Fidelity has traditionally been defined as congruence between transmitted and received signals, and has long been a concern of communication scholars and educators. In the present study, the definition was expanded to include the effectiveness of a message according to the source's purpose or intent. The intent assigned to sources was to nonverbally reward a partner during a conversation. Thus, fidelity was a function of how rewarding a source intended to be relative to how much satisfaction a partner experienced. / Previous research in the fidelity of nonverbal communication has focused on encoding and decoding of emotions. The research indicates that nonverbal communication of emotion does occur; females are better decoders and perhaps better encoders than males; and a variety of situational and modal factors influence encoding and decoding of emotions. / Encoding and decoding research has generally ignored other messages which may be communicated nonverbally, and it has ignored the transaction that occurs in communication events. The research has also overlooked the relationship between the sources and receivers of nonverbal messages. According to the developmental approach to interpersonal communication, the depth of a relationship influences the communication patterns. Nonverbal communication should also vary according to the relationship of the participants: friends should communicate more effectively than strangers. / Thus, the purpose of the present investigation was to determine the effects of sex and friendship on the fidelity of communicating rewarding nonverbal messages. Dyads composed of friends and females were predicted to display greater fidelity of nonverbal communication than dyads of males and strangers. / Fidelity was operationalized two ways. The Product Score represented an overall dimension of fidelity. It was based on the absolute difference between how rewarding the source intended to be and how satisfied the receiver felt after a conversation. The Process Score represented an ongoing dimension of fidelity, and was based on audience analysis procedures. / The experiment was conducted in a laboratory setting. The unit of analysis was the dyad; it was composed of a Sender (instructed to transmit rewarding nonverbal messages) and a Receiver of the same sex. Senders were drawn from students in a nonverbal communication class; Receivers were friends of Senders or strangers. Twenty-nine dyads contained strangers; 42 contained friends. Thirty-five dyads were male; 36 were female. / Data were analyzed using two-way analysis of variance, with sex and friendship as the main effects. The Product and Process Scores both resulted in a trend supporting the prediction regarding sex differences, with p values ranging from .05 to .10. Several exploratory analyses were also performed. Fidelity was correlated with how natural subjects felt and perceived their partners to feel. When the Receiver's perception of how natural the Sender felt was covaried using ancova, a trend supporting the friendship difference was revealed using the Process Score as the dependent variable. / Although none of the hypotheses was confirmed, the results provided some support for the predictions. Sex appears to be more important than friendship, although lack of naturalness and the artificiality of the procedures appeared to have confounded the effect of friendship. The dependent variables were uncorrelated, but both appear worthy of continued research. / Future research should continue to examine the effects of sex and friendship, it should pursue theoretical and empirical understanding of fidelity, and it should utilize other populations of subjects and nonverbal messages. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 41-11, Section: A, page: 4539. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1980.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_74345 |
| Contributors | EDWARDS, JEAN RENEE., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 126 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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