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Communication

Communication is difficult to define as it can be understood from a variety of perspectives. Dominic Infante, Andrew Rancer, and Deanna Womack suggest that communication occurs between humans when the meaning of symbols is manipulated to stimulate meaning. From this perspective, communication is important for promoting cooperation. Humans are social in nature and require cooperation if they are to get along and thrive. Communication also involves acquiring and sharing information through various venues such as the 24-hour news services, newspapers, and the World Wide Web.

Models of Communication

Ronald Adler and Neil Towne and Infante, Rancer, and Womack described several models of communication. The linear model describes communication in simple unidirectional terms—how information from a sender is communicated to a receiver. In this process, a sender encodes a message (by preparing an existing ideal for transmission) and sends the message through a channel (e.g., letter) to a receiver, who decodes (interprets) the message. The linear model proposes that noise and environment are important variables that can influence communication. Noise involves factors that can undermine the process of communication (e.g., psychological stress), and environment relates to factors such as personal experiences and physical setting that can influence communication.

The transactional model suggests that communication is not simply unidirectional (a sender transmitting a message to a receiver) but also is influenced by feedback that can include the responses of the people involved. From this perspective, individuals are referred to as communicators and not senders or receivers, as they are alternately senders and receivers throughout the communication process.

Communication and Counseling

Communication can impact counseling in a variety of ways, such as through listening skills and multicultural issues.

Listening Skills

Adler and Towne noted that more people spend time listening than any other form of communication. Effective communication skills are emphasized in counseling. This is especially true in marriage and family counseling where communication problems are a central focus. In this process, family members are often taught to use listening skills to obtain a phenomenological perspective (seeing others' point of view). Listening skills that promote the phenomenological perspective include open-ended statements, paraphrasing, minimal encouragers, clarifying, and reflection of feeling.

Communication of empathy is a particularly important listening skill. According to Carl Rogers, empathy is considered a core condition in counseling and can be defined as communicating a sense of caring and understanding. According to this definition, empathy involves not just caring but being perceived as caring. In other words, a person could care about a person but not get credit for caring, unless the caring is effectively communicated to the other person.

Multicultural Issues

In terms of multicultural communication in counseling, multiculturalism will be defined in an all-inclusive manner, including race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, disability, and more. Miscommunication can occur in multicultural counseling as a result of not considering cultural issues associated with language differences and nonverbal behavior. Language differences can include counselors using standard English with bilingual clients, resulting in inaccurate assessment of clients. Nonverbal behavior can also create challenges in multicultural counseling. For example, it might be problematic for a European American counselor to misinterpret the direct eye contact of an African American client as anger.

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