Cognitive Psychology

David J. Parnell’s Series on How To Give Effective Group Presentations | Part 2 of 3 | Attention & Positive Affect

In this post we will be dealing with the second and third components of the CAPA model, which are attention and positive affect. As you can imagine, if your message is going to be persuasive, it needs to gain their attention first. Think about it for a second… Which audience do you think would be more palatable: One that is hanging on your every word, or one that is yawning and looking at their watches. Now your content and subject matter is a constant. Although you can indeed make changes in the ways in which it is presented, it “is [...]


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Communication Strategy

Negotiating Successfully – 10 Tips to Help You Win

I don’t care where you are, or what type of interaction you are involved in, you are always negotiating. Every day, in some way shape or form, you are vying for a top spot, offering some compromise or otherwise working to get something from someone else. Your spouse wants to go out for Chinese, you want to go for steaks… Your kid wants to play PlayStation and you want them to take out the trash… Your mother needs you to paint her porch and you want to play golf… All of them, negotiations. Many people find this task intimidating, but [...]


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Effective Communication

David J. Parnell’s Series on How To Give Effective Group Presentations | Part 1 of 3 | Credibility

The CAPA Model and Effective Presentations Inc. magazine interviewed me last week as part of an article about improving presentation skills. As a part of my preparation for the meeting, I put together a quick outline to help my interviewer better understand the content I wanted to review. As a loyal reader of my blog, I thought/think that you deserve to benefit from this just as much as the Inc. readers. Likewise, it is unrealistic to think that they will place all of this information in the article. As such, the Inc. readers that have found their way over can [...]


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Evolutionary Psychology

David J. Parnell’s Crash Course on Cognitive Rule Set’s | Part 1 of 2 | How A Decision Is Made

Communication Expertise with Cognitive Rule Sets. Decision making has been an inherently interesting subject for the field of psychology. In understanding the process by which people make decisions, it is significantly easier to predict and direct their behavior… For us to move further in our discussion, the term “decision” is important to define and understand first… Now when I say “decision”, many people are only envisioning a buying decision which is fair enough. What most people really don’t realize though is that decisions are not only involved, but are the life blood of literally every single turn in our life. [...]


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Cognitive Psychology

David J. Parnell’s Series on How To Give Effective Group Presentations | Part 2 of 3 | Attention & Positive Affect

In this post we will be dealing with the second and third components of the CAPA model, which are attention and positive affect. As you can imagine, if your message is going to be persuasive, it needs to gain their attention first. Think about it for a second… Which audience do you think would be more palatable: One that is hanging on your every word, or one that is yawning and looking at their watches. Now your content and subject matter is a constant. Although you can indeed make changes in the ways in which it is presented, it “is [...]

Read more …

More from Cognitive Psychology:

Communication Strategy

Negotiation Tips

Negotiating Successfully – 10 Tips to Help You Win

I don’t care where you are, or what type of interaction you are involved in, you are always negotiating. Every day, in some way shape or form, you are vying for a top spot, offering some compromise or otherwise working to get something from someone else. Your spouse wants to go out for Chinese, you want to go for steaks… Your kid wants to play PlayStation and you want them to take out the trash… Your mother needs you to paint her porch and you want to play golf… All of them, negotiations. Many people find this task intimidating, but [...]

Read more …

More from Communication Strategy:

Negotiating Successfully – 10 Tips to Help You Win

Negotiation Tips

I don’t care where you are, or what type of interaction you are involved in, you are always negotiating. Every day, in some way shape or form, you are vying for a top spot, offering some compromise or otherwise working to get something from someone else. Your spouse wants to go out for Chinese, you want to go for steaks… Your kid wants to play PlayStation and you want them to take out the trash… Your mother needs you to paint her porch and you want to play golf… All of them, negotiations. Many people find this task intimidating, but [...]

Read more …

David J. Parnell’s Series on How To Give Effective Group Presentations | Part 2 of 3 | Attention & Positive Affect

In this post we will be dealing with the second and third components of the CAPA model, which are attention and positive affect. As you can imagine, if your message is going to be persuasive, it needs to gain their attention first. Think about it for a second… Which audience do you think would be more palatable: One that is hanging on your every word, or one that is yawning and looking at their watches. Now your content and subject matter is a constant. Although you can indeed make changes in the ways in which it is presented, it “is [...]

Read more …

David J. Parnell’s Series on How To Give Effective Group Presentations | Part 1 of 3 | Credibility

The CAPA Model and Effective Presentations Inc. magazine interviewed me last week as part of an article about improving presentation skills. As a part of my preparation for the meeting, I put together a quick outline to help my interviewer better understand the content I wanted to review. As a loyal reader of my blog, I thought/think that you deserve to benefit from this just as much as the Inc. readers. Likewise, it is unrealistic to think that they will place all of this information in the article. As such, the Inc. readers that have found their way over can [...]

Read more …

Mood Congruency Recall and It’s Effect on Communication

The Effect of Mood Valence on Memory Recall and Communication. Have you ever noticed that when you are depressed that pretty much everything seems depressing? You may look at a couple happily walking down the street and all you are thinking about is how they are eventually going to get into an argument and break up… Or how they will eventually cheat on each other and end the relationship. Or maybe you are watching your children play and rather than thinking about how wonderful it is that they are happy, all you can think about is how sad it is [...]

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Where Communication “Experts” Fail…

ARE THEY AN EXPERT OR NOT? This is a touchy subject as you can imagine… Why? Because I am going to blow the lid off of the communication, sales,  relationship and persuasion industries by saying what I am about to say. Now let me forewarn you, there may be a bit of an edge to the tonality of this writing. I may be blowing my horn a bit as well here so please give me a bit of room to run with this… This is a response to all of the email I get from dissatisfied people who have been [...]

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David J. Parnell’s Crash Course on Cognitive Rule Set’s | Part 2 of 2 | Cognitive Rule Set Elicitation

Communication Expertise with Cognitive Rule Sets 2. So now that we have a rough frame work of how a decision is made, let’s talk about the rational component of this process which is the “cognitive decision”. Although they are not necessarily the most important, or influential part of the general decision making process, they are indeed an important part. Understanding someone’s rationalization strategy is an extremely important part of the overall persuasion process. If someone is not able to place rational reasons or logic around a particular decision, it can become extremely difficult to make that very decision. Dissonance sets [...]

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