Context, Cognition, and Communication: Understanding how the Psychology of Location Affects Health and Medical Communication

Prior research reveals that cognition – or how the mind processes information – often guides human behavior in familiar settings (St.Amant, 2018). Such factors can affect the communication practices persons use to convey information about health concepts or medical processes (Hamm, 2003; St.Amant, 2021). The challenge becomes anticipating such connections in order to create texts and visuals audiences can understand and use to meet healthcare needs. This article presents an approach to meeting this need by applying the concept of cognitive scripts to understand and address the communication expectations audiences often associated with health and medical settings. In presenting these ideas, the article begins with an explanation of how cognitive scripts can affect communication processes. From there, the author advocates applying script dynamics to health and medical communication practices. To do so, the author expands upon ideas in the literature on cognitive scripts to create a script-based approach for researching an audience’s expectations of healthcare situations. The author then describes how to apply the information collected from this research to create communication materials audiences can more easily use in healthcare contexts. The result is a three-factor method that focuses on applying cognitive scripts to identify and address an audience’s expectations for healthcare communication in a given context. Readers can then use this approach to design healthcare communication materials that audiences can easily and effectively use.

A Polarized Discourse: Effects of Opinion Differentiation and Structural Differentiation on Communication

In Western societies, many polarized debates extend beyond the area of opinions, having consequences for social structures within society. Such segmentation of society into opinion-based groups may hinder communication, making it difficult to reconcile viewpoints across group boundaries. In three representative samples from Australia and the Netherlands ( N = 1,206), we examine whether perceived polarization predicts the quality (harmony, comfort, and experience of negative emotions) and quantity (avoidance of the issue) of communication with others in the community. We distinguish between perceived opinion differentiation (i.e., the extent to which opinions in society are divided) and perceived structural differentiation (i.e., the extent to which society fissions into subgroups). Results show that although opinion differentiation positively predicts the discussion of societal issues, the belief that these opinions reflect a deeper societal divide predicts negative communication expectations and intentions. We discuss how polarization perceptions may reinforce communicative behaviors that catalyze actual polarization processes.

Oral English Communication Expectations of Business Graduates in the Workplace in Sri Lanka

Graduate employability is a topic of much discussion, and employability skills among graduates is an equally important topic of discussion, as it has been stressed in many scholarly articles that, most graduates do not possess employability skills. Among these skills, oral English proficiency rates high, as they play an important role in the employability and marketability of graduates. Much importance has been placed on English proficiency and good communication skills among graduates which will help in increasing their employability (Ting, Marzuki, Chuah, Misieng & Jerome, 2017). The results of a survey conducted amongst ten employers revealed that in order to be ‘employable,’, business graduates need to develop their oral English competencies, and that good English communication skills can increase the employability of graduates as English is particularly important for graduates (Shivakumar & Sharma, 2017). Thus this article intends to examine the oral English competency that graduates are required to possess, in order that they may be gainfully employed.

Communication, Expectations, and Trust: An Experiment with Three Media

We studied how communication media affect trust game play. Three popular media were considered: traditional face-to-face, Facebook groups, and anonymous online chat. We considered post-communication changes in players’ expectations and preferences, and further analyzed the contents of group communications to understand the channels though which communication appears to improve trust and trustworthiness. For senders, the social, emotional, and game-relevant contents of communication all matter, significantly influencing both their expectations of fair return and preferences towards receivers. Receivers increased trustworthiness is mostly explained by their adherence to the norm of sending back a fair share of the amount received. These results do not qualitatively differ among the three communication media; while face-to-face had the largest volume of messages, all three media proved equally effective in enhancing trust and trustworthiness.