ABSTRACT
The staggering variety of social contexts within which individuals produce verbal and nonverbal messages makes the task of identifying and elaborating message production skills a daunting one. Not only do social interactions unfold in situations that range from the highly routine to those that are unique, the variety of instrumental and communication goals pursued in these interactions is equally large or larger. As these social encounters play out, participants may experience them as positive or negative, or as some admixture of these affects. In addition to these possibilities, studies of social situation perception have revealed several other dimensions such as formal-informal, cooperative-competitive, and superior-subordinate that social perceivers use to characterize social interaction contexts (see Forgas, 1979; Miller, Cody, & McLaughlin, 1994; Wish, Deutsch, & Kaplan, 1976).
