Essay About Listening

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Do you feel pressure to respond more quickly than you’d like? Do you find silence frustrating? Listening is a behavioral skill that takes practice and it can be lost if not used regularly. In early years, listening is taught, a way to show respect with undivided attention to the person who is speaking. But a good listener is someone who takes time to respond with an empathetic response, despite the mood of the speaker and ask questions to keep the conversation going. A good listener comes with certain qualities like empathetic, caring, and attentive. Listening is not used as a way to connect with people and sustain relationships, it is used for simple tasks; today, listening is affected by selective attention, digital distraction, and simply …show more content…

Attention is often limited, but the difference between the two is, selective attention allows the listener to tune out unimportant details and focus on the big picture of a conversation. Selective attention acts, when talking to others, many other noises depicted in the background but the listener is able to ignore certain stimuli and concentrate on the conversation. However, there is a downside to selective attention, people often select the things they want to hear; meaning more favorable to them. It is often based on our own unique and subjective filters we may value. A study done known as a “dichotic listening task” researched by Donald Broadbent was “simultaneously sending one message (a 3-digit number) to a person's right ear and a different message (a different 3-digit number) to their left ear. Participants were asked to listen to both messages at the same time and repeat what they heard” McLeod, S. A. (2008). Broadbent wanted to see how people will use their attention when many different stimuli were constantly thrown to both ears, to find what would they initially pick out. Results concluded, to Broadbent finding out it is easier to hear at one ear at a time, and physical characteristics when listening will catch attention quicker, like the tone of voice. This often is true when it comes to speaking with others because tone tells more than the words. …show more content…

This can often be based on selective attention or attention in general, because it refers back to certain aspects the listener gets out of the whole conversation. This contributes to what we pick and choose to remember. Forgetting is caused by two theories “first, the memory has disappeared - it is no longer available. Second, the memory is still stored in the memory system but, for some reason, it cannot be retrieved.” McLeod, S. A. (2008) Incidental forgetting is memory failures occurring without the intention to forget. Incidental forgetting is most common in conversations because most times people want to remember but constantly think about their own lives and difficulties of themselves. But forgetting can other factors as well, short-term memory and long-term memory, short-term memory is mostly used when we speak to others because your attention can hold so much. The short-term memory came from studies using the 'free-recall' method. “A typical study would use the following procedure: participants listen to a list of words read out a steady rate, usually two seconds per word; they are then asked to recall as many of words as possible. They are free to recall the words in any order, hence the term 'free recall'” McLeod, S. A. (2008). Results concluded in, it was easier to remember words from the beginning of the list and words at the end of the list. This is also typical in

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