Recall from Chapter 4 that when you display your affect, you are showing the positive or negative feelings you have toward something—your attitudes. Similarly, the affective component of listening refers to your attitude toward listening to a person or message. For example, if you care about your roommate Brett, you are probably open to listening to him tell you how worried he is about his economics midterm. You may be even more interested if you have a midterm coming up yourself! Being willing to listen is an important first step in listening effectively.

However, when you are not motivated to listen, you are prone to “tune out” or only listen halfheartedly. If Brett seems to worry or complain about exams all the time (especially if he gets good grades anyway), then you may not want to hear him go on and on about this again. Or perhaps you are jealous of Brett’s good grades. There are many factors that can affect our motivation to listen, including preexisting schemas (Chapter 2) that we have about a person, topic, or situation, and several listening challenges we explain later in this chapter.