Introduction
Strong emotions and feelings have a great impact on the communication styles of belaboring of people. Communication apprehension and its close category, social anxiety, are negatively related to the use of various affinity-seeking strategies that included active communication (e.g., assuming control, dynamism) while positively related to more passive strategies such as conceding control. When affinity seeking is conceptualized as a dispositional tendency, there is an inverse relationship between apprehension and the tendency to seek affinity. This pattern is reflected in related variables such as loneliness, assertiveness, and interaction involvement.
Description of Emotions
When young people are frightened and anxious they are uneasy, they experience tension, worried, or apprehension about what might happen. It is an effective (e.g., emotional) response, not a cognitive response like uncertainty. While uncertainty results from an inability to predict others’ behavior, “anxiety stems from the anticipation of negative consequences. People fear at least four types of negative consequences: psychological or behavioral consequences for the self, and negative evaluations by members of the outgroup and the ingroup” (Stephan & Stephan, 1985, p. 159 Vangelisti 2004, p. 34). When young people are frightened and anxious they tend to use conflict styles of communication. Conflict styles tend to be reciprocal for fairly obvious reasons. Generally, inconsistent styles do not fit together comfortably. It is more difficult and less plausible to deny the presence of conflict, for example, after the partner has disclosed deep-seated feelings of anxiety and fear. There are also straightforward effective linkages between some styles. Compliments provoke positive feelings and lead to return compliments (Aggleton et al 2000).
One of the most widely held assumptions about fear is that it increases arousal and anxiety, which results in automatic changes in overt nonverbal displays. In actuality, fear is bound to differ dramatically, depending on such factors as (a) how serious the fear is, (b) how motivated the person is to avoid it, (c) how serious the consequences, and (d) whether the actor has had time to change the situation. Consequently, when anxiety and fear take place, leakage may be far less apparent and the fear may be far less likely to draw suspicion (Ferch, 2001). Moreover, internally experienced fear need not always yield overt indicators of it. To the extent that actors can monitor and exercise control over a communication channel, they may be able to suppress external manifestations of internal states. The degree of control should follow the leakage hierarchy identified earlier, with the least leakage occurring in the face and the most leakage occurring in the body and voice (Knobloch & Solomon 2003).
To manage the antagonistic response when experience fear and anxious feelings, individuals must understand the strategies they can use to effectively communicate and adapt their behavior when communicating with other people who are often viewed as “undesirable” people. Interacting with such people is a novel situation for most people. Novel situations are characterized by high levels of uncertainty and anxiety. Attempts to deal with the ambiguity of new situations involve a pattern of information seeking (uncertainty reduction) and tension (anxiety) reduction. When young people reduce uncertainty about others and themselves, understanding is possible. Understanding involves obtaining information, knowing, comprehending, and interpreting. Three levels of understanding can be differentiated: description, prediction, and explanation. Description involves specifying what is observed in terms of its physical attributes (i.e., drawing a picture in words) (Ferch, 2001). Prediction involves projecting what will happen in a particular situation, and explanation involves stating why something occurred. With this background, people isolate the major areas where mindfulness is necessary to communicate effectively, including interpreting the behavior of other people or situations, understanding expectations, making sense of behavior, adapting our language usage, and managing fear, uncertainty, and anxiety (Payne, 2001).
Many young couples between 17-18 years old display negative emotions and stupor while frightened. Anxiety, for example, can result from not meeting their needs for group inclusion, trust, security, and/or sustaining our self-concept. While avoiding anxiety is an important motivating factor in our communication with similar people, it is critical in communication with peers. Anxiety is largely a function of fear of negative consequences when young people interact with people who are different. As anxiety becomes high, the need for a sense of a commonly shared world and the need to sustain our self-conception become central (Payne, 2001). For most young people, fear and anxiety are based on the expectation of negative consequences.
Aggleton et al (2000) isolated three broad categories of antecedents to intergroup anxiety: prior intergroup relations, intergroup cognitions (e.g., stereotypes and intergroup attitudes), and situational factors. The important aspects of prior intergroup relations that influence the amount of intergroup anxiety young people experience when communicating with older people are the amount of contact they have had with the groups and the conditions under which that contact occurred. The more contact young people have had and the clearer the norms are for intergroup relations, the less intergroup anxiety they will experience. The less knowledge they have of communication and emotions display, the more anxiety they will experience. Negative cognitive expectations (i.e., negative stereotypes and prejudice) lead to fear.
In some cases, when people are frightened or anxious, they may experience loneliness and isolation. Vangelisti (2004) found positive relationships between assertiveness and respondents reports’ of their likelihood of using active affinity strategies such as assuming control, dynamism, and personal autonomy while finding inverse relationships between assertiveness and more passive strategies such as supportiveness and conceding control. Ray (1998) found that assertiveness was positively related to tendencies to seek affinity when that construct is considered as a dispositional characteristic. “Thus, whereas anger seems to motivate approach behavior, sadness seems to facilitate avoidance behavior.
To examine the extent to which the action tendency for sadness operates within a romantic relationship context, the following hypothesis is posited” (Knobloch & Solomon 2003, p. 282). The researchers also found positive relationships between both affinity-seeking competence and strategy performance of affinity and interaction involvement. Overall, the pattern of results suggests that personality variables reflecting high levels of communication activity are positively related to affinity: People who seek out and enjoy social interaction tend to report greater affinity-seeking behavior. The exceptions are interesting: Passive affinity strategies such as conceding control and supportiveness were inversely related to these personality measures of communicative propensity. The amount of fear and anxiety may also mediate the direction of response. For example, under conditions of minimal discomfort or maximal discomfort, the speaking rate usually is faster; under moderate discomfort, which may typify many circumstances, the speaking rate is usually slower than normal (Payne, 2001).
Payne (2001) states that the situational factors that contribute to fear and anxiety include the amount of structure in the situation, the type of interdependence, the group composition, and the relative status of the participants. Ferch (2001) underlines that in structured situations the norms provide guides for young people’s behavior and reduce their anxiety and fear. The more unstructured the situation is the greater fear and anxiety. For instance, situations in which young people cooperate with strangers involve less anxiety than situations in which we compete with them.
Further, they will experience less anxiety when they find themselves in situations where the ingroup is in the majority than in situations where our ingroup is in the majority. Finally, young people will experience less anxiety and fear in situations where ingroup has a higher status than the strangers’ groups than in situations where ingroup has lower status than their groups. When young people are experiencing anxiety they cannot emotions and display them in verbal and non-verbal form. Other behavioral responses depend on whether there are norms guiding interaction. If there are norms for how to interact, anxiety and fear will amplify behavior responses; that is, people will follow the norms more rigidly. In the absence of norms guiding interactions between people, they will look to norms for how to deal with people who are unfamiliar and amplify their response. If the social norms, for example, call for people to be suspicious, their suspicion will increase as anxiety and fear increase (Payne, 2001).
Conclusion
In sum, young people try to adapt their communication styles to emotions and feelings they experience but the more anxious they are, the more likely they will attune to the behaviors others expected to see (those based on stereotypes) and the more likely young people are to confirm these expectations: others will not attune to behavior that is inconsistent with expectations. Another behavioral consequence of high anxiety and fear is ineffective communication.
Bibliography
Aggleton, P., Hurry, J., Warwick, I. 2000, Young People and Mental Health. John Wiley & Sons.
Knobloch, L.K., Solomon, D.H. 2003, Responses to Changes in Relational Uncertainty within Dating Relationships: Emotions and Communication Strategies. Communication Studies, 54 (3), 282.
Ferch, Ch. R. 2001, Relational Conversation: Meaningful Communication as a Therapeutic Intervention. Counseling and Values, 45 (2), 118.
Payne, K.E. 2001, Different but Equal: Communication between the Sexes. Praeger.
Ray, E. B. 1996, Communication and Disenfranchisement: Social Health Issues and Implications. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Vangelisti, A.L. 2004, Handbook of Family Communication. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.