Prior research on comforting communication from the constructivist perspective has employed a hierarchical system of message analysis to classify different comforting strategies; within this system, messages are scored for the extent to which they explicitly acknowledge, elaborate, and legitimize the feelings of distressed others. The present paper reports two studies assessing the extent to which naive actors' perceptions of comforting strategy sensitivity, effectiveness, and quality correspond with the formal analysis of comforting strategy sophistication embedded in the constructivist hierarchical coding scheme. In the first study, 73 female college students interacted with a female confederate who feigned distress over having recently been dropped by her long-term boyfriend. These interactions were videotaped and content analyzed; in addition, both the confederate and an experimental observer rated participants' behaviors for sensitivity. Results indicated that participants employing a greater proportion of theoretically sophisticated comforting strategies were perceived as behaving more sensitively toward the confederate. In the second study, 148 college students were presented with lists of preformulated comforting strategies derived from the constructivist hierarchy and were asked to rate these strategies for "sensitivity" and "effectiveness" and to rank order them in terms of overall quality. Results indicated that respondents rated and rank ordered the strategies in a manner very consistent with the constructivist hierarchical ordering of comforting strategy types: The constructivist ordering of the strategies explained over 95% of the variance in respondents' ratings and rank orderings.

. Men's and women's evaluations of communication skills in personal relationships: When sex differences make a difference-and when they don't. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 13, 201-224. Published version:http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0265407596132003 Abstract:Much recent research on gender and communication has emphasized differences in men's and women's communicative conduct, with some theorists going so far as to claim that men and women constitute different cultures. However, comparatively little research has assessed both similarities and differences in men and women's communication to determine whether the sexes are more alike or different. The present paper provides such assessments with respect to men's and women's evaluations of the importance of diverse communication skills in two relationships, friendship and romance. Two studies are reported. In Study 1, participants (N = 382) evaluated the importance of eight communication skills in same-sex friendships. Results indicated that although females rated affectively oriented communication skills as somewhat more important than males and males rated instrumentally oriented skills as somewhat more important than females, both males and females overwhelmingly viewed affectively oriented skills as more important than instrumental skills. Study 2 sought to replicate and extend the findings of Study 1 by having participants (N = 685) evaluate the importance of eight communication skills for either same-sex friendship or opposite-sex romances. Results virtually identical to those of Study 1 were obtained in Study 2 for both friendship and romance. Findings are discussed in terms of their implications for our understanding of communication in personal relationships and the different cultures perspective.

Emotional support is a central feature around which white, middle-class adults organizc their same-sex friendships. The purpose of this study was to examine whether emotional support is accorded the same significance in the friendships of Asian-and African-Americans. Participants included 199 students (60 Euro-American men and women, 80 Asian-American men and womeh and 59 African-American men and women) attending either a state or private university in California. Each participant completed three different questionnaires designed to assess perceptions of (a) the importance of comforting skill in same-sex friendship; (b) the significance of emotion-focused versus problem-focused goals in situations requiring emotional support; and (c) the sensitivity and effectiveness of various comforting strategies. Several significant differences due to ethnicity were found in participants' perceptions of emotional support and its attendant behaviors. These and related findings are discussed in terms of their implifations for the conduct of same-sex friendship among individuals from different ethnic backgrounds.

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