From the category archives:

Social Psychology

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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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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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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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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In our final post we are going to talk about some specific examples of hypnotic language patterns and how they can be used in real life. As I stated before, hypnotic language patterns can be broken up into two fundamental categories based on the processes that they create and/or work with within the mind of the recipient. 1.    Cognitive Dissonance / Certainty – These types of patterns either create confusion in the mind with ambiguity or overtly reinforce preexisting rules to “grease” the acceptance of certain information. The wonderful side effect of that confusion is that as the subconscious mind [...]

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I want to make something very clear at the outset… When I talk about hypnotic language, I am referring to the process of utilizing verbiage and phraseology that simply bypasses our critical thinking to gently and smoothly float right into the subconscious workings of our communication recipient’s brain. This is PRACTICAL, REAL LIFE USAGE OF HYPNOTIC LANGUAGE. If we are going to create the skill set of a Communication Expert, we really need to let go of the urban legend-esque stories and look at the psychology and science of this to truly understand the unbelievable power behind it. The most [...]

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