Artifacts – materialistic items that give meaning to a person’s social attributes.
Chronemics – the way people transmit nonverbal messages through time.
Collectivism – a cultural belief that focuses more on the group interests than an individual’s.
Connotative Meaning – a past experience that a person associates with an unknown meaning.
Context – a social situation where communication takes place between sender and receiver.
Cost-benefit ratio – the comparison of efforts to the rewards of creating and maintaining a relationships.
Culture – a group of people’s beliefs, language, norms, and behavior in life
Cultural Exclusion – a person’s belief who thinks that their way of thinking is correct way, and others is incorrect.
Cultural Inclusion – the ability to adapt to others who may feel and act differently than the social norm
Cultural Pluralism – people from diverse groups who maintain their cultural identities even within a shared culture
Decision-making group – a group that comes to a goal by discussing and brainstorming
Decoding – symbols perceived by a receiver in the communication process.
Denotative – a literal definition of a word, one that you would find in a dictionary.
Distortion/Noise & Kinds of Noise – blocks to effective communications from outside sources.
Dyad – two people in a lasting social relationship
Encoding – symbols to meanings that a sources intends to transmit to a receiver
Ethnocentrism – the belief that one’s beliefs in life are superior to others’.
Feedback – a receiver’s interpreted response to a sender’s message.
Feminity – a cultural belief that states that the female role is to be nurturing, cooperative, and empathetic.
Forum – a discussion that is brought up by a group that is followed by participation by audience members.
Group Communication– two or more people who repeatedly interact, regulating their conduct within some set of rules for communication and social activity that they mutually recognize and follow.
Human Communication – when an individual uses verbal and nonverbal cues to express meaning and transmit a message.
Impression Management – creating an impression through verbal and nonverbal messages.
Individualism - a cultural belief where the individual is emphasized, and autonomy, independence, and individual success are valued.
Interpersonal Communication – communication between two people that betters their relationship as it gets more personal.
Language –words, with shared meanings, that a group or society uses to communicate.
Masculinity - a cultural belief that emphasizes the traditional male gender orientation, in which achievement, success, ambition, assertiveness, and competitiveness are stressed
Meaning (Deep) – a basic idea implied by a message that could be understood
Meaning (Surface) – a meaning encoded in a message that may or may not be understood.
Nonverbal – intentional use of objects, actions, sounds to arouse meanings in others.
Nonverbal Immediacy – a psychological and physical closeness with others with deliberate use of nonverbal signals.
Norms – general rules that a group follows to govern society.
Oculesics – the study of the eye’s role in nonverbal communication
Panel – a more formal discussion by experts or representatives
Power Distance – a value of social status in the culture
Proxemics – the study of communication through space and distance.
Receiver – a person who intends to receive a message transmitted by the source
Referent – objects, situations, or events to which symbols refer
Regulate – nonverbal signs to regulate the flow of talk among the sender and the receiver.
Roles –rules in a group which define who has the ability to transmit particular kinds of messages and who must pay attention to them
Role-taking – the sender’s taking on the role of the receiver prior to transmitting the message to make sure the receiver is able to correctly interpret the message.
Roundtable – informal discussion where there is no audience, and participants are arranged in a circular pattern.
Schema – the arrangement of the traces that have been recorded in a person’s memory.
Self-disclosure – a person’s communication to another that reveals his or her past or private thoughts to another individual
Seminar – a small group discussion often used in universities.
Sender-Receiver Reciprocity – a communication encounter by engaging in both role-taking and feedback
Sender-receiver Similarity – a condition in which sender and receiver share similar learning in language community.
Signs – a stimuli to which people have learned to make a patterned response.
Signals – nonverbal cues that individuals use to communicate a message.
Small talk/ phatic communication - discussions that focus on topics of general interest, which do not require self-disclosure.
Source or Sender – a person who formulates or transmits a message to one more receivers.
Symbols – labels used in a community which evoke meanings of aspects of reality.
Symposium - very formal discussion group whose participants are usually a small group of experts. During the discussion the participants take turns delivering their views.
Syntax – organizing words in a sentence to make the meaning understood.
Task-orientated group – a group, consisting of people, that work together to get something done.
Vocalics – the study in which vocal cues give off meaning showing off a person’s emotions to others (DeFleur, Kearney, Plax, & DeFleur, 2005).
