Still Babbling After All These Years?

Reviews the book, Personality and Interpersonal Communication by James C. McCroskey and John A. Daly (Eds.) (1987). This is a book about individual differences in communication styles. More specifically, it is a summary of empirical research about individual differences in some old and some new communication styles. The book is the outgrowth of a symposium held at West Virginia University in 1985. A few connections are drawn between these old-fashioned traits and the new ones. One wishes these historical links were more elaborately drawn, but this is not what the book is about. For speech and communications researchers, the book seems to serve a useful purpose: In a field where individual differences have been a mere murmur, the authors definitely turn up the volume. And for personality and social psychologists, there are clear signals that particular kinds of social relations and motives can begin to be discerned in the babble. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)