Reaction Paper on Interpersonal Relationships and Communication

Reaction Paper on Interpersonal Relationships and Communication

 Communication develops on an adaptive approach depending on the relationship between two communicating people or entities. In interpersonal communication, one has to establish specific characteristics of the other person as the basis components to guide their communication. This task develops an assessment of a friendly relationship with my friend Justin applying the concepts of the study in describing the aspects of communication in our relationship.

Relationship Background

I have known Justin throughout my childhood since we grew together from Kindergarten throughout High School. Through that period of our friendship relationship, we have developed interactive features that have significantly shaped our level of relationship and communication. We grew up in the same neighborhood, attended the same schools, and shared most of the childhood landmarks while internalizing our friendships with different environments of our origin, both cultural and familial. As we came of age, we had established a strong and lasting friendly relationship while adapting to our different life paths, professionals, and ideologies. Through an understanding of self and each other, communication has been critical in the growth of our relationship and internalizing communicational aspects within the relationship. Throughout my childhood life, I had many friends, but creating such a long relationship into adulthood develops from the feature of perception and selection within the attributes and compatibility that exists between the two of us.

The aspect of self-enrichment is critical in communication by evaluating the relationship and promoting self-development. Four types of knowledge define how an individual identifies himself/herself in a relationship with another person. These elements are the open information known to everyone, the blind information others know, but you don’t, the hidden information one knows, and others don’t, and information unknown to everyone. Self-disclosure develops as an intentional act of revealing information to someone about ourselves, which they might get from other sources or in different ways. Within the perspective of self-disclosure, my relationship with Justin is very trustful, and one likely gets offended learning information about the other from a third-party. In our final year of high school, the college acceptance mails coincided with my travel out of the neighborhood. When Justin received his mail, he wanted me to be among the first people who get the information. His attempts to reach my phone failed, and he tried to withhold information from other people to avoid a situation where I learned the information from a different person. This is just an example of the element of self-disclosure and self-identity within a relationship where people prefer to give information in a firsthand account, depending on the level of a relationship.

The aspect of perception develops within three active processes of selecting, organizing, and interpreting. These features develop within the human cognitive complexity, which is a psychological process of developing perceptual skills of an individual. Establishing long relationships must emerge from an array of attributes that guide the selection, organization, and interpretation features of a person. Selection in the study is set from influences by stimuli, a notice of new things, needs analysis within the moment, and the cultural impact on perception. The organization develops from prototypes, personal constructs, stereotypes, and scripts. Interpretation extends to attach meanings to our selection and organization processes. Within these perspectives, Justin and I developed the friendship from early childhood and perceptions have evolved out of shared experiences that help us to explore life differently. The relationship still exists, but definitely, how we relate has changed through that period. We currently live in different regions, and as we came of age, our decisions and perceptions developed differences, and an understanding of change is evident.

Influence on perception is an element that develops from six factors that affect the perception process of an individual. The physiological factor, for instance, applies to our differences in food and beverage selections and medical conditions such as Justin’s allergy to peanuts. The element of expectations refers to the socio-psychological phenomenon of self-fulfilling, where people tend to predict things in the future and believe they will happen. This feature is different from everyone, and differences in expectations influence perceptions and, eventually, decisions. For instance, my expectations in future career paths differ from those of Justin, and thus, individual choices tend to influence differences. Age and life experiences are other critical factors since as people grow to experience different things, their views are altered, and eventually, interpretations differ from those processed by others. Justin, for instance, lost his relative to medical malpractice from a minor accident that wasn’t life-threatening. He began to establish interests in health sciences and decided to pursue a career within the field. Culture, cognitive abilities, and self-identity are other features that impact on perception and the level of relationships between people. Culturally, as I venture into business studies and Justin studies health sciences, our perceptions of the world, and life develops significant differences. Cognitive features range from psychological response to events, and the career path, Justin’s reaction to a traumatic experience influenced his self-development and identity.

Language is a crucial element of communication, and its success depends on the ability to understand language and its symbolic nature. Communication in every kind of relationship must be able to identify language features and its symbols to ensure understanding and proper usage of it for interactions. Symbols in language define how we use and understand the language and are what we use to describe experiences, relationships, thoughts, etc. Across every relationship, language symbols denote how features such as stereotypes, judgments, and meaning develop. The ability to communicate effectively is highly dependent on the choice of language symbols for use, and a slight failure can lead to misrepresentation of the entire language. To effective communicate using language symbols, one has to adopt regulative rules and constitutive rules. This is a feature that guides my friendship with Justin by identifying the different topics and how they should be communicated. This feature was practical during the grief period, and condoling someone who had lost a close relative required a specific approach to every kind of conversation. Interpersonal interactions ought to adopt punctuation, which basically derives the limits of every issue and the perceptions the two hold differently. Issues such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and culture derive a particular barrier of interaction between people, and throughout our conversations, we have a form of understanding of some issues and their limits. Totalizing is another feature we tend to avoid in a kind of relationship where we’ve been supportive of each other’s attributes through the years.

Interpersonal interactions, particularly in an informal, friendly relationship, require a critical understanding of communication across both verbal and non-verbal perspectives. One needs the ability to express ideas and thoughts adequately while understanding the response across both communication perspectives. The level of a relationship can be affected mainly by elements of resentment if a person feels the other ones are developing resenting attributes to a message. The study can equip this perspective in my interactions with Justin through the integration of effective verbal communication guidelines with my interactive features. Engaging in a dual perspective would provide my recognition of the viewpoints of Justin. Owning my feelings is critical in developing an argument as my own and offering a perspective for his response. Respecting responses can aid the engagement and understanding of how the answer emerges from the other person and their perceptions of the topic or issue. In verbal interactions, I can also strive for accuracy and clarification of ideas through our engagements. This would objectively aid static evaluation of the conversation; establish the language success in the communication and indexing as a reminder of communication evaluations and their applications.

Non-verbal communication is an element that has evolved within our relationship from an early age. The element exists on the ability to identify issues arising or messages delivered without the use of words. Throughout our friendship, how we communicate has significantly changed, and coming of age, the level of openness in addressing issues becomes self-limited. Successful engagement, therefore, has been on the ability to read the non-verbal language symbols within an understanding of each other throughout our friendship. Sometimes a friend can say “all is well,” but the tone of the response infer on something different. An element such as chronemics can establish how the person feels about a question or a topic developing. Chronemics refers to the purpose or role of time taken in communication, and a close relationship ought to employ that feature and establish the hidden meaning of the non-verbal language.

Listening is another reflective issue addressed in the study and develops as a critical component in interpersonal interaction. How we engage with people is highly dependent on our ability to hear their thoughts, internalize, and efficiently provide feedback. Listening is an integrated process from the ears, the mind, and the heart to integrate all necessary features of communication-based on the type of relationship and the current situation or issue under discussion. Through the study, I can develop listening traits that avoid barriers such as pseudo listening, monopolizing, selectivity, and negative connotations to equip communication and integration.

Conclusion

My relationship with Justin is currently at a transformation level as we get used to the distance and differences in career paths, choices, and decisions. Through my study of interpersonal communication and relationships, I expect to integrate the study’s insights with my communication practices and processes daily. I hope to benefit from developing an understanding of situations within different perspectives of communication. We are at an age where, through different experiences in life, our perceptions and thoughts may tend to differ across different subjects. Through an understanding of self, self-identity, and the natural occurrence of such differences, I expected our development and history to strengthen the relationship as more differences tend to occur. Communication is crucial in every relationship, and how we develop aspects of engagement defines how effective we interact.