Active listening

Active listening is a technique that is used in counseling, training, and solving disputes or conflicts. It requires the listener to fully concentrate, understand, respond and then remember what is being said.[1] This is opposed to other listening techniques like reflective listening and empathic listening. Reflective listening is where the listener repeats back to the speaker what they have just heard to confirm understanding of both parties. Empathic listening is about giving people an outlet for their emotions before being able to be more open, sharing experiences and being able to accept new perspectives on troubled topics that cause emotional suffering.[2] Listening skills may establish flow rather than closed mindedness.

Comprehending

Comprehension is a shared meaning between parties in a communication transaction. This is the first step in the listening process. The second step is being able to take breaks between discernible words, or talking segmentation.

Retaining

Retaining is the second step in the process. Memory is essential to the listening process because the information retained when a person is involved in the listening process is how meaning from words is created. Because everyone has different memories, the speaker and the listener may attach different meanings to the same statement. Memories are fallible, things like cramming may cause information to be forgotten.

Responding

Listening is an interaction between speaker and listener.[3] It adds action to a normally passive process.[3]

Tactic

Active listening involves the listener observing the speaker's nonverbal behavior and body language.[4] The listener can observe nonverbal behaviors through, kinesics—the study of body motion and posture, paralinguistics—the study of the tone of words, and proxemics—the study of physical distance and posture between speakers.[5] Having the ability to interpret a person's body language lets the listener develop a more accurate understanding of the speaker's message.[6]

Individuals in conflict often contradict each other.[7] Ambushing occurs when one listens to someone else's argument for its weaknesses and ignore its strengths.[8] This may include a distortion of the speaker's argument to gain a competitive advantage. On the other hand, if one finds that the other party understands, an atmosphere of cooperation can be created.[9]

Use

Active listening is used in a wide variety of situations, including public interest advocacy, community organizing, tutoring,[10] medical workers talking to patients,[11] HIV counseling,[12] helping suicidal persons,[13] management,[14] counseling and journalistic settings. In groups it may aid in reaching consensus. It may also be used in casual conversation or small talk to build understanding, though this can be interpreted as condescending.

A listener can use several degrees of active listening, each resulting in a different quality of communication.[15]

The proper use of active listening results in getting people to open up, avoiding misunderstandings, resolving conflict, and building trust.[16] In a medical context, benefits may include increased patient satisfaction,[11] improved cross-cultural communication,[17] improved outcomes,[11] or decreased litigation.[18]

Active listening can be lifted by the active listening observation scale.[19]

Barriers to active listening

There are a multitude of factors that may impede upon someone’s ability to listen with purpose and intention; these factors are referred to as listening blocks.[20] Some examples of these blocks include rehearsing, filtering, and advising. Rehearsing is when the listener is more focused on preparing their response rather than listening. Filtering is when a listener focuses only on what they expect to hear, while tuning out other aspects of what is being said, and lastly, advising is when the listener focuses on problem solving, which can create a sense of pressure to fix what the other person is doing wrong.[21] Some barriers are due to hunger or fatigue of the listener, making them irritated and less inclined to listen to the speaker. Sometimes it is due to the language the speaker uses—such as high sounding and bombastic words that can lead to ambiguity. Other barriers include distractions, trigger words, vocabulary, and limited attention span.[22]

Shift response

Shift response is the general tendency of a speaker in a conversation to affix attention to their position. This is a type of conversational narcissism—the tendency of listeners to turn the topic to themselves without showing sustained interest in others.[23] A support response is the opposite of a shift response; it is an attention giving method and a cooperative effort to focus the conversational attention on the other person. Instead of being me-oriented like shift response, it is we-oriented.[24] It is the response a competent communicator is most likely to use.[8]

Understanding of non-verbal cues

Ineffective listeners are unaware of non-verbal cues, though they dramatically affect how people listen. To a certain extent, it is also a perceptual barrier. Up to 93 percent of people's attitudes are formed by non-verbal cues. This should help one to avoid undue influence from non-verbal communication. In most cases, the listener does not understand the non-verbal cues the speaker uses. A person may show fingers to emphasize a point, but this may be perceived as an intent by the speaker to place their fingers in the listener's eyes. Overuse of non-verbal cues also creates distortion, and as a result listeners may be confused and forget the correct meaning.[25]

Overcoming listening barriers

The active listening technique is used to improve personal communications in organizations. Listeners put aside their own emotions and ask questions and paraphrase what the speaker says to clarify and gain a better understanding of what the speaker intends to say.[26] Judging or arguing prematurely is a result of holding onto a strict personal opinion.[27] This hinders the ability to be able to listen closely to what is being said. Eye contact and appropriate body languages are seen as important components to active listening. The stress and intonation may also keep them active and away from distractions.

Active listening in music

Active listening has been developed as a concept in music and technology by François Pachet, researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Paris. Active listening in music refers to the idea that listeners can be given some degree of control on the music they listen to, by means of technological applications mainly based on artificial intelligence and information theory techniques, by opposition to traditional listening, in which the musical media is played passively by some neutral device[28][29][30]

History

Carl Rogers and Richard Farson coined the term "active listening" in 1957 in a paper of the same title (reprinted in 1987 in the volume “Communicating in Business Today”). Practicing active listening also emphasized Rogers’ (1980) concept of three facilitative conditions for effective counseling; empathy, genuineness, and unconditional positive regard.[31] Rogers and Farson write: "Active listening is an important way to bring about changes in people. Despite the popular notion that listening is a passive approach, clinical and research evidence clearly shows that sensitive listening is a most effective agent for individual personality change and group development. Listening brings about changes in peoples’ attitudes toward themselves and others; it also brings about changes in their basic values and personal philosophy. People who have been listened to in this new and special way become more emotionally mature, more open to their experiences, less defensive, more democratic, and less authoritarian."

Criticism

A Munich-based marital therapy study conducted by Dr. Kurt Hahlweg and associates found that even after employing active listening techniques in the context of couple's therapy, the typical couple was still distressed.[32]

Active listening was criticized by John Gottman's The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work as being of limited usefulness:

Active listening asks couples to perform Olympic-level emotional gymnastics when their relationship can barely walk. . . . After studying some 650 couples and tracking the fate of their marriages for up to fourteen years, we now understand that this approach to counseling doesn't work, not just because it's nearly impossible for most couples to do well, but more importantly because successful conflict resolution isn't what makes marriages succeed. One of the most startling findings of our research is that most couples who have maintained happy marriages rarely do anything that even partly resembles active listening when they're upset.[33]

Robert F. Scuka defends active listening by arguing that:

...a careful reading of the Hahlweg et al. (1984) study reveals that Gottman cites only certain (one-sided) results from the study. He also overlooks several important considerations that call into question his implied dismissal of the RE model as a legitimate therapeutic intervention for distressed couples.[34]

See also

References
  1. "Active Listening Presentation". 2014-07-11. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  2. "Empathic First Aid listening skills". Empathic listening skills. Berkeley University of California: College of Resources. Retrieved 14 December 2018.
  3. Worthington, Debra (2016). Listening: Processes, Functions and Competency. New York: Routledge. p. 87. ISBN 9780132288545.
  4. Maley, Claude (2012). Project Management Concepts, Methods, and Techniques. CRC Press. p. 417. ISBN 978-1-4665-0288-8.
  5. Lackie, B. (1977). "Nonverbal communication in clinical social work practice". Cinical Social Work Journal. 5 (1): 43–52. doi:10.1007/BF02143599. S2CID 144069604.
  6. Atwater, Eastwood (1981). I Hear You. Prentice-Hall. p. 83. ISBN 0-13-450684-7.
  7. Barr, Jill; Dowding, Lesley (2015). Leadership in Health Care. Sage. p. 132. ISBN 978-1-4739-0455-2.
  8. In the Company of Others: An Introduction to Communication. New York: Oxford University Press. 2010. pp. 157–66. ISBN 978-0-19-533630-6. OCLC 276930486.
  9. Fisher, Roger; Ury, William (2012). Getting to Yes. Random House.
  10. Maudsley G (March 1999). "Roles and responsibilities of the problem based learning tutor in the undergraduate medical curriculum". BMJ. 318 (7184): 657–61. doi:10.1136/bmj.318.7184.657. PMC 1115096. PMID 10066213.
  11. Lang F, Floyd MR, Beine KL (2000). "Clues to patients' explanations and concerns about their illnesses. A call for active listening". Arch Fam Med. 9 (3): 222–27. doi:10.1001/archfami.9.3.222. PMID 10728107.
  12. Baxter P, Campbell T (August 7–12, 1994). "HIV counselling skills used by health care workers in Zambia (abstract no. PD0743)". Int Conf AIDS. 10 (390). Archived from the original on March 7, 2010.
  13. Laflamme G (1996). "[Helping suicidal persons by active listening]". Infirm Que (in French). 3 (4): 35. PMID 9147668.
  14. Mineyama S, Tsutsumi A, Takao S, Nishiuchi K, Kawakami N (2007). "Supervisors' attitudes and skills for active listening with regard to working conditions and psychological stress reactions among subordinate workers". J Occup Health. 49 (2): 81–87. doi:10.1539/joh.49.81. PMID 17429164.
  15. Verma, Shalini (2015). Technical Communication for Engineers. India: Vikas. p. 228. ISBN 978-93259-9018-0.
  16. "Active Listening". Inspiration. White Dove Books. Archived from the original on 28 June 2012. Retrieved 19 April 2012.
  17. Davidhizar R (2004). "Listening – a nursing strategy to transcend culture". J Pract Nurs. 54 (2): 22–4, quiz 26–7. PMID 15460343.
  18. Robertson K (2005). "Active listening: more than just paying attention". Aust Fam Physician. 34 (12): 1053–55. PMID 16333490. Archived from the original on 2012-09-09.
  19. Fassaert T, van Dulmen S, Schellevis F, Bensing J (2007). "Active listening in medical consultations: development of the Active Listening Observation Scale (ALOS-global)". Patient Educ Couns. 68 (3): 258–64. doi:10.1016/j.pec.2007.06.011. PMID 17689042.
  20. McKay, M.; Davis, M.; Fanning, P. (2009). Messages: The communications skills book. Oackland, CA: New Harbinger.
  21. Nemec, P.B.; Spagnolo, A.C.; Soydan, A.S. (2017). "Can you hear me now? Teaching listening skills". Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal. 40 (4): 415–417. doi:10.1037/prj0000287. PMID 29265860.
  22. Reed, Warren H. (1985). Positive listening: learning to hear what people are really saying. New York: F. Watts. ISBN 0-531-09583-5.
  23. Derber, C. (1979). The pursuit of attention: Power and individualism in everyday life. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 5.
  24. Vangelisti, A.; Knapp, M.; Daly, J. (1990). "Conversational narcissism". Communication Monographs. 57 (4): 251–74. doi:10.1080/03637759009376202.
  25. Communication Skills, Nageshwar Rao, Rajendra P. Das, Himalaya publishing House, 2012, ISBN 9789350516669, p. 64
  26. Kerzner, Harold. Project Management: A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling, and Controlling.
  27. Lama, Dalai. "Top 3 Barriers to Effective Listening". People Communicating. Retrieved 19 April 2012.
  28. François Pachet. "The Future of Content Is in Ourselves" Archived 2014-05-21 at the Wayback Machine. "The Future of Content Is in Ourselves". In M. Tokoro, editor, Open System Science, pp. 133–58, IOS Press. 2010.
  29. François Pachet. "Active Listening: What is in the Air?" Archived 2015-09-23 at the Wayback Machine. In Miranda, E., editor, Musica y Nuevas Tecnologias: Perspectivas para el Siglo XXI, L'Angelot. 1999.
  30. François Pachet. "Constraints for Multimedia Applications" Archived 2015-09-23 at the Wayback Machine. Proceedings of PACLP 1999, London, March 1999. The Practical Application Company.
  31. Levitt, D.H. (2001). "Active listening and counselor self-efficacy: Emphasis on one microskill in the beginning counselor training". The Clinical Supervisor. 20 (2): 101–115. doi:10.1300/J001v20n02_09. S2CID 145368181.
  32. Halhweg, K., Schindler, L., Revenstorf, D., & Brengelmann, J.C. (1984). The Munich Marital Therapy Study. In K. Hahlweg & N.S. Jacobson (Eds.), Marital Interaction: Analysis and Modification (pp. 3–26), New York: Guilford Press
  33. Gottman, John (16 May 2000). "Inside the Seattle Love Lab: The Truth about Happy Marriages". The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Harmony Books. pp. 10–11. ISBN 978-0-609-80579-4.
  34. Scuka, Robert F. (28 May 2005). "The Munich Group Study". Relationship Enhancement Therapy.

Further reading
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