Janet Bavelas

University of Victoria | UVIC · Department of Psychology

Demonstrations (e.g., direct quotations, conversational facial portrayals, conversational hand gestures, and figurative references) lack conventional meanings, relying instead on a resemblance to their referent. Two experiments tested our theory that demonstrations are a class of communicative acts that speakers are more likely to use in dialogue t...

A collaborative theory of narrative story-telling was tested in two experiments that examined what listeners do and their effect on the narrator. In 63 unacquainted dyads (81 women and 45 men), a narrator told his or her own close-call story. The listeners made 2 different kinds of listener responses: Generic responses included nodding and vocaliza...

this chapter is based on one assumption, that the best-known part of scientific research—the published report—is the visible fruition of a much longer process, the beginnings of which are different from its final form critical and analytical way of thinking (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Het boek Pragmatics of human communication (1967; Nederlandse vertaling De pragmatische aspecten van de menselijke communicatie, 1970) was een van de eerste boeken over intermenselijke communicatie en het groeide uit tot een standaard theorieboek voor onder meer de vakgebieden communicatie en psychotherapie. Face-to-Face dialogue (in druk), geschre...

The given-new contract entails that speakers must distinguish for their addressee whether references are new or already part of their dialogue. Past research had found that, in a monologue to a listener, speakers shortened repeated words. However, the notion of the given-new contract is inherently dialogic, with an addressee and the availability of...

Pragmatics of Human Communication (1967) was one of the first books on interpersonal communication and became a standard theory book in communication, psychotherapy, and other fields. Face-to-Face Dialogue (in press) by one of the original co-authors presents subsequent decades of research that revealed both similarities and differences; hence, thi...

Conversational facial gestures are not emotional expressions (Ekman, 1997). Facial gestures are co-speech gestures – configurations of the face, eyes, and/or head that are synchronized with words and other co-speech gestures. Facial gestures are the most frequent facial actions in dialogue, and the majority serve pragmatic (meta-communicative) rath...

Mutual understanding'' has both cognitive and social, interactive meanings. Interlocutors can have or share a (cognitive) mutual understanding. We propose they also do mutual understanding in an observable, reciprocal, three-step micro-process called calibrating. Following Mead (1934) and several subsequent authors, calibrating sequences require th...

Microanalysis of face-to-face dialogue (MFD) developed out of experimental research showing that conversational interaction is a moment-by-moment process that is both collaborative and multimodal. MFD is not limited to the analysis of an a priori set of variables or constructs; instead, it is a meta-method for analyzing any observable feature of fa...

Conversational hand and facial gestures are an integral part of language use in face-to-face dialogue. Extensive research shows that conversational hand gestures are tightly synchronized with words to demonstrate anything that can be represented (directly or metaphorically) as size, shape, position, or action and that they are highly sensitive to t...

This is the second of two special sections we have presented to JST, featuring new methods of research on solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) that are directly useful to practitioners. The four articles in Part I (JST, vol. 32, no. 3) introduced microanalysis of therapeutic dialogues, which focuses directly on the details of how therapists work....

Conversational facial gestures fit Kendon’s (2004) specifications of the functions of hand gestures. We illustrate how facial gestures in dialogue, like hand gestures, convey referential content as well as serving pragmatic, interpersonal and interactive functions. Hand and facial gestures often occur together, creating an integrated visual image i...

de Shazer (1991) introduced a post-structural view of language in therapy in which the participants' sociai interaction determines the meaning of the words they are using. Broader theories of social construction are similar but lack details about the role of language. This article focuses on the observable details of co-constructing meaning in dial...

Report to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada

Fourteen visibility experiments, which compared the overall rate of gesturing when participants could or could not see each other, have produced perfectly contradictory results: Seven found a significantly higher overall gesture rate in the visible condition, and seven found no significant difference. Experiments that used quasi-dialogues in which...

The models of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and solution-focused brief therapy (sFBT) differ in their primary focus: problem solving versus solution building. These theoretical differences imply dissimilar practices, including the content of the therapeutic dialogue. specifically, CBT sessions should include more talk about negative topics in...

Formulation, in the research literature, refers to an everyday conversational practice in which one person comments on what another has said. Terms such as echoing, paraphrasing, or summarizing are used for formulating in therapy, where these are usually considered neutral techniques. We propose that thera-pists' formulations are not neutral becaus...

In psychotherapy, co-construction refers to the proposal that the therapist and the client(s), in their dialogue, collaboratively create what emerges in their session. We trace the development of co-construction from its origins in postmodernism and point out that, unfortunately, it has remained more theoretical than practical or observable. The pr...

There is a rapidly increasing number of social experiments on gesture use, that is, experiments with at least one condition in which both participants can interact freely. Already this experimental evidence shows that conversational hand gestures serve a variety of social interactive functions in face-to-face dialogues. First, speakers in a dialogu...

Many non-traditional therapies treat questions as an influential therapeutic technique, but there is little research on this assumption. The goal of the present study was to test the effects of questions in an analogue experiment, that is, a lab experiment that used forms of questions drawn from psychotherapy. The experimenter used contrasting sets...

Face-to-face conversation is a unique listening setting, with a particular kind of listener; the person the speaker is directly addressing is the addressee. Our research program has included several experiments involving detailed, reliable examinations of the subtle yet crucial behaviors that addressees use to collaborate with the speaker in face-t...

Recent experiments support the SFBT emphasis on the co-constructive nature of language. First, even in the lab, the speaker and addressee create shared meanings together. They collaborate in an observable, momentby- moment process called grounding. Second, the addressee (who, in psychotherapy, is often the therapist) has an essential role in ground...

Speakers use gestures to communicate within a dialogue, not as isolated individuals. We therefore analyzed gestural communication within dyadic dialogues. Specifically, we microanalyzed grounding (the sequence of steps by which speaker and addressee ensure their mutual understanding) in a task that elicited abstract deictic gestures. Twenty-two dya...

This randomly controlled experiment tested a theory of how experienced physicians solve the dilemma of communicating bad news by using implicit language. 8 physicians delivered both bad and good news to 16 analogue patients. Microanalysis of their news delivery reliably identified departures from explicit language. As predicted, the physicians used...

Face-to-face dialogue is the basic site of language use. Our group's program of research focuses on unique features of face-to-face dialogue, especially the ways in which participants collaborate moment-by-moment (e.g. Bavelas et al., 1995; Bavelas and Chovil, 1997; Bavelas et al., 2000, 2002). Current experiments are showing that the availability...

Face-to-face dialogue is the basic site of language use. Our group's program of research focuses on unique features of face-to-face dialogue, especially the ways in which participants collaborate moment-by-moment (e.g. Bavelas et al., 1995; Bavelas and Chovil, 1997; Bavelas et al., 2000, 2002). Current experiments are showing that the availability...

Speakers often gesture in telephone conversations, even though they are not visible to their addressees. To test whether this effect is due to being in a dialogue, we separated visibility and dialogue with three conditions: face-to-face dialogue (10 dyads), telephone dialogue (10 dyads), and monologue to a tape recorder (10 individuals). For the ra...

Microanalysis in psychotherapy is the close examination of the moment-by-moment communicative actions of the therapist. This study microanalyzed demonstration sessions by experts on solution-focused and client-centered therapies, specifically, the first 50 therapist utterances of sessions by Steve de Shazer, Insoo Kim Berg, Carl Rogers, and Nathani...

Nonverbal and verbal communication: Hand gestures and facial displays as part of language use in face-to-face dialogue Of the many different research perspectives on the fundamentals of nonverbal communication, one of the most taken for granted is the relationship between verbal communication and co-occurring nonverbal acts. Most researchers assume...

We dedicate this article to the memory of Steve de Shazer, who was the University's External Examiner for the doctoral dissertation on which this article is based. His comments were both generous and influential, as they were on many other occasions. We would also like to thank Ron Chenail (as Editor of JMFT) and Dora Fried Schnitman (as Editor of...

Hand gestures in face-to-face dialogue are symbolic acts, integrated with speech. Little is known about the factors that determine the physical form of these gestures. When the gesture depicts a previous nonsymbolic action, it obviously resembles this action; however, such gestures are not only noticeably different from the original action but, whe...

Language and Gesture. David McNeill. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 420 pp.

This experiment expanded the visual availability paradigm by subsuming it under the broader principle of recipient design . We varied recipient design by asking speakers to describe a picture to someone who would see a videotape of their description or only hear an audiotape. Second, speakers described pictures that varied in verbal encodability. F...

The authors examined precisely when and how listeners insert their responses into a speaker's narrative. A collaborative theory would predict a relationship between the speaker's acts and the listener's responses, and the authors proposed that speaker gaze coordinated this collaboration. The listener typically looks more at the speaker than the rev...

This research examined the language used to describe sexual offenses in 75 British Columbia trial judgments. Since 1983 nonconsensual sexual contact is legally termed as sexual assault in Canada, so we tested whether the language in the judgments depicted sexual activity or assault. The most frequent characterization was in sexual (erotic or affect...

The authors propose that dialogue in face-to-face interaction is both audible and visible; language use in this setting includes visible acts of meaning such as facial displays and hand gestures. Several criteria distinguish these from other nonverbal acts: (a) They are sensitive to a sender-receiver relationship in that they are less likely to occ...

Microanalysis, which is the close examination of actual communication sequences, can be a useful way to understand how therapeutic communication works. This is a preliminary report on our research group's applications of microanalysis to communication in psychotherapy. We first describe the historical origins in the Natural History of an Interview...

The theoretical framework of this long-term research project on equivocation includes three essential principles: (a) An interesting and unexplained phenomenon is worth studying for itself, by inductive methods; (b) communicative acts are part of a communicative sequence; and (c) the methods must keep the phenomenon in its communicative sequence. T...

This reference work provides broad and up-to-date coverage of the major perspectives - ethological, neurobehavioral, developmental, dynamic systems, componential - on facial expression. It reviews Darwin's legacy in the theories of Izard and Tomkins and in Fridlund's recently proposed Behavioral Ecology theory. It explores continuing controversies...

Because face-to-face dialogue is our first and most common form of communication, we can use it as a prototype to evaluate other forms of communication. Three features are fully present only in face-to-face dialogue: unrestricted verbal expression, meaningful non-verbal acts such as gestures and facial displays, and instantaneous collaboration betw...

A small group of hand gestures made during conversation (interactive gestures) seem to function solely to assist the process of dialogue rather than to convey topical information. The rate of interactive gestures was significantly higher when 27 dyads talked in dialogue than in sequential monologues, whereas the rate of other (topical) gestures did...

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We analyzed the language in a random sample of recent Western Canadian trial judgments in cases of sexual assault. We discovered five anomalous themes: erotic/affectionate characterization of sexual assault; sexual assault as distinct from violence; appropriate resistance by the victim; the good character of the offender; and grammatically omitting...

Illustrators are hand gestures made during conversation. Following Bavelas, Hagen, Lane, and Lawrie (1989), we propose a new division of illustrators, into topic and interactive gestures. Interactive gestures refer to the interlocutor rather than to the topic of conversation, and they help maintain the conversation as a social system. They subsume...

Two propositions that have been treated as equivalent ("All behavior is communication” and “one cannot not communicate") are separated, on logical grounds, into two separate questions: “Is all nonverbal behavior communicative?” and “In an interactional setting, is there always some communicative behavior?” I suggest that both should be treated as h...

This article proposes a situational and discourse-oriented view of a particular class of messages, equivocations, that have usually been dismissed as ineffective or even deceptive. We distinguish between-and measure independently-what a message says (whether it is true or false) and how it is said (whether it is clear or equivocal), and we propose...

Equivocation is nonstraightforward communication; it appears ambiguous, contradictory, tangential, obscure, or even evasive. Such messages were first studied (as "disqualification") by the Palo Alto Group, who sought an explanation in the speaker's communicative situation. Indirect speech acts are also forms of equivocation, and these have been pur...

Motor mimicry is behavior by an observer that is appropriate to the situation of the other person, for example, wincing at the other's injury or ducking when the other does. Traditional theories of motor mimicry view this behavior as an indicator of a vicarious cognitive or empathic experience, that is, of taking the role of the other or of “feelin...

elementary motor mimicry ("Einfühlung") / current research / mimetic synchrony as a class of nonverbal behaviors / communicative view of nonverbal behavior (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Disqualification is nonstraightforward communication — messages that say something without really saying it. The four experiments described here examined whether naive, normal individuals might generate disqualified messages. The participants were presented with hypothetical communicative conflicts to which they wrote their own replies. These messa...

Elementary motor mimicry (e.g., wincing when another is injured) has been previously considered in social psychology as the overt manifestation of some intrapersonal process such as vicarious emotion. A 2-part experiment with 50 university students tested the hypothesis that motor mimicry is instead an interpersonal event, a nonverbal communication...

For over two hundred years, social psychologists have been puzzled by elementary motor mimicry—overt behavior by an observer that is appropriate to the situation of the other rather than to the observer's situation. This ubiquitous but fleeting behavior has not previously been amenable to experimental study, which might elucidate its meaning or mea...

A large number of studies of family and marital conflictual interaction purport to describe relational processes, yet close examination reveals a scarcity of process analyses. Many studies are interactional or systemic in name only. Three basic criteria are proposed as necessary for the development of a systems methodology: observable, sequential,...

Suppose person A has received a gift from a friend who lives in another city.

This paper presents a simple means of pragmatically identifying the occurrence of verbal conflict. The identification is structural in nature, based on the control aspects of verbalizations and consistent with the active opposition conceptualization of conflict. A verbal conflict is claimed to occur when three consecutive one‐up maneuvers have been...

Responds to comments by A. S. Gurman (see record 1985-18983-001) on the present author's (see record 1985-18967-001) article on naturalistic family research, asserting that Gurman's comments represent an informative, appropriate complement to the article. However, it is emphasized that Gurman's approach is aimed at understanding or improving psyc...

Disqualification is nonstraighforward communication—messages that are ambiguous, indirect, or evasive to some degree. A previous paper defined and measured disqualification as deviations from the direct “I am saying this to you in this situation”—that is, as relative ambiguity in sender, content, receiver, or context. The present article addresses...

For the past 30 years family therapists repeatedly have referred to “systems theory” as a means of explaining and legitimizing the treatment of the whole family. As a consequence of this repeated pairing (in schools, books, and seminars), most mental health professionals have come to assume that “family treatment” and “systems work” are synonymous...

A disqualification is a message that says something “without really saying it”—one that is evasive, indirect, or effectively ambiguous in some other way. This article describes the rationale for, and development of, an objective method for measuring the degree of disqualification in brief written messages: nonexpert judges independently assess four...

Traducción de: Pragmatics of human communication Reimpresión en 1986, 1987, 1995, 1997 Incluye bibliografía

Authors describe a procedure for construction of evaluation instruments that clearly are preferred by students, and reflect their views.

Conducted 6 experiments with a total of 338 undergraduates to determine the existence of a linear effect of goal level on performance. Exp I failed to replicate such an effect with a standard addition task. Exps II–IV did replicate a goal effect with several "creativity" tasks; the higher the goal, the more responses given. The quality of responses...

Discusses 2 social facets of citations and citation counts. It is proposed that literature is cited both because of scholarly impact and to show a familiarity with the pertinent literature. In this sense, citation counts measure social consensus indistinguishable from scholarly impact. Qualitative evaluation methods are considered to be appealing b...

These experiments conclude a program of research aimed at developing a method bywhich a dyadic unit can be studied as a formal system, a living system at the level of the group. The dyad chosen was one in which a subject acting as “teacher” repeatedly set a goal for another subject, who performed in response to that g o d Each half of the dyad was...

Evaluated cognitive complexity, constellatoriness, and identification as measured by Kelly's Rep Grid (G. A. Kelly's Role Construct Repertory Test, 1955) by a multitrait-multimethod matrix, using 76 summer school college students. All 3 traits showed low test-retest reliability over short, randomly varied time intervals (1-3 wks), as did J. Bierie'...

Dyadic interaction should be studied as a formal system, with the behaviors of each individual studied separately in such a way that the whole can be constructed from the parts. A mechanism for such interaction is interpersonal judgment, by which A selects a response to suit B's behavior. In two experiments, Ss acting as teachers were given perform...

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