and enduring level and other times at a superficial and fleeting level.
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| Connection-autonomy dialectic | The desire to come together with another person (connection) yet remain apart, independent, and in control of one's own life (autonomy).
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| Connotation | The volatile, personal, subjective meaning of words composed of three dimensions: evaluation, potency, and activity.
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| Consensus | A state of mutual agreement among members of a group in which all legitimate concerns of individuals have been addressed to the satisfaction of the group.
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| Constructive conflict | Conflict that is characterized by We-orientation, de-escalation, cooperation, and flexibility.
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| Content dimension (of messages) | What is actually said and done.
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| Content-only response | Focuses on the content of a message, but ignores the emotional side of communication.
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| Context | The environment in which communication occurs; the who, what, where, when, why, and how of communication.
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| Continuous changes | Extensions of previous decisions of a group.
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| Contrast effect | A persuasive strategy that begins with a large request that makes a smaller request seem more palatable.
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| Conventionality-uniqueness dialectic | Wanting your relationship to be perceived by others as the same yet different from other relationships.
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| Convergence | Similarities that connect us to others.
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| Conversational narcissism | The tendency of listeners to turn the topics of ordinary conversation to themselves without showing sustained interest in others' topics.
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| Cooperation (MIGA) | Mutually inclusive goal attainment; for you to achieve your goals others must also achieve their goals.
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| Cooperative argumentation | Engaging in a process of deliberation with understanding and problem solving as ultimate goals.
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| Correlation | A consistent relationship between two variables.
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| Counterpersuasion | Attacks from an opposing side on an issue of controversy.
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| Credibility (of evidence) | Believability of supporting materials determined by its trustworthiness and reliability.
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| Credibility (of speaker) | Judgments made by listeners concerning the believability of a communicator.
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| Critical listening | The process of evaluating the merits of claims as they are heard.
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| Cultural relativism | The view that cultures are merely different, not deficient, and each culture's norms and practices should be assessed only from the perspective of the culture itself, not by standards embraced by another culture.
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| Culture | A learned set of shared interpretations about beliefs, values, and norms, which affect the behaviors of a relatively large group of people.
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| Culture shock | The anxiety that comes from the unfamiliarity of new cultural surroundings, rules, norms, and practices.
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| Cynics | Those who unthinkingly mock, ridicule, and tear down other people and their ideas.
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| Dead-level abstracting | The practice of freezing on one level of abstraction (getting stuck using mostly very vague or very concrete words).
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| Defensiveness | A protective reaction to a perceived attack on our self-esteem and self-concept.
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| Defiance | Unambiguous, overt, purposeful noncompliance with the dictates of others who exercise greater power.
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| Demographics | Characteristic of an audience such as age, gender, culture, ethnicity, and group affiliations.
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| Denotation | The socially agreed upon meaning of words; it is the meaning shared by members of a speech community.
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| Depth (of self-disclosure) | How personal you become when discussing a particular subject that reveals something about yourself.
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| Description | Verbal reports that sketch what we perceive from our senses.
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| Descriptivists | Linguists who describe how language is used, not how it should be used, and identify rules for using a language effectively as a tool of communication.
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| Destructive conflict | Conflict that is characterized by escalation, retaliation, domination, competition, cross-complaining, defensiveness, and inflexibility.
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| Dialectics | Impulses that push and pull us in opposite directions simultaneously within our relationships with others.
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| Directive Style (of leadership) | Leaders tell group members what to do and they expect compliance.
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| Directory | An Internet tool in which humans edit indexes of Web pages that match, or link with, key words typed in a search window.
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| Discontinuous change decisions | Major changes that depart significantly from the direction a team is taking currently.
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| Displacement | The human ability to use language to talk about objects, ideas, events, and relations that don't just exist in the here and now and may not exist at all except in our minds.
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| Display rules | Culture-specific prescriptions that dictate appropriateness of behaviors.
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| Divergence | Differences that separate people.
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| Dogmatism | The belief in the self-evident truth of one's opinion.
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| Dominance | The exercise of power over others.
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| Door-in-the-face strategy | A version of the contrast effect.
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| Downward communication | Messages that flow from superordinates to subordinates in a hierarchical organization.
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| Dynamism | The enthusiasm and energy exhibited by a speaker.
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| Dysfunctional speech anxiety | When the intensity of the fight or flight response prevents an individual from performing a speech appropriately and effectively.
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| Effectiveness | How well an individual progresses toward the achievement of his or her goal.
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| Elaboration Likelihood Model (of persuasion) | Theory of how persuasion works positing two routes to persuasion -- the central route that requires mindfulness and the peripheral route that is relatively mindless.
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| Emblem | A gesture that has a precise meaning separate from verbal communication and is usually recognized across an entire culture or co-culture, sometimes even across cultures.
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| Empathic listening | Requires listeners to take the perspective of the other person and to listen for what that person needs.
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| Empathy | Thinking and feeling what you perceive another to be thinking and feeling.
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| Empowerment | Power derived from enhancing the capabilities and influence of individuals and groups.
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| Equivocation | Using language that permits more than one plausible meaning, often as a substitute for outright lying.
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| Ethics (in communication) | Set of standards for judging the moral correctness of communication behavior.
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| Ethnocentrism | The notion that one's own culture is superior to any other. It is the idea that other cultures should be measured by the degree to which they live up to one's own cultural standards.
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| Ethos | Aristotle's version of credibility characterized by "good sense, good moral character, and good will" of the speaker.
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| Euphemism | Form of linguistic Novocain whereby word choices numb us to or camouflage unpleasant or offensive realities.
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| Evaluations | Value judgments made about individuals and about their performance exhibited as praise, recognition, admiration, criticism, contempt, or blame.
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| Evaluative response | A judgment by a listener about a person's conduct.
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| Explicit norms | Norms that specifically and overtly identify acceptable and unacceptable behavior in groups.
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| Extemporaneous speech | A speech delivered from a prepared outline or notes.
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| Facial feedback hypothesis | Facial expressions can influence emotions.
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| Fallacies | Errors in evidence and reasoning.
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| Feedback | The receiver's verbal and nonverbal responses to a message.
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| Feminine culture | A culture that exhibits stereotypic feminine traits such as affection, nurturance, sensitivity, compassion, and emotional expressiveness.
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| Fields of experience | Cultural background, ethnicity, geographic location, extent of travel, and general personal experiences accumulated over the course of a lifetime that influence messages.
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| Flaming | A cyberterm for an abusive, attacking e-mailed message.
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| Flooding | When you can no longer think clearly because conflict triggers intense emotional reactions.
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| Forgiveness | Letting go of feelings of revenge and desires to retaliate.
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| Formal roles | Assigned positions usually in an organizational structure.
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| Framing | The influence wording has on our perception of choices.
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| Friendship-warmth touch | Touch communication that can be ambiguous but is intended to express friendship between people.
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| Functional speech anxiety | When the fight or flight response is managed and stimulates an optimum speech presentation.
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| Functional-professional touch | Instrumental touch communication that is limited to the requirements of the situation.
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| Fundamental attribution error | Overemphasizing personal characteristics and underemphasizing situational causes of other people's behavior.
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| Gender | Socially constructed learned feminine and masculine role characteristics and behavior derived from communicating with others.
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| General purpose (of speech) | Identifies the overall goal of a speech (to inform, describe, explain, demonstrate, persuade, celebrate, memorialize, entertain, or eulogize).
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| Glazing over | When listeners' attention wanders and daydreaming or sleeping occurs.
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| Group | Three or more individuals, interacting for the achievement of some common purpose(s), who influence and are influenced by one another.
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| Groupthink | An ineffective process of group decision-making in which members excessively emphasize cohesiveness and agreement instead of skepticism and optimum decision-making.
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| Hasty generalization | A broad claim based on too few or unrepresentative examples.
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| Hearing | The physiological process of registering sound waves as they hit the eardrums.
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| Hierarchy | The rank ordering of members of an organization.
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| High power-distance cultures | Cultures with a relatively strong emphasis on maintaining power differences.
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| High-context communication style | Indirect verbal expression; significant information is derived from contextual cues, such as relationships, situations, setting, and time; typically found in collectivist cultures.
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| Hindsight bias | The tendency to look back after a fact or outcome has been revealed and say to yourself, "I knew that all along."
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| Horizontal communication | Messages that flow between individuals with equal power in organizations.
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| Hostile environment sexual harassment | Insult, ridicule, humor, or intimidation of a sexual nature that makes the work environment an unpleasant, even threatening place to remain.
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| Hyperbole | Exaggeration for effect that is not meant to be taken literally.
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| Hypercompetitiveness | The excessive emphasis on beating others to achieve one's goals.
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| Hypothetical examples | Instances that describe an imaginary situation, one that is concocted to make a point, illustrate an idea, or identify a general principle.
Identification (in persuasion) The affiliation and connection between speaker and listeners.
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| Illustrators | Gestures that help explain what one person says to another person.
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| Implicit norms | Observable patterns of behavior exhibited by group members that identify acceptable and unacceptable conduct.
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| Impromptu speech | A speech delivered off the cuff without notes.
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| Inclusion-seclusion dialectic | The desire to spend time alone with one's partner and also spend time together with others outside of the relationship.
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| Individual achievement | The realization of personal goals without having to defeat an opponent.
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| Individualist culture | A culture with an "I" consciousness; individuals see themselves as loosely linked to each other and largely independent of group identification.
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| Inferences | Statements or generalizations about the unknown based on the known.
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| Inferential error | A mistaken conclusion that results from the assumption that inferences are factual descriptions of reality instead of interpretations of varying accuracy made by individuals.
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| Informal roles | Roles that identify functions not positions; they usually emerge naturally from group transactions.
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| Information bulimia | Cramming information into short-term memory.
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| Informational listening | Listening for comprehension of a speaker's message.
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| Integration | A collaborating strategy that finds alternatives that meet the goals of all parties in a conflict.
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| Intensity | Concentrated stimuli; an extreme degree of emotion, thought, or activity.
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| Interdependence | When all parties rely on each other to achieve goals.
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| Internal summary | Restates a key point or points of a speech in the body of the speech.
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| Interpersonal communication | Dyadic communication; a transaction that takes place between two people.
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| Interpersonal relationship | A connection two people have to each other because of an association (brother-sister), an attraction (friends), or a power distribution (boss-employee).
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| Interpreting response | A listener expressing what he or she thinks is the underlying meaning of a situation presented by another person.
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| Interrupting | When one person stops speaking when another person starts speaking.
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| Interviewing | A purposeful, planned conversation, characterized by extensive verbal interaction.
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| Intimacy | The feeling of closeness in a relationship; the degree to which a person can share feelings freely with another person.
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| Jargon | The specialized language of a profession, trade, or group.
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| Judgments | Subjective evaluations of objects, events, or ideas.
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| Knowledge | An understanding of what is required by a communication context to be effective and appropriate.
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| Language | A structured system of symbols for communicating meaning.
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| Latitude of acceptance | Positions a person finds acceptable or at least tolerable.
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| Latitude of noncommitment | Positions that provoke only a neutral or ambivalent response from individuals.
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| Latitude of rejection | Those positions people find objectionable because they are too far from their anchor attitude.
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| Leadership | A transactional influence process whose principle purpose is group goal achievement produced by competent communication.
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| Legitimate authority | Someone who is perceived to have a right to direct others' behavior because of his or her position, title, role, experience, or knowledge.
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| Lexicon | The total vocabulary of a language.
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| Linguistic determinism | The claim that we are prisoners of our native language, unable to think certain thoughts or perceive in certain ways because of the grammatical structure and lexicon of our language.
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| Linguistic relativity | The claim that the grammar and lexicon of our native language powerfully influences but does not imprison our thinking and perception.
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| Listening | The process of receiving, constructing and reconstructing meaning from, and responding to spoken and/or nonverbal messages.
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| Logos | Aristotle's conception of building arguments based on logic and evidence.
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| Love and intimacy touch | Touch that is reserved for a very few, special individuals, that is not sexual but does express tenderness between individuals.
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| Low power-distance cultures | Cultures with a relatively weak emphasis on maintaining power differences.
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| Low-context communication style | Verbally precise, direct, and explicit method of communicating usually found in individualistic cultures.
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| Manipulative communication | An attempt by one person to maneuver another toward the manipulator's goal.
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| Manipulators | Gestures with no particular meaning made by one part of the body, usually the hands, that rub, pick, squeeze, clean, or groom another part of the body.
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| Masculine culture | A culture that exhibits stereotypic masculine traits such as male dominance, ambitiousness, assertiveness, competitiveness, and drive for achievement.
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| Masculine-generic gender references | The use of masculine nouns and pronouns to include references to both women and men.
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| Meaning | The conscious pattern humans create out of their interpretation of experience; making sense of our world.
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| Message | Stimulus that produces meaning.
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| Metaphor | An implied comparison of two seemingly dissimilar things.
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| Metasearch engine | An Internet tool that will send your keyword request to several search engines at once.
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| Mindful | Thinking about our communication with others and continually working at changing what we do to become more effective.
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| Mindless | Not being cognizant of our communication with others and putting little or no effort into improving it.
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| Misattribution | An attribution about the reason for an event given by a foreigner that differs from that typically given by a member of the host culture.
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| Mixed messages | Inconsistencies or outright contradictions between verbal and nonverbal messages.
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| Mixed metaphor | The use of two or more vastly different metaphors in a single expression.
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| Morpheme | The smallest unit of meaning in a language.
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| Multiculturalism | Social-intellectual movement that promotes the value of diversity as a core principle and insists that all cultural groups be treated with respect and as equals.
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| Murphy's Law | The assertion that anything that can go wrong likely will go wrong.
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| Muscle dysmorphia | A preoccupation with one's body size and a perception that, though very muscular, one actually looks puny.
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| Myth | A belief that is contradicted by fact.
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| Negative synergy | The product of joint action of group members that produces a result worse than that expected based on perceived individual abilities and skills of members.
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| Negativity bias | A strong tendency to weigh negative information more heavily than positive information, especially when forming perceptions of others.
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| Netiquette | Etiquette (rules of proper conduct) when using the Internet.
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| Neutralizing | A strategy to manage dialectics in which a compromise is struck between opposing impulses by partially satisfying both impulses.
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| Niches | Specialized segments of an audience.
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| Noise | Any interference with effective transmission and reception of messages.
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| Nominal group technique | Creative problem-solving method in which team members work alone to generate ideas, those ideas are announced to the group, and team members' ranking of ideas result in the group's top preferences.
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| Nonverbal communication | Sharing meaning with others nonlinguistically.
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| Norms | The rules that indicate what group members have to do (obligation), should do (preference), and cannot do (prohibition) if they want to accomplish specific goals.
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| Onomatopoeic words | Those words that imitate sounds such as bang and awchoo.
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| Openness | A willingness to communicate.
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| Openness-closedness dialectic | The tension in relationships between accessibility and privacy.
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| Operational definition | Specifies measurable behaviors or experiences that indicate what a word means to the user.
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| Organizational culture | A particular way of doing things, certain shared values, and specific ways members talk about their organization.
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| Participative style (of leadership) | Leaders encourage all group members to engage meaningfully in discussions and decision-making.
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| Pathos | Aristotle's conception of emotional appeals used for persuasion.
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| Pattern recognition | The process of piecing together seemingly unrelated information into a plan, design, or whole picture.
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| Perception | The process of selecting, organizing, and interpreting data from our senses.
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| Perceptual set | A mental predisposition to perceive a stimulus in a fixed way as the result of an expectation.
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| Performance orientation | Public speakers focusing on the do's and don'ts of giving a speech.
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| Personal relationship | A close connection between two people that is characterized by strong emotional bonding and commitment.
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| Persuasion | A communication process of converting, modifying, or maintaining the attitudes, beliefs, or behavior of others.
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| Phonemes | The individual sounds that compose a specific spoken language.
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| Physical noise | External, environmental distractions, such as startling sounds, poorly heated rooms, and the like that divert our attention from the message sent by a source.
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| Physiological noise | Biological influences such as sweaty palms, pounding heart, and butterflies in the stomach induced by speech anxiety, or feeling sick or exhausted at work that interfere with sending and receiving messages.
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| Power | The ability to influence the attainment of goals sought by oneself or others.
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| Power resource | Anything that enables individuals to achieve their goals, assist others to achieve their goals, or interferes with the goal attainment of others.
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| Power-distance dimension | Cultural variations in the acceptability of unequal distribution of power in relationships, institutions, and organizations.
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| Predictability-novelty dialectic | The desire for both stability and change within a relationship.
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| Prescriptivism | The perspective that tells us that we should unerringly follow standardized rules for the dominant language of a culture.
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| Prevention | Power used to thwart the influence of others.
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| Primacy effect | The tendency to perceive information presented first as more important than information presented later.
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| Principle of least interest | The person who cares less about continuing a relationship usually has more power.
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| Probing response | A listener seeking more information from others by asking questions.
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| Productivity (in language) | The capacity of language to transform a small number of phonemes into whatever words, phrases, and sentences that we require to communicate our abundance of thoughts, ideas, and feelings.
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| Productivity (in groups) | The degree to which a group accomplishes its work efficiently and effectively.
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| Proposition | The primary overriding claim for a persuasive speech.
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| Proposition of fact | The primary overriding claim in a persuasive speech that alleges a truth.
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| Proposition of policy | The primary overriding claim in a persuasive speech that calls for a significant change from how problems are currently handled.
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| Proposition of value | A primary overriding claim in a persuasive speech that calls for a judgment that assesses the worth or merit of an idea, object, or practice.
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| Prototype | The most representative or "best" example of something.
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| Provisionalism | Qualifying our statements with words such as possibly, probably, perhaps, maybe, and could be, and avoiding absolutes such as always, never, must, can't and won't.
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| Pseudolistening | When someone pretends to listen.
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| Psychological noise | Preconceptions, biases, and assumptions that interfere with effective message transmission and reception.
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| Psychological reactance | The more someone tries to control our behavior and restrict our choices, the more we are inclined to resist such efforts, even do the opposite behavior.
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| Quality circles | Teams composed of employees in an organization who volunteer to work on a similar task and attempt to solve a particular problem.
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| Quid pro quo sexual harassment | When the more powerful person requires sexual favors usually from the less powerful individual in exchange for keeping a job, getting a high grade in a class, landing an employment promotion, and the like.
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| Random sample | Portion of the population chosen in such a manner that every member of the entire population has an equal chance of being selected.
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| Readiness | The ability of group members, their motivation, and their experience with relevant tasks that make them suitable for assuming greater responsibility for decision-making and problem solving.
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| Real examples | Actual occurrences used to illustrate an idea, make a point, or identify a general principle.
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| Re-bid | An attempt to connect with another person after an initial bid has been ignored.
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| Receiver | Decoder of messages.
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| Recency effect | The tendency to evaluate others on the basis of the most recent information or evidence available.
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| Referents | The objects, events, ideas, or relationships referred to by words.
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| Reframing (dialectics) | A strategy for managing dialectics in which two seemingly contradictory impulses are viewed from a new and different frame of reference.
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| Reframing (problem-solving technique) | The creative process of breaking rigid thinking by placing a problem in a different frame of reference.
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| Refutation | The process of answering opposing arguments in a debate or disagreement.
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| Relationship dimension (of messages) | How the message defines or redefines the association between individuals.
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| Relevance (of evidence) | Supporting evidence must relate directly to the claim made.
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| Resistance | Covert, ambiguous noncompliance with the dictates of more powerful individuals.
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| Revelation-concealment dialectic | The dilemma you face when wanting to share information about your relationship with another person with those outside the relationship yet also wanting to conceal the relationship for various reasons.
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| Rhetorical question | A question asked by a speaker that the audience answers mentally, but not out loud.
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| Role fixation | Playing a group role rigidly with little or no inclination to try other roles.
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| Roles | Patterns of behavior that group members are expected to exhibit.
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| Rule | A followable prescription that indicates what behavior is obligated, preferred, or prohibited in certain contexts.
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| Sapir-Whort hypothesis | A claim that we are either prisoners of our native language, unable to think certain thoughts or perceive in certain ways (linguistic determinism), or that our language powerfully influences but does not imprison our thinking and perceptions (linguistic relativity).
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| Schemas | Mental frameworks that create meaningful patterns from stimuli.
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| Script | A predictable sequence of events that indicates what we are expected to do in a given situation.
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| Search engine | An Internet tool that computer generates indexes of Web pages that match, or link with, key words typed in a search window.
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| Segmenting | A strategy to manage dialectics in which certain parts of a relationship are divided into separate domains and some of these domains are declared off limits.
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| Selecting | A strategy for managing dialectics in which one contradictory impulse is given attention and another is ignored.
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| Selective memory bias | The tendency to remember information that supports our stereotypes but to forget information that contradicts them.
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| Self-concept | The sum total of everything that encompasses the self-referential term "me"; your identity or self-perception.
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| Self-disclosure | The process of purposely revealing to others information about ourselves that they otherwise would not know.
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| Self-esteem | The evaluative element of self-perception; self-appraisal or your perception of self-worth, attractiveness, and social competence.
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| Self-managed work teams | Self-regulating groups in organizations that complete an entire task.
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| Self-reflexiveness | The ability to use language to talk about language.
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| Self-selected sample | Individuals, usually the most committed, aroused, or motivated, choose themselves to participate in a survey, poll, or study.
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| Self-serving bias | The tendency to attribute our successful behavior to ourselves (personal traits) but to assign external circumstances (situations) to our unsuccessful behavior.
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| Semantic noise | Word choice that is confusing or distracting that interferes with accurate message transmission and reception.
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| Semantic reaction | A delayed, thoughtful response to language that seeks to decipher the users' intended meaning of a word.
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| Sender | Initiator and encoder of messages.
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| Sensitivity | Receptive accuracy whereby we can detect, decode, and comprehend signals in our social environment.
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| Sensory acuity | The level of sensitivity of our senses.
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| Sex | Biological differences between males and females.
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| Sexual touch | Intimate touch between individuals.
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| Shift response | A competitive vying for attention and focus on self by shifting topics.
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| Signal reaction | An automatic, conditioned response to a symbol (usually a word).
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| Signposts | Organizational markers for a speech that indicate the structure of a speech and notify listeners that a particular point is about to be addressed.
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| Simile | An explicit comparison of two seemingly dissimilar things using the words like or as.
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| Skepticism | The process of listening to claims, evaluating evidence and reasoning supporting those claims, and drawing conclusions based on probabilities.
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| Smoothing | A collaborative strategy that attempts to calm the agitated feelings of those involved in a conflict.
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| Social dimension (of groups) | Relationships between group members and the impact these relationships have on the group.
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| Social judgment theory | A theory of persuasion that focuses on how close or distant an audience's position on a controversial issue is from its anchor attitude.
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| Social loafing | The tendency of individuals to reduce their work effort when they join groups.
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| Social-polite touch | Touch communication that occurs during initial introductions, business relationships, and formal occasions.
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| Spamming | Sending unsolicited e-mail, especially advertisements for products or activities.
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| Specific purpose statement (of speech) | A concise, precise declaration composed of simple, clear language that encompasses both the general purpose and the central idea of a speech and indicates what the speaker hopes to accomplish with the speech.
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| Speech anxiety | Those situations when an individual reports that he or she is afraid to deliver a speech.
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| Standardization | A set of formal rules dictated by a dominant culture governing how everyone, even members of co-cultures, ought to speak and write a language, especially in formal situations.
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| Stereotype | A generalization about a group or category of people.
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| Stonewalling | A form of the avoiding style of conflict management exhibited by refusing to discuss problems or by physically leaving when one person is complaining, disagreeing, or attacking the other person.
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| Style (of speaking) | Words chosen to express your thoughts and the ways you use language to bring your thoughts to life for an audience.
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| Style shifting (language) | Using language flexibly to suit the context.
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| Stylistic similarity | An identification strategy of persuasion in which a speaker attempts to look and act similarly to his or her audience.
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| Substantive similarity | An identification strategy of persuasion in which a speaker tries to establish common ground between the speaker and his or her audience.
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| Support response | A cooperative effort to focus attention on the other person, not oneself during conversation.
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| Supporting response | Acknowledges the feelings of the speaker and tries to boost the person's confidence.
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| Supportiveness | A confirmation of the worth and value of others and a willingness to help others be successful.
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| Synergy | By individuals working together as a group, the work of group members yields a greater total effect than the sum of the individual members' efforts could have produced.
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| Syntax | The rules that govern appropriate combinations of words into sentences.
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| Systematic desensitization | A technique used to control speech anxiety involving incremental exposure to increasingly threatening stimuli coupled with relaxation techniques.
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| Task dimension (of groups) | The work performed by a group and its impact on the group.
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| Team | A small number of people with complementary skills who are equally committed to a common purpose, goals, and working approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.
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| Teamwork | The process of members exercising competent communication within the framework of teams.
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| Technology | A tool to accomplish some purpose.
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| Territoriality | A predisposition to defend a fixed geographic area, or territory, as one's exclusive domain.
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| Traits | Relatively enduring characteristics of a person that highlight differences between people and are displayed in most situations.
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| Triangular Theory of Love | The interaction among three elements of love -- intimacy, passion, and commitment -- that determines seven different types of love between people.
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| True believers | Those who willingly accept claims by authorities or valued sources without question, and protect beliefs based on these claims by embracing confirmation bias.
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| Trustworthiness | How truthful or honest an audience perceives a speaker to be.
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| Turning against response | An overtly negative rejection of a connecting bid.
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| Turning away response | Ignoring a connecting bid or acting preoccupied when a bid is offered.
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| Turning points (in relationships) | Key moments that move a relationship forward, such as sharing an interest, disclosing a personal secret, or lending something important.
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| Turning toward response | Reacting positively to a connecting bid.
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| Understanding response | A listener checking his or her perceptions for comprehension of the speaker's message or paraphrasing the message to check for accuracy.
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| Upward communication | Messages that flow from subordinates to superordinates in an organization.
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| Values | The most deeply felt, generally shared views of what is deemed good, right, or worthwhile behavior or thinking.
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| Variable | Anything that can change.
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| Virtual library | An Internet search tool that combines Internet technology and standard library techniques for cataloguing and appraising information.
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| Vividness effect | When graphic, outrageous, shocking, controversial, and dramatic events distort our perceptions of the facts, and we listen to the dramatic example and conclude that we have problems wholly out of proportion to the facts.
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| Vocal fillers | The insertion of uhm, ah, like, you know, know what I mean, whatever and additional variants that substitute for pauses when speaking and often draw attention to themselves.
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