COMM 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 24: Personal Relationships, Interpersonal Communication, Social Skills
27 Apr 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
The Mystery of Roseto
How did this small town in Pennsylvania avoid heart disease?
Had to do with how they were communicating
○
Low number of heart attacks and high wellbeing of cardiovascular health
○
Nourished by each other
○
-
How did this community capture the fountain of youth?
-
Overarching Themes of The Mystery of Roseto
Inadequate or distorted interpersonal relationships can have dramatic negative
effects on physical and mental health
-
Poor relationships cripple peoples' abilities to empathize, regulate emotional
expression, manage conflict, and effectively persuade others
-
Violence and suicide are often linked to interpersonal deficits
-
Inadequate interpersonal relationships contribute to cardiovascular disease
-
Interpersonal stress reduces the effectiveness of the human immune systems
and often leads to infection or stimulates autoimmune disease
-
Poor interpersonal relationships promote risky health practices like smoking,
overeating, and substance abuse
-
Personal Relationships and Health
Researcher Malcom Parks connects interpersonal communication with 5 aspects
of physical and mental health:
Social skills deficit
When one or multiple people in the relationship is unsatisfied with
the social skills being used or have not acquired good social skills
because of poor or lack of interpersonal relationships
§
○
Violence and suicide
Being perpetrated and being the victim
§
○
Cardiovascular difficulties
○
Immune system malfunctions
○
Risky health practices
Behaviors, attitudes, or events specifically
§
○
-
Social skills deficit
Social skills include perspective-taking, turn-taking, regulating emotional
expression, constructing persuasive messages, managing conflict, etc.
○
Parks argues that social deficits result in mental and physical illnesses
○
For example, children who are rejected by their parents are more likely to
have difficulty regulating their own emotional expression and engaging in
interaction
○
Parents who control their children and can not express emotion can also
cause deficits
○
"Rolling laboratories"
○
-
Violence and suicide
People with inadequate or dysfunctional personal relationships are
particularly susceptible to violence
○
Children who do not have a reciprocated friendship are more likely to be
bullied by their classmates
○
Although not the only cause or contributing factor, studies have liked
suicide and inadequate or disordered personal relationships. For example,
divorced people are 25% more likely to commit suicide
○
-
Cardiovascular disease
Poor personal relationships break people's hearts… literally
○
People who are Type A personalities are at greater risk for a heart attack
because they tend to be conflict-laden, aggressive, unsupportive, and
unsupportable
Although, global personalities are vague gauges and not all the
evidence is consistent, people with this pattern of communication
behavior do have more heart problems
§
○
-
Immune system malfunctions
Poor communication can lead to immune suppression
○
Respiratory illness were four times more common during periods of
stressful family interaction than during stressful periods
○
Chronic stress reduces immunity
○
Poor interpersonal communication can also lead to autoimmune diseases
○
Anger, depression, and stress lead to the faster progression of immune
diseases
Rheumatoid arthritis progresses more rapidly with higher levels of
anger, depression, or stress
§
○
Diseases also limit social participation and this can lead to poor
interpersonal communication
Those affected by RA report significant reductions in social activities
due to the illness
§
○
-
Risky health practices
Poor interpersonal relationships promote, or at least fail to discourage,
risky and destructive behaviors
○
Having unsupportive relationships makes it harder to stop smoking,
reduce blood pressure, manage diabetes, lose weight, and even seek
treatment for illness in the first place
○
Parents who have poor relationships with their children or bad
communication practices are less likely to provide supervision and
positive messages when it comes to accidents, drug and alcohol use, and
unsafe sexual practices
○
Drug and alcohol abuse is far more common among people with
disordered personal relationships
These relationships are both the product and cause of the abuse
§
"The cycle continues when these people become parents
themselves"
§
○
-
The Nature of Conflict
Mental health and overall happiness improve with a constructive confect
process
-
Resolving conflict reduces a common stressor
-
Our family of origin socializes us into either constructive or destructive ways of
handling conflict and this can carry over to how romantic relationships are
handled later in life
-
Destructive Marital Conflict
First, negative conflict between parents reduces the family's network of friends
and creates more loneliness
-
Conflict between parents leads to focus on negative behaviors of their children
-
Ongoing conflict at home has a greater impact on adolescent distress and
symptoms than does parental divorce
-
Love Relationships
Love relationships provide a rigorous test of our ability to manage conflict
-
The first big fight in a relationship can be a predictor of its viability and
sustainability
-
Couples that handle fights productively and successfully survive and prosper
while those who do not break up
-
The Workplace
Conflict is a stubborn fact of organizational life
-
Diverse work places and gender issues present a greater chance for impact
-
Communication training should be seen as conflict prevention
-
Unresolved conflict among management can permeate an organization and
force people to take sides
-
Advantages of Studying Organizational Communication and Conflict
As an employee you can learn to get along with:
Fellow employees
○
Your manager
○
The public
○
-
You will be perceived as more skilled
-
You can help prevent workplace conflict
-
Learn productive responses
-
Gain more cooperation from employees
-
Keep interpersonal conflicts from spreading
-
Conflict Management
Draws upon the skills of emotional intelligence
-
Emotional intelligence- the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those
of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves
and in our relationships
-
Preventing destructive conflict involves being aware of unresolved conflicts and
defining the conflict so that parties understand the conflict
-
Personal Relationships and Health
Monday, April 23, 2018
11:32 AM
Document Summary
Had to do with how they were communicating. Low number of heart attacks and high wellbeing of cardiovascular health. Inadequate or distorted interpersonal relationships can have dramatic negative effects on physical and mental health. Poor relationships cripple peoples" abilities to empathize, regulate emotional expression, manage conflict, and effectively persuade others. Violence and suicide are often linked to interpersonal deficits. Interpersonal stress reduces the effectiveness of the human immune systems and often leads to infection or stimulates autoimmune disease. Poor interpersonal relationships promote risky health practices like smoking, overeating, and substance abuse. Researcher malcom parks connects interpersonal communication with 5 aspects of physical and mental health: When one or multiple people in the relationship is unsatisfied with the social skills being used or have not acquired good social skills because of poor or lack of interpersonal relationships. Social skills include perspective-taking, turn-taking, regulating emotional expression, constructing persuasive messages, managing conflict, etc.
