The most obvious elements in any communication are the communicators themselves. When sending and receiving messages, each communicator is influenced by cognitions, the thoughts they have about themselves and others, including their understanding and awareness of who they are (smart, funny, compassionate), how well they like themselves, and how successful they think they are. We discuss this in depth in Chapter 2. For now, just understand that your cognitions influence your behavior when you communicate. Behavior is observable communication, including verbal messages (words) and nonverbal messages (facial expressions, body movements, clothing, gestures). Your cognitions are encoded into the messages you send, which are then decoded by your communication partner into his or her own cognitions that influence the interpretation of your message and the preparation of feedback to you.

This constant cycle can be seen in the following example. Devon knows that he’s a good student, but he struggles with math and science courses. This embarrasses him because his mother is a doctor and his brother is an engineer. He rarely feels like he will succeed in these areas. He tells his friend Kayla that he can’t figure out why he failed his recent physics exam because he studied for days beforehand. When he says this, his eyes are downcast and he looks angry. Kayla receives and decodes Devon’s message, and because she prides herself on being a good listener and not reacting overly emotionally, she encodes and sends a feedback message of her own: she calmly asks whether Devon contacted his physics professor or an academic tutor for extra help. Devon receives and decodes Kayla’s message in light of his own cognitions about being a poor science student. He notices that Kayla made very direct eye contact, didn’t smile, and didn’t express sympathy. He concludes that she is accusing him of not working hard enough. He sends feedback of his own—his eyes are large and his arms are crossed and he loudly and sarcastically states, “Right, yeah, I guess I was just too dumb to think about that.”

Because communication situations have so many “moving parts,” they can vary greatly. More successful communicators often have a high degree of cognitive complexity. That is, they can consider multiple scenarios, formulate multiple theories, and make multiple interpretations when encoding and decoding messages. In this case, both Kayla and Devon could have considered other possible interpretations and responses to be more competent communicators.