Commmunication Climates

A communication climate is the emotional tone of a relationship. What makes communication positive of negative is confirming and disconfirming messages. Confirming is like the value and disconfirming is like the disregard.  Confirming messages include things like recognition, acknowledgment, and endorsement. Disconfirming messages on the other hand is like verbal abuse, interrupting, and mean responses. Communication climates develop through spirals which can be negative or postive. Once a spiral starts they escalade into the climate.

 

When you feel a conflict starting to occur it is best to use confirming messages to try to stop the conflict and prevent defensive spirals from happening. Defensiveness is when someone attacks the critic, or changes what the critic says into something that they didnt neccassarly say. Defensiveness can be prevented by avioding people who  can cause dissonance, blocking out negative information or acknowledging the negativeness and not caring about it.

 

I get very uncomfortable in negative communication climate so i do alot of avoiding of them. Avoiding people to cause them especially, and if i come in contact with them i listen and act nicely to them even though i really dont care what they are saying. I am not a defensive person, i only am to people that i know really well. Otherwise i try to aviod the defensive thing all together. If someone tells me not to do something or says something not nice to me, i will just take it in an try not to get denfensive about it.