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Research problem: Adding contextual information to a core message has been shown to be critical in improving communication quality, especially in computer mediated communication. This paper models how people contextualize messages in the face of changing communication complexity. Research question: Can changes in communication complexity that occur during the communication process explain and predict contextualization? Literature review: Theories of human communication and studies of computer supported collaboration suggest that communication complexity reflects potentially problematic conditions resulting from 1) the difference in perspective and context held by the collaborators; 2) the incompatibility between the message representation and the way it is interpreted and used by the receiver; and 3) the intensity of information exchanged between communicators. We use this definition as a basis of for developing a measure of cognitive communication complexity. The literature further suggests that higher communication complexity induces higher contextualization. Methodology: First, we conducted a pilot study to develop and validate measures of communication complexity. Second, we conducted a laboratory experiment, in which 258 participants working in pairs collaborated on a sixteen-step assembly task. They used a tailored system that structured each message as core (the essence of the message) and context (additional information that explains the core and the sender's perspective). We used unbalanced panel data analysis to examine the repeated measures of contextualization and communication complexity associated with each step of the task. Results and discussion: We found that collaborators respond to changes in communication complexity at the expense of higher collaborative effort. We offer a cost-benefit framework in which, at the step level, people contextualize to reduce the communication complexity, and at the task level, they additionally consider the impact of contextualization on task performance. The main limitation of this study was the need to structure the communication between collaborators, to control and measure contextualization. Future research can adapt and extend our measure of communication complexity to less structured communication.

Various disciplines have extensively studied deception in human communication. With the increasing use of instant messaging (IM) for both informal communication and task performance in the work place, deception in IM is emerging as an important issue. In this study, we explored the behavioral indicators of deception in a group IM setting. The empirical results showed that three types of nonverbal behaviors and three types of verbal behaviors that were investigated could significantly differentiate deceivers from truth tellers. The findings potentially can broaden our knowledge of deception behavior in human communication and improve deception awareness and deception detection in the cyberspace.

The assessment of engineering products and services is central to the work of engineering, but the evaluation of human communication and its development in engineering and other technical professions has not yet received enough attention in IEEE research and publications. This special section begins to remedy this situation by calling for more research in the assessment of professional communication skills and training programs as well as in the development of better assessment tools and procedures. It features four new articles on the topic in the hope that these will inspire even more research related to the assessment of human communication in scientific and technical professions.

The Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES) is a computerized conferencing system built by the Computerized Conferencing and Communications Center at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (Newark) under the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation. It is designed as a test facility to support information exchange among small groups of research scientists and engineers. The system is first described in terms of the hardware, the functional characteristics, and the user protocols. Then these characteristics are reviewed from the standpoint of human communications.

This book is part of the Scott, Foresman ProCom series, which has been created “to bring the very latest thinking about human communication to the attention of working professionals.” Getting the Job Done offers practical solutions to office-related communication problems. This book is aimed at persons who entered the business world some years ago at the “secretarial level,” and now, because of the technological revolution, are finding themselves unable to communicate effectively within their organizations. Johnson's aim, then, as expressed in her first chapter, is to provide those who are exceptionally well experienced in their work with practical guidelines for surviving — in fact, for living well — in the information age.