ASSESSMENT OF SOCIAL COMPETENCE IN AN EVALUATION-INTERACTION ANALOGUE1

Forty men were selected from a larger pool of 235 college students who had completed three questionnaires designed to measure social competence. Twenty high socially competent and 20 low socially competent college men were given either positive or negative feedback by a woman confederate in a five-minute dyadic interaction. The confederate made either four all-positive or all-negative statements on the impression she was forming about the men during the interaction. Measures were taken of the amount of time the men spoke, the latency of their response to the confederate's statements, and the number of topics and topic changes used during the interaction. Judgements were also made on the men's physical attractiveness and social skill. Finally, the men's verbal reactions to the confederate statements were content analyzed for direction (self, confederate, or other) and valence (positive, negative, or neutral). A 2-by-2-by-4 (competence by feedback by statements) ANOVA indicated that subjects differed over trials (statements) in their reaction latencies as a function of their competence level and feedback: low competent men took considerably longer to react to the confederate's negative feedback than did men in other conditions. There were no differences among groups on the amount of conversation time or number of topics and topic changes. High competent men were judged to be more attractive and more socially skilled than low competent men. Content analysis revealed that high competent and low competent men did not differ in their verbal responses when receiving positive feedback. During negative feedback, however, high competent men employed a wider range of responses than low competent men. These findings suggest that high and low socially competent men may differ in their responses to evaluative feedback such that high competent men are both quicker to respond and have a broader repertoire of response than do low competent men.     

Complexity Effects on Temporal Characteristics of Speech

In light of evidence that multiple-goal messages tend to be characterized by longer speech-onset latencies and higher pause-phonation ratios, Greene, McDaniel, Buksa, and Ravizza have suggested that it is not the pursuit of multiple goals, per se, that results in less fluent speech. Rather, these authors suggest that the slower speech production characteristic of such messages is the result of difficulties in assembling, or integrating, incompatible message features. Recent evidence, however, indicates that this account is incomplete and in need of revision. Toward this end, we advance a complexity account that suggests that there are increased processing-capacity and temporal demands associated with formulating and maintaining more complex message representations. The article then reports four experimental studies of this complexity account. Experiments 1 and 2 operationalize complexity as the amount of information to be communicated in a message. These studies indicate that complexity does affect pause-phonation ratio and average pause duration. Experiments 3 and 4 operationalize complexity as the coherence of the information to be conveyed in a message. The results of Experiment 4, but not Experiment 3, again indicated that complexity influences speech fluency. The results of these studies, then, are taken to provide considerable support for the complexity hypothesis.