Study guide: Communication Principles and Processes

📋 Course Outline

1. Nature and Importance of Communication
2. Elements of the Communication Process
3. Principles and Characteristics
4. Verbal and Nonverbal Language
5. Nonverbal Communication Systems
6. Communication Flows in the Workplace

📖 1. Nature and Importance of Communication

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Communication: the mutual exchange of information, ideas, and understanding through effective verbal or nonverbal means

📝 Essential Points

• Communication enables humans to express thoughts, feelings, aspirations, doubts, questions, and fears and serves as an instrument for human interaction.

💡 Memory Hook

Human social needs → communication → shared information, ideas, and understanding

📖 2. Elements of the Communication Process

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Sender/Encoder: conceptualizes the message and chooses the most effective form of transmission while considering the receiver
• Medium: The medium is the immediate form taken by a message, such as a letter, email, speech, or face-to-face exchange.
• Channel: The channel delivers the chosen message form through means such as the post office, internet, television, or radio.
• Feedback: indicates whether the receiver grasped the intended meaning and whether communication was successful

📝 Essential Points

📌 Communication is dynamic, continuous, irreversible, and contextual, and its elements function interdependently rather than separately.

💡 Memory Hook

Sender → medium → channel → receiver → feedback, within context and noise

📖 3. Principles and Characteristics

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Schemata-driven Communication: Schemata-driven communication begins with knowledge already stored in the communicator’s mind, which helps make transmitted messages meaningful.

📝 Essential Points

📌 Communication is an interpretative act because the receiver interprets, infers, or guesses the sender’s meaning rather than automatically accessing the sender’s complete intention.

📌 Communication is ethical when it follows rules, moral values, and beliefs accepted by members of the communicator’s cultural group.

• Communication can symbolize ideas through:
  • letters
  • words
  • sentences
  • graphs
  • pictures
  • objects
  • gestures
  • eye movements
  • posture
  • facial expressions

💡 Memory Hook

SIPACRED: Schemata-driven, Interpretative, Powerful, Active, Contextual, Reversible only in meaning? Ethical, Developmental

📖 4. Verbal and Nonverbal Language

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Verbal Language: Antonio, et.al. — uses letters, words, and other marks governed by language or grammar rules to express and understand ideas coherently
• Nonverbal Language: Martin & Nakayama, 2010 — Nonverbal language represents ideas through cues other than words, and its norms vary across countries, cultures, contexts, and individuals.

📝 Essential Points

• The largest cultural differences in nonverbal communication occur in eye contact, touch, and personal space. — Pease & Pease, 2004

💡 Memory Hook

Verbal communication uses language symbols, whereas nonverbal communication uses bodily, vocal, spatial, temporal, and environmental cues

📖 5. Nonverbal Communication Systems

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Body Movements: studied as kinesics, communicate meanings through gestures, facial expressions, posture, and eye behavior
• Paralanguage: Paralanguage consists of extra vocal sounds and qualities accompanying spoken words, including pitch, volume, duration, intonation, voice quality, vocalizations, and pauses or boosters.
• Proxemics: Proxemics is the study of how space, physical closeness, distance, and touch communicate preferences, intimacy, and relationship meanings.

💡 Memory Hook

BPTPO: Body movements, Paralanguage, Time, Proxemics, Physical appearance and object language

📖 6. Communication Flows in the Workplace

📝 Essential Points

📌 The workplace case demonstrates that communicating a decision to one person or department does not guarantee that all affected participants understand or know about it.

• Anna, Barbara, and Charles were all scheduled to be off from Monday through Friday and to work on Saturday, leaving Dan as the only nurse working during that period.

• In the workplace case, schedule changes spread from Sara to Anna, from Barbara to Rick, from Charles to Dr. Goodman, and from Dr. Goodman to Susan Stevens before being implemented.

💡 Memory Hook

Uncoordinated schedule changes → conflicting information → inadequate nurse coverage

📊 Synthesis Tables

Verbal and Nonverbal Communication

Dimension	Verbal Language	Nonverbal Language
Primary symbols	Letters, words, and other marks	Body, vocal, spatial, temporal, and environmental cues
Organization	Subject to language and grammar rules	Governed by cultural and contextual norms
Examples	Spoken or written language	Gestures, eye contact, touch, posture, and personal space