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Powerful People Are Shorter Than They Think [Study]

January 27, 2012 Interpersonal/Small Group Communication

You often hear about “the little people,” even when actual height is not discussed. Often times, it is people who converse with upcoming celebrities, telling them not to forget “the little people.” A research study from the authors of a new paper published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, found that there is some psychological truth to these kinds of statements.

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Child Raised ‘Gender Neutral’ to Avoid Stereotyping

January 27, 2012 Critical/Cultural Studies of Communication/Media

A British couple who kept their child’s gender a secret for five years have revealed that the child is male. Beck Laxton and Kieran Cooper say that they kept their son’s sex under wraps because they wanted him to grow up free from society’s preconceived ideas about what constitutes gender-appropriate behavior.

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Job Dissatisfaction Stems From Unmet Employee Needs [Study]

January 26, 2012 Organizational Communication

A new study has linked employee satisfaction to both management style and corporate attitudes towards employees. In an article published in Springer’s Journal of Business and Psychology, researchers from the Universite Francois Rabelais in Tours, France, revealed new evidence that meeting employees’ basic needs for competence, autonomy and relatedness leads to improved job satisfaction.

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$Women and math stereotypes$

Stereotype Busted! Women Are Not Worse At Math Than Men [Study]

January 25, 2012 Critical/Cultural Studies of Communication/Media

“Math is hard!” cries Teen Talk Barbie. Those words made Matel revamp the doll so that she did not say she found math hard after protesters insisted that it was degrading to women. It turns out that they were right according to a study researched at the University of Missouri.

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The Technology of Storytelling

January 23, 2012 Communication and Technology

“The art of storytelling has remained unchanged and for the most part stories are recycled, but the way that humans tell the stories has always evolved with pure consistent novelty,” says iPad storyteller Joe Sabia. From cave walls to books, opera to vaudeville, radio to radio theater, silent films and now 3D movies, we are constantly embracing new technologies that help enhance our stories.

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The Wingman Theory: Most Lie to Help Friends Save Face [Study]

January 23, 2012 Interpersonal/Small Group Communication

A new study conducted by researchers from the Alberta School of Business in cooperation with the University of Calgary suggests that, in many cases, people are willing to lie in order to help a close friend avoid embarrassment in a social situation. According to Jennifer Argo, most people will step in to help preserve or even enhance a friend’s social image or to save a friend from social embarrassment.

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Ambiguity Makes Language More Efficient, Say Scientists

January 20, 2012 Rhetorical Studies

A new study by MIT cognitive scientists argues that ambiguity may be the most efficient way to communicate after all. Instead of speakers having to invent new sounds for single-use words or memorize a large vocabulary, they can simply reuse small words that listeners can easily disambiguate through social or verbal cues.

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Signers Identify Non-Verbal Cues More Quickly, Study Reveals

January 20, 2012 Interpersonal/Small Group Communication

Deaf people who communicate through sign language are better than their hearing counterparts who don’t understand sign language at spotting and reading body language, according to a new study from the University of California. The study, which was published in the journal Cognition, was funded by the National Science Foundation, along with the National Institutes of Health.

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