The present study examines the roles need and care play in such positive interpersonal attitudes as love, liking, attraction, and friendship, by both replicating and extending a 1982 study by Steck, Levitan, McLane, and Kelley. Subjects were presented with slightly revised Rubin Love Scales which were filled out as if by persons involved in relationships, and were asked to judge how much each hypothetical person loved, liked, was attracted to, and felt friendly toward their partner. In fact, the love scales had been divided into three components, i.e. need, care, and trust, and were filled out with each component at a specific level. Nine patterns were devised using all possible combinations of high, medium, and low levels of care and need, and holding trust at a constant medium level.

The interaction between troubled adolescents and the adult world is generally characterized as laden with ambiguity and conflict, and is rarely seem as productive or mutually satisfying. This research project is an attempt to study the way in which this interaction is perceived by a group of female adolescents involved in the Bridge, a short-term residential program for girls in a state of early crisis as demonstrated by runaway behavior. This study specifically focuses on communication behaviors of parents and of adults other than parents as perceived by the adolescent upon her entry into The Bridge and at her release from the program.

A review of the literature on self-disclosure and small group communication showed that few investigations dealt with the effects of disclosing communication on small group process. The present study was conducted in order to assess the effects of the frequency of self-disclosure within small groups on the members' overall attraction to the group. 120 subjects were selected from the East Hill Church senior high youth department in Gresham, Oregon. Subjects were placed at random into ten small groups with twelve members each which met for one-half hour per week for six consecutive weeks. All group communications were audio tape recorded. Weekly recordings were transcribed and rated for frequency of self disclosure. In addition, a self-report "attraction-to-group" measure was completed by all subjects at the end of each session in order to assess the attraction members felt for their groups each week.

In order to assess a component of communication in interpersonal relationships, an instrument was developed to determine the correspondence in relational perceptions between partners in a marital dyad. The current study focuses on the levels of awareness spouses exhibit regarding phenomenological perceptions of themselves, their partners and the status of their dyadic system.

High communication apprehension has several negative effects on affected persons. Students with high communication apprehension in particular experience low class participation, poor teacher-student relationships, and low grades. This study examined the effects of Fundamentals of Oral Communication (public speaking) classes on students ' communication apprehension compared to non-public speaking alternatives, Introduction to Communication. McCroskey's PRCA-24 was distributed as a pre- and post-test, and the data was analyzed using a repeated measures design. Limitations and future study implications are discussed.

This study examines print advertising from Cookie, an up-scale American parenting magazine for affluent mothers. The ads include seven designer clothing brands: Rocawear, Baby Phat, Ralph Lauren, Diesel, Kenneth Cole, Sean John, and DKNY. When considered within the context of their adult equivalents, the ads for the children’s lines often created a prolepsis—or flash-forward—by depicting the child model as a nascent adult. This was accomplished in three ways. First, the children’s ads typically contained structural continuities such as logo, set design, and color scheme that helped reinforce their relationship with the adult brand. Second, most of the ads place the camera at eye-level—a framing that allows the child models to address their adult viewers as equals. Finally, almost half of the ads feature at least one child looking directly at the camera with a serious expression. This is significant because, in Western culture, the withholding of a smile is a sign of dominance typically reserved for adult males. When children mimic this familiar and powerful “look,” they convey a sense of adult-like confidence and self-awareness often associated with precocious sexuality.

Married couples aged 55-98 were surveyed regarding their perceptions of family-of-origin distress, their affective communication and problem solving communication skills, and their emotional intimacy. Two 2-way ANOVAs were performed with husbands' (model 1) and wives' (model 2) emotional intimacy scores as dependent measures and family-of-origin distress scores as the independent measures. Then both models were re-analyzed with affective communication and problem solving communication entered as co-variates. Results suggested that for both husbands and wives, emotional intimacy was affected by family-of-origin distress. Additionally, intimacy was affected by the distress in their spouses' family-of-origin in both models. Post-hoc analyses suggested that as long as at least one member of the couple reports low family-of-origin distress, intimacy does not suffer for either spouse. Taking communication variables into account rendered the effects of family-of-origin distress non-significant in both models. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for psychoanalytic, systemic, and developmental theory.

The purpose of this study is to measure the amount of social distance found in a typical Mormon community, and to investigate the influence of the so-called "Mormon Church" upon the prejudices of its members towards other races and religions. It also aims to experiment with a techique for re-conditioning social distance in order to increase the degree of sympathetic understanding of persons for other groups of people.

Transracial adoptive families often encounter various struggles around race as they acknowledge the challenges of racial dissimilarity in their family structure. This thesis, grounded in the theoretical framework of Relational Dialectics Theory, explored the competing discourses around the conversation of race for adult Asian adoptees. The results from 35 semi-structured interviews and contrapuntal analysis revealed one dialectical tension highlighting the Asian adoptee’s role in maintaining conversations of race with their White adoptive parents. Some adoptees voiced the discourse of taking the opportunity to be the advocate, while others voiced the discourse of feeling frustrated with being the advocate. The results of this thesis provide the perspective of Asian adoptees in White families as they attempt to engage in conversations about race with their family members.

This study critically examined how issues of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration are discursively constructed within the English language European online press. Through the use of a frame analysis as well as a more focused discourse analysis, an examination was undertaken to uncover how “us” versus “them” perspectives were manifest within a public discourse. A total of 132 articles from The Daily Mail, Le Monde Diplomatique, Dutchnews.nl, Spiegel Online and The International Herald Tribune were selected using a systematic sampling method based on the results of a search query for multiculturalism at each news site. The analysis of the data corpus revealed the news media's depiction of multiculturalism and Muslim immigrants as not wholly negative on the surface but under closer scrutiny revealed discursive and linguistic techniques that consistently marginalized and “othered” them. The themes found in the data corpus also illuminated a trend of the subordinated population as lacking proper representation and always being spoken for by the news media.