Interpersonal Theories

In my sisters junior year of college she met a guy at a local bar who she found to be extremely outgoing and handsome.  Little did my sister know that after leaving the bar that night that she would soon be dating him, and then be engaged to him and then finally reach their wedding day.  Two weeks before Bret(now my brother-in-law) engaged to my sister he had found out that he was hired to work for Nestle Food Company doing marketing and research.  My sister was extremely proud and supportive of his new job except for one little fact.  Bret had to then move out to California for his new job.

My sister and Bret had to make decisions fast. My sister recently had just gotten a job at the local high school teaching 10th grade Chemistry.  She knew she could not let the job down but she also knew that she could not leave her love of her life.  They knew it would not work long distance so for a week or so they were in a very rocky position in their relationship.  Bret obviously ended up engaging to my sister and she had agreed to move out to California with him in the Fall.  They are now happily married and they never once regret their decision moving out to California. 

This particular situation with my sister and brother-in-law exemplifies the filtering theory.  This theory states that we use a series of filters to judge how close to others we want to become.  The most important type of filter that my sister and Bret used and engaged in(no pun intended) was the sociological or incidental cues.  this filter are the demographic or environmental factors that determine probability of contact.  This filter includes factors such as where we work and live, how frequently we travel, and so on.  "Obviously, we cannot form relationships with people we have never met, and maintaining contact with someone thousands of miles away is extremely difficult." I underlined and bolded part of the previous sentence because it made my personal story of my sister and my brother-in-law ten times more probable.

I added a clip of the famous movie, The Notebook.  In this clip, the couple is seen doing everything together and some things done seperately, which can be called autonomy-togetherness dialect.  If you skip to about 45 seconds into the clip you will see the couple rope swinging into a lake, the next scene you can see the husband trying to teach the wife how to drive a stick shift.  Although he was getting very annoyed and angry with her he still found time to laugh at it until the next scene.  In the next short part the couple got into a slight argument but immediatley got over the situation.

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis asks the question of whether the language we speak shapes the way we think and see the world.  Personally, I think that this theory is a bit bizarre yet very interesting.  I think that this theory applies to everyone in the world and that everyone speaks differently and will view the world differently because of that.

Linguistic relativity says that people from different language communities and different cultures will look at the world differently pertaining to how they speak. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis looks at if American students ever studied a foreign language.  For example, some concepts and ideas that are easily expressed in one language are difficult to translate into another.

After reading an article in the New York Times my senior year of high school I can vividly remember an article about the chinese language.  In this article it discussed how chinese people cannot understand the concept of tripping on something while walking down the street.  The article said that they cannot understand this because there is nothing in their language that means "to trip" they only have a word for falling.  This is just one of many examples of where the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis comes into play.

In conclusion, I think that the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is a theory that is going to be on-going major debate for many, many years.  I feel this way because people feel very differently about this theory and some people say it is completely bogus.

Conflict with a friend

Conflict is something that happens every day in life.  From conflict with terrorist groups across seas, to conflict in Literature classics such as Romeo and Juliet, to the simplest things like conflict within our friendships, it is constantly surrounding human beings.  My friends to me are the people that hold me up when I’m down and are always supporting me no matter what I do in life.  When I have conflicts with them I get very sad and I always think of ways it could have been stopped. 

                In class we learned about the listening process and the steps it has for successful listening techniques.  Attention, Interpretation, Evaluation, Responding, and Storage and Retrieval are the five steps in the process.  My one friend and I back in high school used to obviously communicate poorly after learning about the steps we should have taken to communicate with each other.  My friend and I never focused on each other when we were talking.  Either she or I used to be on our phones texting while one of us was trying to talk.  This exemplifies the first step of Attention.  To improve my attention, I should realize that becoming distracted will happen in any situation.  I also would need to avoid distractions, in this case being my cell phone. 

                The next step is interpretation.  Some ways I could improve my interpretation skills is to previously inform myself on the topic that I was going to be listening about.  By interpreting the situation we assign meaning to what the person is saying.  In my situation I may not have been paying close enough attention to her, which in turn would make my interpretation of what she was saying incorrect.  To make sense of what somebody is saying we use cognitive schema.  There are three different types of cognitive schemata people can use to make meanings around them.  Person prototypes are idealized representations of a certain kind of person or stereotype.  Personal constructs are the characteristics that we habitually notice in others, these are used to make judgments.  Finally, scripts are representations of sequences of actions.  A script tells us what comes next in a sequence of actions. 

            Evaluation is when people make critical judgments about messages.  In order to improve one’s evaluation skills, somebody can question the accuracy of information, separate facts from inferences and evaluations are aware of personal biases, and delay final evaluation.  To improve responding the person should realize that you cannot not communicate.  Also the person should see things from the sender’s perspective. Finally, to improve storage and retrieval skills one should decide what information needs to be stored, review the material that was communicated to you and use mnemonic devices or special memory aids to remember things in an easier way.