Judgments of emotion by nurses and students given double-bind information on a patient's tone of voice and message content.

Abstract

We examined the communication process in a situation typical of the nursing setting by use of a double-bind communication. Our objective was to examine which of two cues in communications from a patient, tone of voice or verbal content, was more important in judging the speaker's emotional status and personality traits and in arousing the listening nurse's emotions. Subjects were 82 nurses who worked at the university hospital and 100 students who were studying at the Faculty of Nursing of the university. They were assigned into four groups at random, presented professionally tape-recorded scripts representing a patient's verbal report, and then completed a questionnaire concerning the speaker's emotional status as well as the listener's own emotional status. When the listeners judged the speaker's emotional status, they gave more attention to a negative emotional expression, and when the listeners formed an impression of the speaker's personality traits, they were influenced by the speaker's tone of voice rather than by the content of the speech.