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

We examined the communication process in a situation typical of the nursing setting by use of a double-bind communication. Our objective was to examin e which of two cues in communications from a patient, tone of voice or verb al content, was more important in judging the speaker's emotional status an d personality traits and in arousing the listening nurse's emotions. Subjec ts were 82 nurses who worked at the university hospital and 100 students wh o were studying at the Faculty of Nursing of the university. They were assi gned into four groups at random, presented professionally tape-recorded scr ipts representing a patient's verbal report, and then completed a questionn aire concerning the speaker's emotional status as well as the listener's ow n emotional status. When the listeners judged the speaker's emotional statu s, they gave more attention to a negative emotional expression, and when th e 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 o f the speech.