Transactional analysis (TA) proposes that there are three ego states - Parent, Adult, and Child. The Parent ego state relates to caretaking and control, the Adult deals with facts and logic, and the Child involves emotions, desires, and inner experiences. TA provided an easy framework for understanding different tones of thought and analyzing how advertising engages the Child ego state to bypass rational defenses. It uses the Parent, Adult, Child model to examine the impact of different voices depicted in ads and commercials.
The MTL Professional Development Programme is a collection of 202 PowerPoint presentations that will provide you with step-by-step summaries of a key management or personal development skill. This presentation is on "Using Your Voice in Presentations" and will show you how to use your voice to best effect in your presentations.
The Power of Nonverbal CommunicationAs little as 7 of a message m.docxoreo10
The Power of Nonverbal Communication
As little as 7% of a message may be communicated by the words we use.
"Actions speak louder than words." I am sure you have heard this phrase many times. Perhaps someone said it to you when you had a misunderstanding over the meaning of a message. Perhaps you used this phrase yourself to question the intent of a friend, family member, or coworker. What does it suggest? How do our actions and other nonverbal communication add to or detract from our goal of a meeting of the minds?
In the introduction to this course, we said that communication is power--the power to inform, the power to influence others, the power to entertain, and the power to manage interpersonal exchanges. How much of that power is in the words we choose? How much of that power is harnessed in the nonverbal?
In fact, the most widely accepted research on this topic breaks it down like this:
Transcript
Wow! These numbers certainly suggest that listening with our eyes is even more important that listening with our ears. This sure puts a new spin on last week's discussions.
If you don't believe what you are reading, if you think these numbers are off base, look at the images below and take a minute to jot down what you think is going on in each of them.
Did you say any of the following?
1. The doctor has just received some really great news about a patient's condition.
2. The stressed out student realizes that he has no idea how to apply macroeconomic concepts.
3. The woman in the grey pantsuit and her coworker are in disbelief when the vendor tells them that he cannot meet their deadline.
4. The pregnant woman is excited to feel her baby kick.
You may not have perceived these images precisely as they are described here, but I bet your conclusions were similar. A picture is worth a thousand words; isn't it amazing what these pictures can say? The nonverbal communication in these still images pretty effectively communicates the thoughts and feelings of these total strangers. Imagine the added power nonverbal cues possess when we are dealing with real people, particularly those with whom we have a history. Nonverbal communication is powerful, far more powerful than the words we say. The fact that we did not all interpret those pictures in precisely the same way suggests too that nonverbal communication and verbal communication have something in common: Both can be ambiguous. Recognizing that nonverbal communication has great power, the power to add to or detract from our message, is an important idea to take away from this course.Nonverbal Messages
Body language is made up of several things, including facial expression, gestures, eye contact, and posture. The charades game you played as a kid that required you to use body language alone to get your teammates to guess the name of a movie or a well-known phrase, the era of the silent movie, and the talent of a mime all teach us that body language is powerful.
I am sure you can recall a time w ...
The MTL Professional Development Programme is a collection of 202 PowerPoint presentations that will provide you with step-by-step summaries of a key management or personal development skill. This presentation is on "Using Your Voice in Presentations" and will show you how to use your voice to best effect in your presentations.
The Power of Nonverbal CommunicationAs little as 7 of a message m.docxoreo10
The Power of Nonverbal Communication
As little as 7% of a message may be communicated by the words we use.
"Actions speak louder than words." I am sure you have heard this phrase many times. Perhaps someone said it to you when you had a misunderstanding over the meaning of a message. Perhaps you used this phrase yourself to question the intent of a friend, family member, or coworker. What does it suggest? How do our actions and other nonverbal communication add to or detract from our goal of a meeting of the minds?
In the introduction to this course, we said that communication is power--the power to inform, the power to influence others, the power to entertain, and the power to manage interpersonal exchanges. How much of that power is in the words we choose? How much of that power is harnessed in the nonverbal?
In fact, the most widely accepted research on this topic breaks it down like this:
Transcript
Wow! These numbers certainly suggest that listening with our eyes is even more important that listening with our ears. This sure puts a new spin on last week's discussions.
If you don't believe what you are reading, if you think these numbers are off base, look at the images below and take a minute to jot down what you think is going on in each of them.
Did you say any of the following?
1. The doctor has just received some really great news about a patient's condition.
2. The stressed out student realizes that he has no idea how to apply macroeconomic concepts.
3. The woman in the grey pantsuit and her coworker are in disbelief when the vendor tells them that he cannot meet their deadline.
4. The pregnant woman is excited to feel her baby kick.
You may not have perceived these images precisely as they are described here, but I bet your conclusions were similar. A picture is worth a thousand words; isn't it amazing what these pictures can say? The nonverbal communication in these still images pretty effectively communicates the thoughts and feelings of these total strangers. Imagine the added power nonverbal cues possess when we are dealing with real people, particularly those with whom we have a history. Nonverbal communication is powerful, far more powerful than the words we say. The fact that we did not all interpret those pictures in precisely the same way suggests too that nonverbal communication and verbal communication have something in common: Both can be ambiguous. Recognizing that nonverbal communication has great power, the power to add to or detract from our message, is an important idea to take away from this course.Nonverbal Messages
Body language is made up of several things, including facial expression, gestures, eye contact, and posture. The charades game you played as a kid that required you to use body language alone to get your teammates to guess the name of a movie or a well-known phrase, the era of the silent movie, and the talent of a mime all teach us that body language is powerful.
I am sure you can recall a time w ...
1. Psychology on a Page 3: Transactional Analysis (TA)
1
Throughout my early career I became something of
a specialist in advertising development research: the
kind of project where you take a set of scripts or
storyboards out into groups to see if they grab
people or not and if they do, how they work.
One of the essential components of this kind of
work is to have a language for talking about the
tone of voice/style of behavior depicted in the
prospective commercial and whether it works to
engage and motivate or not. Transactional Analysis
intrigued me because it had tackled just that
problem – the issue of finding an easy-to-
understand language to communicate with patients about the workings of their
minds. The photo above shows Eric Berne the originator of TA.
This realisation of Berne’s was also one of the earliest examples of the
‘Intersections’ style of insight, described in our ‘Paths to Insight’ Course. Berne
practiced on the West Coast and connected the idea of characters and their tone
of voice from the movies with the tones of voice we hear in our head, in our
inner worlds.
This new language, with its famous Parent, Adult, Child model was particularly
appropriate for advertising because so often commercials attempt to skirt the
rational defences of the mind and engage the childlike delights or pleasures.
Berne called these voices the Ego States.
The basic TA model is here:
TA, the three Ego States
The idea is that there are three core components to consciousness,
three voices if you like – a Parent, an Adult and a Child. Each one
has a particular tone and affect and these are summarised in the
next diagram, below:
Parent
Adult
Child
2. Psychology on a Page 3: Transactional Analysis (TA)
2
The fun thing is that you can experience each of these voices for yourself from
moment to moment. Your parent voice can be either controlling or nurturing,
your adult presents facts and observations while your child hums that jingle or
pop tune you can’t get out of your head! The beauty of the model is that it can
be checked out experientially by any of us at any time. We can feel its reality:
our inner voices do speak to us in different styles. In advertising research we
often used references to these voices to analyse the impact – or lack of it – of
advertising.
There is a brilliant example of a TA enhanced commercial here: the R White’s
Secret Lemonade Drinker:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqBa7eay6Fo
Here an adult who creeps downstairs in an exaggerated pantomime ‘tippy-toes’
walk to help himself to some Lemonade from the fridge. He is totally gripped by
his Child ego state. His expression is of delight. Just as he drinks his lemonade,
his wife appears behind him, completely in her Adult, and we wonder for a few
seconds whether she will scold him (Critical Parent) or empathise (Nurturing
Parent).
Because the advertiser wants to encourage our empathy and participation, a
smile dawns on her face and she accepts her man’s bizarre behavior. All of this
takes place over a jingle, a mock rock track sung in a very Free Child voice.
Parent
Adult
Child
Rules, judgments, decisions,
counsel, care & punishment
Information, sensory perception
Facts, no emotional aspect
Creativity, play, self-expression
obedience, compliance,
rebellion
TA - the structural model of the psyche