A Broader Understanding of the Ethics of Listening: Philosophy,Cultural Studies,Media Studies and the Ethical Listening Subject

This study investigated the effects of Mozart's high-frequency-rich music and structured oral directions on third graders' auding and reading comprehension performance. The design was pre-post, with a control group and two experimental treatment groups. Mozart Symphonies Nos. 35, 38, 40, and 41, and four Frank Schaffer listening skills books were used with one experimental group. The second experimental group received the listening instruction without music. The control group worked assorted word searches. The Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test (Forms 1 and 2, Primary C) and the Addison-Wesley Sequential Test of Educational Progress (STEP) III (D) Listening Test (Form X) were used to measure reading comprehension and auding respectively. Instruction was administered by regular classroom teachers to intact classes for 30 minute morning periods, three times per week for eight weeks. Analysis of pretest and posttest scores from 63 students reveal that an organized instructional method using Mozart's music and oral directions significantly increases auding and reading comprehension, with music being the key independent variable.     

Response: Choice and Ethics in Listening Situations

We developed a new listening scale pertaining to how one likes to be listened to by others. Specifically, we constructed items by adapting the Listening Style Profile (LSP)-16 and a Constructive Listening subscale taken from the Facilitative Listening Scale and tested the validity of the scale against the Big Five personality traits. A survey (N = 195) suggested that (a) the factor structure of the adapted LSP-16 items yielded the expected four factors, albeit with items not loading on factors as expected in the original LSP-16; (b) the people facet of the LSP-16 is strongly correlated with a scale of constructive listening, r = .70; and (c) both the people facet of the LSP-16 and the constructive-listening behaviors scale are correlated with all of the Big Five personality traits, save for neuroticism. These listening scales showed a moderate correlation with a summary of all of the Big Five scales, known as General Factor of Personality, r = .38. Among the implications is the possibility that the more adjusted a person is, the more the person prefers to be listened to with a people-listening style or by a constructive listener.     

Listening to Words,Hearing Feelings: Links Between Eating Disorders and Alexithymia

Research suggests that eating disorders often involve difficulty with affect regulation and processing of emotions. Studies also show that many individuals with these difficulties suffer from alexithymia, or an impaired ability to use language to tolerate or process emotions. Many clients with eating disorders are highly verbal, able to talk about feelings and even have good insight into the causes of their behaviors. Yet their verbal and cognitive strengths may disguise their inability to use thoughts to manage their emotions. Such clients often have a lifelong experience of appearing more capable and competent than they feel. Self-criticism and negative self-image concretized in a negative body image are part of their eating disorder. Therapeutic exploration can increase anxiety and self-criticism, aggravating feelings of inadequacy and the concomitant need for self-soothing. Techniques that focus on affect regulation have been shown to be effective, yet a psychodynamic approach can be an important tool in such an integrative practice. In this article, clinical material and theory will illustrate some of the ways that incorporating an understanding of alexithymia into the work can enhance the use of both psychodynamic exploration of meaning and also tools to manage affect and change behavior.     

Response to the Dialogue Between Adrienne Harris and David Lichtenstein

In this discussion, the author clarifies the different positions held by Adrienne Harris and David Liechtenstein in a frank and open dialogue about the Lacanian and relational viewpoints in the field of psychoanalysis. The author proposes in the end a new integration of the process of projective identification to narrow the divergence between the two schools of thought.     

Cross Talk: Dialogue Between the Edge and the Center

This essay was inspired by Robert Gober's moving and brilliant creation of a room of Forrest Bess's work and life, set within Elisabeth Sussman's paradigm smashing 2012 Biennial. I read Bess as an artist and a man in struggle, creatively and personally, with several binaries: inside/outside, metropolitan and hometown, gender binaries, and binaries in artistic practice. In all spheres, highly consciously and perhaps also unconsciously, Bess's encounter with, defeat by, and victory over these binaries produced an extraordinary body of work. In this very postmodern modernist, we see the complexity of materiality in body, sexuality, gender, and art.     

Listening in Mediated Contexts: Introduction to a Special Issue

New communication technologies, applications, and software have fundamentally changed how we communicate. However, listening research and scholarship has not kept pace – conceptually, methodologically, or theoretically – with this emerging area of research. This special issue takes an important step toward addressing the intricacies and complexities associated with mediated listening.     

Compassionate Listening: A Framework for Listening to the Seriously Ill

Present conceptions of listening, such as empathic or therapeutic listening, do not provide a way of alleviating the sense of being alone felt by individuals who are seriously ill or suffering in some other way. Compassionate listening, a kind of dialogic listening, provides a framework for approaching these significant listening situations that emphasizes our interconnectedness and our shared humanity and that seeks to overcome the isolation so commonly felt during serious illness.     

Theory and the Advancement of Listening Research: A Reply to Purdy

This essay provides a spirited response to Purdy's essay decrying the necessity for theory-driven listening research. In it, I correct two primary misconceptions about my previous essay and attempt to maintain a place for theorizing listening.     

Exploring the Relationship Between Listening Style and Need for Cognition

To further our understanding of listening as a cognitive process, a greater understanding of the relationship between listening and other personality and cognitive constructs is needed. To that end, this study explores the relationship between need for cognition and listening style preference. Results indicate that need for cognition is moderately associated with the Content listening style such that participants with higher need for cognition scores exhibit a higher preference for content listening.     

Disaster,Time, and Dialogue: A Couple Lessons from Hurricane Katrina

There is much to learn about ourselves and the worlds we fashion “when all hell breaks loose” (W. Lloyd Warner 1947:1).

This brief paper is about The Katrina Bookshelf, specifically about a couple of the contributions several of the forthcoming books on The Shelf will make to the social study of disaster. It is both a collective and an individual achievement. Imagine The Katrina Bookshelf as a composition and each book on The Shelf a movement, a part of the composition that is more or less complete in and of itself. Any one of the books could be taken from The Shelf and read alone, independent of the others. Each has its own voice and reaches its own resolution. But examined together, The Shelf reveals the phenomenal human complexity that is Hurricane Katrina.