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Relational Listening Goals Influence How People Report Talking About Problems

This study tested the extent that style of listening by message receivers and their subsequent responses affects communicative response styles of initial message senders in supportive contexts. A sample of 415 college students participated in an experiment. Each participant was asked to recall a recently upsetting event, to imagine that they disclosed to a close friend or family member who was attributed with each of four different listening goals, and to indicate how they were likely to respond. Results suggest that listening goals affect situational communicator responses when controlling for trait communicator styles. Relational goals increase the likelihood of interpersonal communicator responses but decrease the prospect of linguistic-styled disclosures. Analytical listener goals do not elicit linguistic or logical responses nor do critical listener goals influence linguistic or logical disclosures. Only relational listener goals influence communicator responses in these data, and only for interpersonal- (increased) and linguistic- (decreased) type responses. Listener effectiveness did not increase with a wider variety of listening skills; relational listening was the only goal that significantly affected response preference. This study moves work on supportive listening toward a model that theorizes the reciprocal nature of supportive encounters: Listening is interactive.