The highly recognized concept of "active listening" is widely adopted in contexts that involve gathering information and solving problems. Demanding both verbal and nonverbal skills, this way of communication improves mutual understanding by using techniques like paraphrasing. The benefits are manifold and crucial in many areas of life for all kinds of communicative settings – face-to-face as w...

In the movie, “Dumb and Dumber,” Lloyd demonstrates how a person can hear what someone is saying without listening to what that person is saying. Lloyd’s lack of listening skills prevent him from understanding the other person’s point of view. Lloyd does not know he is a poor listener. The combination of these two deficits creates entertaining interpersonal conflicts. We laugh at Lloyd because ...

Communication skills courses are an essential component of undergraduate and postgraduate training and effective communication skills are actively promoted by medical defence organisations as a means of decreasing litigation. This article discusses active listening, a difficult discipline for anyone to practise, and examines why this is particularly so for doctors. It draws together themes from...

abstractlistening plays a significant role in daily communication and educational processes. in spite of its importance, listening has long been the neglected skill in second and foreign language acquisition, research, teaching, and assessment. however, on account of the entire challenges efl learners encounter in classrooms due to the listening complexity, some pre-listening activities as supp...

We used near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to assess listeners’ cortical responses to a 10-s series of pure tones separated in frequency. Listeners were instructed to either judge the rhythm of these “streaming” stimuli (active-response listening) or to listen to the stimuli passively. Experiment 1 showed that active-response listening caused increases in oxygenated hemoglobin (oxy-Hb) in respon...