Mindfulness and Interpersonal Communication

Journal of Social Issues, Spring, 2000 by Judee K. Burgoon, Charles R. Berger, Vincent R. Waldron

In addition to mindfulness growing out of naturally arising features of interaction, verbal and nonverbal message elements can be manipulated intentionally to elicit more thoughtful, creative, and flexible states of mind. In fact, most experimental inductions designed to instigate greater mindfulness rely on variants on these kinds of message manipulations and so could be reexamined from the perspective of the communication features that made the mindfulness induction successful. Additionally, communication research has examined social-cognitive phenomena closely related to mindfulness-mindlessness. Communication that is planful, effortfully processed, creative, strategic, flexible, and/or reason-based (as opposed to emotion-based) would seem to qualify as mindful, whereas communication that is reactive, superficially processed, routine, rigid, and emotional would fall toward the mindless end of the continuum. Moreover, principles of mindfulness are centrally implicated in research on message production and message reception. Such research reveals that extensive planning, heightened attention, greater effort, and the like do not automatically translate into more efficacious behavior. Rather, the complexity (number of planned actions and contingencies), specificity, and quality or sophistication of such thoughts, plans, and goals are key (Berger et al., 1996; Waldron et al., 1995). Interactants who can think of only abstract courses of action ("argue the point" "be friendly") may be stymied by the need to produce specific responses during conversational situations. Those who have ineffective plans for making friends or requesting dates may experience loneliness (Berger, 1988; Berger & Bell, 1988). Interventions that offer both specific responses and alternatives when initial tactics fail represent the kind of mindful communication that may enable more effective functioning.

Mindfulness can have negative consequences on some objective measures while simultaneously producing positive consequences on others. For example, studies of plans for direction giving, persuasive interactions, and requesting dates (Berger, 1988; Berger, Karol, & Jordan, 1989; Berger et al., 1996; Knowlton & Berger, 1997) have shown that plan complexity can have a detrimental effect on verbal fluency. Yet the complexity of "imagined interactions" (defined in a manner similar to plans) predicted competent performance in another study (Edwards, Honeycutt, & Zagacki, 1988). And complexity at the tactical level appears to facilitate the production of effective information-seeking and verbal disagreement tactics (Waldron & Applegate, 1994, 1998). Thus, although mental search processes may interfere with the production of fluent speech (Berger, 1995, 1997), they may produce more desirable courses of action.

In sum, even when interaction features possess the potential to elevate mindfulness, thoughts may be drawn to more concrete and trivial features of the interaction rather than to more consequential ones. In other words, there is no assurance that interaction features instigating greater mindfulness will yield more flexible, creative, or adaptive thought processes and responses. Nevertheless, because action schemata and other behavioral adjustments typically operate semiautomatically and have fewer cognitive resources devoted to their surveillance (J. K. Burgoon, Stem et al., 1995; Patterson, 1998), novel and unexpected elements of social episodes at least increase the odds that more mindful processing of relevant and important information will occur.