RESPONDING

You’re spending the afternoon at your apartment discussing your plans for a cross-country road trip with your friends, John and Sarah. You want them to help you with logistical details as well as ideas for interesting places to visit. As you talk, John looks directly at you, smiles, nods his head, and leans forward. He also asks questions and offers up some kitschy Americana attractions. Sarah, in contrast, seems completely uninterested. She alternates between looking at the people strolling by your living-room window and texting on her phone. She also sits with her body half-turned away from you and leans back in her chair. You become frustrated because it’s obvious that John is listening closely and Sarah isn’t listening at all.

What leads you to conclude that John is listening and Sarah isn’t? It’s the way your friends are responding—communicating their attention and understanding to you. Responding is the fourth stage of the listening process. When you actively listen, you do more than simply attend and understand. You also convey your attention and understanding to others by clearly and constructively responding through positive feedback, paraphrasing, and clarifying (McNaughton et al., 2007).

Feedback Critical to active listening is using verbal and nonverbal behaviors known as feedback to communicate attention and understanding while others are talking. Scholars distinguish between two kinds of feedback: positive and negative (Wolvin & Coakley, 1996). When you use positive feedback, like John in our earlier example, you look directly at the person speaking, smile, position your body so that you’re facing him or her, avoid using electronic devices, and lean forward. You may also offer back-channel cues, verbal and nonverbal behaviors such as nodding and making comments—like “Uh-huh,” “Yes,” and “That makes sense”—that signal you’ve paid attention to and understood specific comments (Duncan & Fiske, 1977). All of these behaviors combine to show speakers that you’re actively listening. In contrast, people who use negative feedback, like Sarah in our example, send a very different message to speakers: “I’m not interested in paying attention to you or understanding what you’re saying.” Behaviors that convey negative feedback include avoiding eye contact, turning your body away, looking bored or distracted, using electronic devices, and not using back-channel cues.

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The type of feedback we provide while we’re listening has a dramatic effect on speakers (Wolvin & Coakley, 1996). Receiving positive feedback from listeners can enhance a speaker’s confidence and generate positive emotions. Negative feedback can cause speakers to hesitate, make speech errors, or stop altogether to see what’s wrong and why we’re not listening.

To effectively display positive feedback during interpersonal encounters, try four simple suggestions (Barker, 1971; Daly, 1975). First, make your feedback obvious. No matter how actively you listen, unless others perceive your feedback, they won’t view you as actively listening. Second, make your feedback appropriate. Different situations, speakers, and messages require more or less intensity of positive feedback. Third, make your feedback clear by avoiding behaviors that might be mistaken as negative feedback. For example, something as simple as innocently stealing a glance at your phone to see what time it is might unintentionally suggest that you’re bored or wish the person would stop speaking. Finally, always provide feedback quickly in response to what the speaker has just said.

Paraphrasing and Clarifying Active listeners also communicate attention and understanding through saying things after their conversational partners have finished their turns—things that make it clear they were listening. One way to do this is by paraphrasing, summarizing others’ comments after they have finished speaking (“My read on your message is that . . . ” or “You seem to be saying that . . . ”). This practice can help you check the accuracy of your understanding during both face-to-face and online encounters. Paraphrasing should be used judiciously, however. Some conversational partners may find paraphrasing annoying if you use it a lot or they view it as contrived. Paraphrasing can also lead to conversational lapses—silences of three seconds or longer that participants perceive as awkward (McLaughlin & Cody, 1982).

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Paraphrasing can cause lapses because when you paraphrase, you do nothing to usefully advance the conversational topic forward in new and interesting ways (Heritage & Watson, 1979). Instead, you simply rehash what has already been said. Consequently, the only relevant response your conversational partner can provide is a simple acknowledgment, such as “Yeah” or “Uh-huh.” In such cases, a lapse is likely to ensue immediately after, unless one of you has a new topic ready to introduce to advance the conversation. This is an important practical concern for anyone interested in being perceived as interpersonally competent, because the more lapses that occur, the more likely your conversational partner is to perceive you as incompetent (McLaughlin & Cody, 1982). To avoid this perception, always couple your paraphrasing with additional comments or questions that usefully build on the previous topic or take the conversation in new directions.

Of course, on some occasions, we simply don’t understand what others have said. In such instances, it’s perfectly appropriate to respond by seeking clarification rather than paraphrasing, saying, “I’m sorry, but could you explain that again? I want to make sure I understood you correctly.” This technique not only helps you clarify the meaning of what you’re hearing but also enables you to communicate your desire to understand the other person.

RECALLING

The fifth stage of listening is recalling, remembering information after you’ve received, attended to, understood, and responded to it. Recalling is a crucial part of the listening process because we judge the effectiveness of listening based on our ability to accurately recall information after we’ve listened to it (Thomas & Levine, 1994). Think about it: when a romantic partner asks, “Were you listening to me?” how do you demonstrate that you really were actively listening? By recalling everything that was said and reciting it back to your partner. Indeed, practically every scientific measure of listening uses recall accuracy as evidence of listening effectiveness (Janusik, 2007).

Your recall accuracy varies, depending on the situation. When people have no task other than simple memorization, recall accuracy is high. But when people are engaged in activities more complicated than straight memorization, recall accuracy plummets. That’s because in such cases, we’re receiving a lot of information, which increases the likelihood of perceptual and recall errors. Research on the recall accuracy of criminal eyewitnesses, for instance, has found that people frequently err in their recall of crimes, something most jurors and even the eyewitnesses themselves don’t realize (Wells, Lindsay, & Tousignant, 1980). Our recall of interpersonal and relational encounters is not exempt from error. For negative and unpleasant interactions, such as conflicts, we tend to recall our own behavior as positive and constructive and the behavior of others as comparatively negative, regardless of what actually happened (Sillars, Smith, & Koerner, 2010).

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How can you enhance your recall ability? One way is to use mnemonics, devices that aid memory. For example, when I first starting teaching yoga (more than a decade ago), I would often arrive at the studio only to find that I had forgotten something (my mat, my music, my water, my choreography journal, and so forth). So I created a simple mnemonic: “music-water-keys-mat-book.” Now, each and every time before I leave for class, I always say out loud this quick checklist mnemonic, and it ensures that I arrive at my classes ready to teach!

Because listening is rooted in both visual and auditory information, and memory is enhanced by using all five senses, you can bolster your memory of an interpersonal communication encounter by linking information you’ve listened to with pleasant or even silly visuals, scents, or sounds. To create visual images of an interpersonal encounter, you could write detailed notes or draw diagrams documenting the contents of a conversation. You could also link a new acquaintance’s name with a unique physical feature characterizing him or her. Finally, when you develop mnemonics or notes, review them repeatedly, including reciting them out loud, because repetition helps aid memory.