Communication Café
Scholar Spotlight Videos and Biographies
Click on the tabs below to view the video and biography for each scholar.
Chapter 1
Charles Berger
Charles Berger is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Communication at the University of California – Davis. His research is broadly focused on the role of cognition and planning in the construction of messages during social interaction. He is best known for his pioneering research on uncertainty reduction theory, which explains how features of initial interactions between partners give rise to uncertainty that people are motivated to reduce through interpersonal communication.
Chapter 2
Howard Giles
Howard Giles is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California – Santa Barbara. His research focuses on inter-group communication in a variety of domains, including communication between individuals of different ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, and ages. His recent work has revolved around intergenerational communication and issues of the aging population. He developed the communication accommodation theory, which describes how people adjust their speech to either emphasize similarities or accentuate differences in communication behaviors with partners from other cultures.
Chapter 3
Karen Tracy
Karen Tracy is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her research uses discourse analysis to examine how individual identities are constructed through everyday talk. Her research seeks to explain how conversational strategies and ideals of appropriate conduct contribute to institutional practices, particularly among social institutions responsible for justice, education, and governance.
Chapter 4
Jennifer Monahan
Jennifer Monahan is a Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia. Her research generally examines conversational behavior in a variety of interaction contexts including initial interactions and arguments. More specifically, she is interested in the effects of alcohol consumption on people's ability to produce and process messages during conversation. Her recent research has focused on the influence of alcohol on women's communication during risky sexual situations.
Chapter 5
Steven Wilson
Steve Wilson is a Professor in the School of Communication at Purdue University. His research focuses on patterns of communication behavior in parent-child interaction that promote children's adjustment, resiliency, and well-being. In particular, his work investigates the implications of verbal aggression and control in parental communication. Much of Dr. Wilson's work is done in applied contexts focusing on low-income families and military families, which contributes to programs and interventions designed to enhance children's school readiness and resilience in the face of family stress.
Chapter 6
Judee Burgoon
Judee Burgoon is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on the ways that nonverbal communication is enacted and interpreted in interpersonal interaction. Specifically, she has devoted much of her research to the study of deceptive behaviors during communication, which has contributed to her interpersonal deception theory. She has also developed expectancy violations theory to explain how people respond when interaction partners violate norms for nonverbal behavior and interaction adaptation theory to explain how communication partners adjust their nonverbal behaviors to coordinate their interaction patterns.
Chapter 7
Peter Andersen
Peter Andersen is Professor Emeritus in the School of Communication at San Diego State University and he is one of the 100 most published scholars in the field of Communication. His research focuses on the communication of emotion in close relationships. Much of his research explores nonverbal behavior in the expression of various emotions like jealousy, warmth, and immediacy in close relationships.
Chapter 8
John Greene
John Greene is a Professor in the School of Communication at Purdue University and has been recognized as being among the top 1% of prolific scholars in the field of Communication. His research focuses on the cognitive processes that underlie the production and processing of messages during interpersonal interaction. He is also interested in the ways that cognition is related to social skills and the effects of aging on communication behavior.
Chapter 9
Leanne Knobloch
Leanne Knobloch is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois. Her research focuses on the ways that people communicate within romantic relationships, especially when those relationships are going through a transition. For example, her recent research has examined interpersonal communication in military couples during the transition from deployment to reintegration. Dr. Knobloch's work has also been instrumental in advancing the construct of relational uncertainty as a feature of romantic relationships that both shapes and reflects people's communication behaviors with their partner.
Chapter 10
Jennifer Samp
Jennifer Samp is an Associate Professor and Associate Head of the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia. Her research focuses on the ways that people communicate about relationship problems. In particular, she is interested in the ways that people manage conflict, power, and stress in their close relationships and the verbal and nonverbal manifestations of these issues in conversation.
Chapter 11
Sandra Petronio
Sandra Petronio is a Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis. Her research focuses on the tension between privacy and disclosure in families and close relationships. She developed the communication privacy management theory to speak to the boundaries that people construct around their private information and the decisions they make about when and how to share private information with others. She is the author of the award winning book, Boundaries of Privacy: Dialectics of Disclosure.
Chapter 12
James Dillard
James Dillard is a Professor in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on the role of emotion in interpersonal influence. In particular, he is interested in the features of messages that elicit emotions and the conditions under which certain emotions can lead to persuasion. He has recently applied his research on emotion and influence to understand how people's emotional responses to health-related information, such emotional responses to cancer, affect their responses to public health campaigns to improve health behavior.
Chapter 13
Michael Roloff
Michael Roloff is a Professor in the School of Communication at Northwestern University. His research spans the topics of interpersonal influence and interpersonal conflict,within which he focuses on the role of power, communication strategies, and cognitions. He has explored various topics related to interpersonal conflict, including the obstacles people perceive to achieving their communication goals and the effects of mulling about irritations in close relationships. Dr. Roloff is the long-standing editor of Communication Research, a premier outlet for research on communication.
Chapter 14
Wendy Samter
Wendy Samter is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at Bryant University. Her research focuses on social skills in the provision of social support in interpersonal interaction. She is especially interested in the effects of age, ethnicity, relationship type, and context on people's social skills and their ability to provide effective support. She has recently applied her research on social skills and supportive communication to understand how people communicate support following crises like 9/11 or when foster children are reunited with their families.