Chapter 6 Listening 153Affective Component
Recall from Chapter 4 that when you display your affect, you are showing the
positive or negative feelings you have toward something—your attitudes. Simi-
larly, the affective component of listening refers to your attitude toward listen-
ing to a person or message. For example, if you care about your roommate Brett,
you are probably open to listening to him tell you how worried he is about his
economics midterm. You may be even more interested if you have a midterm
coming up yourself! Being willing to listen is an important first step in listening
effectively.
However, when you are not motivated to listen, you are prone to “tune out”
or only listen halfheartedly. If Brett seems to worry or complain about exams all
the time (especially if he gets good grades anyway), then you may not want to
hear him go on and on about this again. Or perhaps you are jealous of Brett’s
good grades. There are many factors that can affect our motivation to listen,
including preexisting schemas (Chapter 2) that we have about a person, topic, or
situation, and several listening challenges we explain later in this chapter.
Cognitive Component
The cognitive component of listening involves the mental processes of selecting
messages to focus on, giving them our attention, and then trying to understand
them. In the face of competing stimuli—your roommate Brett complaining
about his economics midterm while your other roommates stream The Walking
Dead and you get multiple texts from your parents—you must choose one sound
over the others, a process called selecting.
Next, through attending, you elect to focus attention on the communica-
tion. If you select Brett’s voice (deciding that it’s more interesting or important
than the sound of The Walking Dead), you attend actively to his words and mes-
sage. Attending is not always easy, however; if your phone keeps chirping at you
with new texts, attending to Brett’s message may be more difficult.
Suppose that while talking about his midterm, Brett mentions a disagreement
he had with his professor over the wording of an essay question. He throws around
phrases like “aggregate supply” and “reciprocal demand.” You’ve never studied eco-
nomics, so you barely understand a word he’s saying. Understanding—making
sense of messages—is a crucial step because it enables you to interpret meaning.
THERE’S A BIG
difference between hearing a
song on the radio and listening
to a friend express concern
about a personal issue. (left)
Blend Images/Punchstock/Getty Images;
(right) Blend Images/Punchstock/Getty
ImagesCONNECT
As relationships develop
(Chapter 7), communica-
tion content changes, as
do listening behaviors and
goals. When you are in
the early stages of friend-
ship with someone, you
use informational listen-
ing to discover hobbies
and things you may have
in common. But in later
stages, critical and em-
pathic listening becomes
more important as you
seek to analyze, under-
stand, and connect on a
deeper level.