Verbal behavior of interviewees: The effects of several situational variables on verbal productivity, disfluency, and lexical diversity

Language in Psychotherapy

“…Sixteen studies have concerned the relationship of this measure and transient anxiety in the speaker. Twelve of them confirmed our findings, either as main or interaction effects (Blass & Siegman, 1975;Blumenthal, 1964;Boomer, 1963;Bradac, Konsky, & Elliott, 1976;Brady & Walker, 1978 [2 experiments];Cook, 1969;Feldstein, Brenner, & Jaffe, 1963;Musumeci, 1975;Pope, Blass, Siegman, & Raher, 1970;Siegman & Pope, 1965). One study was inconclusive (Boomer & Goodrich, 1961), and three failed to obtain positive results (Geer, 1966;Meisels, 1967;Reynolds & Paivio, 1968).…”

Three Language Variables in Communication Research: Intensity, Immediacy, and Diversity

“…Since the nonapprehensive subjects produced longer messages, this methodological lapse would have worked against the prediction expressed in Generalization 20. Nevertheless, we offer the generalization somewhat tentatively, for some evidence indicates that communicators who habitually use high diversity actually increase on that variable under moderate stress (Bradac, Konsky, & Elliott, 1976). This qualifying result is predicted by Hull-Spence drive theory (Hull, 1943;Spence, 1956) and by social facilitation theory (Zajonc, 1965), both of which assert that arousal facilitates the production of habitual responses.…”

“…Anticipating a hostile audience should have put subjects in a state of cognitive stress on the basis of evaluation apprehension (cf. Bradac, Konsky, & Elliott, 1976). Furthermore, persons (presumably unstressed) encoding belief-congruent messages use more intense language than do persons (presumably stressed) encoding belief-discrepant messages (Burgoon & Miller, 1971).…”

Threats to generalization in the use of elicited, purloined, and contrived messages in human communication research

“…Researchers attempting to produce messages which exhibit properties of theoretical interest may intentionally create products which are highly unusual (Jackson & Jacobs, 1983). For example, although it might be important to compare messages exhibiting very high and very low levels of lexical diversity to get a clear picture of the effects of this variable, it may be the case that such extreme diversity levels are exhibited rarely by communicators in everyday life (Bradac, Desmond, & Murdock, 1977;Bradac, Konsky, & Elliott, 1976). In such a case generalizations could be made to this unusual population of messages only.…”

“…For various purposes researchers create situations in which persons respond verbally and non-verbally to researcher-controlled stimuli, e.g., questions (Bradac, Konsky, & Elliott, 1976) or pictures (Mulac & Lundell, 1980). Responses are then content analyzed, subjected to linguistic analysis, evaluated, etc.…”