High Communication Studies

Although people with high levels of communication apprehension presumably want to avoid communication in general, it may also be hypothesized that some types of communication will appear more threatening to the individual and thus avoided even more than others, such as was the case with public speaking and seeing an advisor as previously noted. Following this line of reasoning, three studies have tested the hypothesis that people with high communication apprehension will engage in less self-disclosure than other people. All three obtained support for the hypothesis (Hamilton, 1972; McCroskey and Richmond, 1976; Wheeless, Nesser, and McCroskey, 1976). Whether this pattern is produced by lack of self-esteem, the desire to avoid the reciprocity

al. (1976) have also investigated the social behavior of college students with regard to their level of communication apprehension. As hypothesized, they found that students with high communication apprehension, interacted less with peer strangers, and were more likely to engage in exclusive (steady) dating. The latter finding was predicted on the basis that, for a person with high communication apprehension, it would be difficult to engage in the variety of persons and, consequently, steady dating would be an attractive alternative to the option of interacting with a significant number of other people in order to secure dating partners. In an extension of this research, McCroskey and Kretzschmar (1977) found that college graduates with high communication apprehension are more likely to marry immediately upon graduation than graduates with lower communication apprehension. This effect was hypothesized on the basis of the presumed difficulty for the person with high communication apprehension to engage in courtship behaviors and the attractive alternative of marrying the person with whom the person had been dating steadily in college. Further research into using computers to close the gap in communication for people with high CA found that computer-mediated communication reduced levels of social anxiety in the person, which means the person was more likely to open up and speak out online than face-to-face (Yen, Yen, Chen, Wang, Chang & Ko,

Four studies are particularly relevant. McCroskey, Hamilton, and Weider (1974) found that people who exhibited high tension in their communication behaviors in a small group were perceived to be less socially attractive, and less interpersonally similar. Daly and McCroskey (1975) found that there was a generally positive linear correlation between the amount of time a person was perceived to talk in a small group and other people's perceptions of their competence, sociability, extroversion, composure, power, social attractiveness, and task attractiveness. Similarly, Freimuth (1976) found that as the amount of silence increased during the presentation of a speech, there was a corresponding decrease in perceived competence of the speaker. Mulac and (1975) also observed a significant negative relationship between perceived anxiety in male public speakers and perceptions of their competence and