Tag: listening

Listening is the act of paying attention to sounds. It includes listening to the sounds of nature, listening to music, and perhaps most importantly, interpersonal listening, i.e. listening to other human beings. When listening to another person, one hears what they are saying and tries to understand what it means.

Interpersonal listening involves complex affective, cognitive, and behavioral processes. Affective processes include the motivation to listen to others; cognitive processes include attending to, understanding, receiving, and interpreting content and relational messages; and behavioral processes include responding to others with verbal and nonverbal feedback.

Interpersonal listening is a skill for resolving problems. Poor interpersonal listening can lead to misinterpretations, thus causing conflict or dispute. Poor listening can be exhibited by excessive interruptions, inattention, hearing what you want to hear, mentally composing a response, or having a closed mind.

Listening is also linked to memory. According to one study, when there were background noises during a speech, listeners were better able to recall the information in the speech when hearing those noises again. For example, when a person reads or does something else while listening to music, he or she can recall what that was when hearing the music again later.

Listening can also function rhetorically as a means of promoting Cross-cultural communication. Krista Ratcliffe (author of "Rhetorical Listening and Cross - Cultural Communication") built her argument upon two incidents in which individuals demonstrated a tendency to refuse the cross-cultural discourses.