Relational Messages

Relational Messages Provide Information about the Relationship

Relational messages provide interactants with information about the nature of the relationship, the interactants' status in the relationship, and the social context within which the interaction occurs. Relational messages play a particularly important role in those interpersonal relationships that have the potential of becoming increasingly more interdependent (one partner responds to the behavior of the other partner). Because they provide information above and beyond the concrete content of a message, relational messages are considered metacommunication (meta-means “about”; thus, these messages are about messages). Consider a father asking his daughter: “Is that actually your new boyfriend?” Depending on the quality of their relationship (e.g., both father and daughter have a more or less loving relationship), as well as the relative status of each person (e.g., the father may be more or less authoritative), as well as the specific context within which the statement is made (e.g., the family may sit at the dinner table), the father may ask this question teasingly, angrily, or admiringly.

Enormous research efforts have been expended to identify the kind of information that people send and receive during social interactions. Virtually every one of these research efforts owes a conceptual debt to Gregory Bateson, an anthropologist who studied the New Guinea Latmul tribe in the 1930s and who later contributed significantly to the Palo Alto Group. He proposed that relational messages provide information about relational control: the extent to which one person possesses the power to influence the other person. An interaction can be either complementary (one person is dominant, whereas the other person is submissive; e.g., one person decides where to go for dinner, whereas the other person acquiesces) or symmetrical (both people are equally submissive or equally dominant; e.g., both partners either assert their views or submit to one another). William Schutz added two additional kinds of information that people communicate through relational messages—namely, inclusion, which is the need to establish and maintain satisfactory relationships, and affection, which involves the perception that one is liked, loved, and held in regard by another.

In an exhaustive review of the dimensions that inform relational messages, Judee Burgoon and Jerold Hale deduced seven types of information referred to as fundamental relational themes: (1) dominance/submission (similar to relational control), (2) level of intimacy (similar to affection or affiliation), (3) degree of similarity (the extent to which people coordinate their nonverbal and verbal behaviors), (4) task/social orientation (the extent to which people are engaged in work-related or leisurely interactions), (5) degree of formality (the extent to which communication is distanced and serious), (6) degree of social composure (the extent to which people present themselves as confident and competent in a conversation), and (7) level of emotional arousal (the extent to which an interaction is pleasant and active). Of these, relational control and the level of intimacy are the two primary dimensions that are metacom-municated in all message exchanges.

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