Defensive climates, rather than supportive climates, are created when people use

Type your learning objectives here.

• Explain communication climate.
• Differentiate confirming and disconfirming messages.
• Distinguish supportive and defensive messages.
• Explore strategies to create a positive communication climate.

Communication Climate

Do you feel organized or confined in a clean work-space? Are you more productive when the sun is shining than when it’s gray and cloudy outside? Just as factors like weather and physical space impact the way we feel, communication climate influences our interpersonal interactions. Communication climate is the “overall feeling or emotional mood between people” (Wood, 1999). If you dread going to visit your family during the holidays because of tension between you and your sister, or you look forward to dinner with a particular set of friends because they make you laugh, you are responding to the communication climate—the overall mood that is created because of the people involved and the type of communication they bring to the interaction.

Interpersonal Communication Now: “Sticks and Stones Can Break my Bones But Words Can Hurt Me Too”

In a study published in the journal Science, researchers reported that the sickening feeling we get when we are socially rejected (being ignored at a party or passed over when picking teams) is real. When researchers measured brain responses to social stress they found a pattern similar to what occurs in the brain when our body experiences physical pain. Specifically, “the area affected is the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain known to be involved in the emotional response to pain” (Fox). The doctor who conducted the study, Matt Lieberman, a social psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said, “It makes sense for humans to be programmed this way. Social interaction is important to survival.” (Nishina, Juvonen, & Witkow, 2005)

Principles of Communication Climate

Confirming and Disconfirming Messages

Positive and negative climates can be understood by looking at confirming and disconfirming messages. We experience positive climates when we receive messages that demonstrate our value and worth from those with whom we have a relationship. Conversely, we experience negative climates when we receive messages that suggest we are devalued and unimportant. Obviously, most of us like to be in positive climates because they foster emotional safety as well as personal and relational growth. However, it is likely that most of our relationships fall somewhere between the two extremes.

Let’s start by looking at three types of messages:

• Recognition Messages: Recognition messages can confirm or deny another person’s existence. For example, if a friend enters your home and you smile, hug them, and say, “I’m so glad to see you” you are confirming their existence. On the other hand, if you say “good morning” to a colleague and they ignore you by walking out of the room without saying anything, they may create a disconfirming climate by not recognizing your greeting.

• Acknowledgment Messages: Acknowledgement messages go beyond recognizing another’s existence by confirming what they say or how they feel. Nodding our head while listening, or laughing appropriately at a funny story, are nonverbal acknowledgment messages. When a friend tells you she had a really bad day at work and you respond with, “Yeah, that does sound hard, do you want to talk about it?”, you are acknowledging and responding to her feelings. In contrast, if you were to respond to your friend’s frustrations with a comment like, “That’s nothing. Listen to what happened to me today,” you would be ignoring her experience and presenting yours as more important.

• Endorsement Messages: Endorsement messages go one step further by recognizing a person’s feelings as valid. Suppose a friend comes to you upset after a fight with his girlfriend. If you respond with, “Yeah, I can see why you would be upset” you are endorsing his right to feel upset. However, if you said, “Get over it. At least you have a girlfriend” you would be sending messages that deny his right to feel frustrated at that moment. While it is difficult to see people we care about in emotional pain, people are responsible for their own emotions. When we let people own their emotions and do not tell them how to feel, we are creating supportive climates that provide a safe environment for them to work through their problems.

• Impervious response fails to acknowledge another person’s communication attempt through either verbal or nonverbal channels. Failure to return phone calls, emails, and letters are examples.
• In an interrupting response, one person starts to speak before the other person is finished.
• Irrelevant responses are comments completely unrelated to what the other person was just talking about. They indicate that the listener wasn’t really listening at all, and therefore doesn’t value with the speaker had to say. In each of these three types of responses, the speaker is not acknowledged.
• In a tangential response, the speaker is acknowledged, but with a comment that is used to steer the conversation in a different direction.
• In an impersonal response, the speaker offers a monologue of impersonal, intellectualized, and generalized statements that trivializes the other’s comments (e.g., what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger).
• Ambiguous responses are messages with multiple meanings, and these meanings are highly abstract or may be a private joke to the speaker alone.
• Incongruous responses communicate two messages that seem to conflict along the verbal and nonverbal channels. The verbal channel demonstrates support, while the nonverbal channel is disconfirming. An example might be complimenting someone’s cooking, while nonverbally indicating you are choking.

John Gottman, a world-renowned relationship scientist identified four communication styles that have been shown to accurately predict the end of a relationship because of the negative climate they create. The below video talks about the “Four Hoursemen of the Aplocalypse.”

Remember once again, we can never completely ensure that someone “hears what we want them to hear” (interprets what we intended). However, with some awareness and forethought, we can ensure there’s a better chance of it. CCMP also helps us with better awareness of how what we say and how we say it may impact another person’s relational or face needs. Our consideration of what human beings “need” will help us infer how they might react to messages emotionally, intellectually, or relationally. Doing so helps us communicate more effectively and appropriately whatever our goal may be.

1. Communication climate influences our interactions.
2. Confirming and supporting messages can create positive communication cliamtes.
3. Disconfirming and defensive messages can create negative communication climates.
4. Empathy, thoughtful communication, and reflection can help us to create positive communication climates.

References and Licensing

6.1 Self-Disclosure & Communication Climate by Department of Communication, Indiana State University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Gerber, P. J., & Murphy, H. (2021, September 6). Frameworks for Identifying Types of Climate Messages. Central New Mexico Community College. https://socialsci.libretexts.org/@go/page/114785