Logan Coulter

Professor Gonzalez

Interpersonal Communications

24 March 2020

Listening styles

Listening plays a very important role in communication as a whole. It’s how we

perceive feelings, needs, wants, and just a part of how we communicate with others. By

listening you can just tell with their tone or intensity if they are upset, happy, or etc.

Listening is an important role in interpersonal relationships because it allows you

to understand how the other person is feeling. We can define listening as the process of

receiving and responding to others’ messages. Empathizing is a response style

listeners’ use when they want to show they identify with the speaker (Alder et al. 197 &

214). The four types of listening styles are Relational, Analytical, Task Oriented, and

Critical. Each of these styles play important roles listening when building and

maintaining interpersonal relationships.

Listening is an important role in interpersonal communication. Listening and

hearing are two very different terms, hearing is the process in which sound waves strike

the eardrum and cause vibrations that are transmitted to the brain. Listening occurs

when the brain reconstructs these electrochemical impulses into a representation of the

original sound and then gives them meaning. (Alder et al. 198). An example of listening

versus hearing would be hearing is when you can hear people talking in a restaurant but
are not actually listening to the words and processing them, in other words it would just

sound like background noise. Listening would be talking with someone, taking in the

information, and responding back to them. 

There are four types of listening styles, Relational, Analytical, Task oriented and

critical. Relational listening is building relations or emotional closeness with other

people. My results from this were thirty-five. I think this score is pretty good because I

tend to try and relate with the person I am talking to when communicating. According to

the book, people who primarily use this style are typically extroverted, attentive and

friendly (Alder et al. 199). Although I may not be extroverted, I think of myself as friendly

and attentive.

The second type of listening is Analytical. Analytical listening emphasizes

attending to the full message before coming to judgement. People who default to this

style of listening want to hear details and analyze an issue from a variety of

perspectives. Analytical listeners can be a big help when the goal is to investigate

difficult questions, taking into account a wide range of perspectives (Alder et al. 201).

My score for this was thirty. I personally think that I tend to not quickly judge a book by

it’s cover, mainly because that’s how I was raised but here and there I notice myself

being judgmental in my head.

The third style of listening is Task Oriented. This type of listening is most

concerned with efficiency and accomplishing the job at hand. It’s most appropriate when

the primary focus is taking care of business; such listeners encourage others to be

organized and concise (Alder et al. 199). My score for this was Forty. This was my
highest score because I tend to get impatient with people who take forever to get the

point across.  

The last style of listening is critical. This would be defined as having the desire to

evaluate messages like critical thinking. These types of people are concerned not with

just understanding messages, but with assessing their quality, focusing on accuracy

and consistency (Alder et al. 201). A con for critical listeners is they can at times

frustrate others by seeming to find faults about small details. My score for this was

nineteen. My score was so low for this one because I don’t usually tend to interrupt

someone when they are talking but afterwards I may.

Based on my data, I can conclude that my listening is pretty good, but could

always improve. My highest score came from task-oriented listening and my lowest

score was critical listening. 

What I think needs to change about my listening to strengthen my interpersonal

relationships at work or at home is to just be a more effective listener and pay closer

attention to detail. Whichever style I use, it is important to recognize that I can control

the way I listen (Alder et al. 201). I can also become a more effective listener by

assessing and adapting to the different styles of my conversational partners. Based on

my lowest score, what I plan to do to improve my listening for the future is to pay closer

attention to details when having a conversation to pick up on details. For example, I

tend to forget what my boss specifically wanted done or what my parents wanted me to

do. I can also use more nonverbal skills such as making eye contact, showing good

body language to show that I am being attentive and listening to what someone else
has to say. Oculesics is the study of how the eyes can communicate. Gazes and

glances are usually signals of the looker’s interest (Alder et al. 179).
 Works Cited

Alder, Ronald. Interpersonal Communications. Madison Ave, New York. 2001 Accessed

February 7, 2020