Consistencies in theoretical and naive evaluations of comforting messages

Abstract

Prior research on comforting communication from the constructivist perspective has employed a hierarchical system of message analysis to classify different comforting strategies; within this system, messages are scored for the extent to which they explicitly acknowledge, elaborate, and legitimize the feelings of distressed others. The present paper reports two studies assessing the extent to which naive actors' perceptions of comforting strategy sensitivity, effectiveness, and quality correspond with the formal analysis of comforting strategy sophistication embedded in the constructivist hierarchical coding scheme. In the first study, 73 female college students interacted with a female confederate who feigned distress over having recently been dropped by her long‐term boyfriend. These interactions were videotaped and content analyzed; in addition, both the confederate and an experimental observer rated participants' behaviors for sensitivity. Results indicated that participants employing a greater proportion of theoretically sophisticated comforting strategies were perceived as behaving more sensitively toward the confederate. In the second study, 148 college students were presented with lists of preformulated comforting strategies derived from the constructivist hierarchy and were asked to rate these strategies for “sensitivity” and “effectiveness” and to rank order them in terms of overall quality. Results indicated that respondents rated and rank ordered the strategies in a manner very consistent with the constructivist hierarchical ordering of comforting strategy types: The constructivist ordering of the strategies explained over 95% of the variance in respondents' ratings and rank orderings.