A non-supervised training program for Carkhuff's discrimination and communication skills and its effects upon the...

Used Carkhuff's Indices of Communication and Discrimination along with other measures to assess the level of communication and discrimination skills at various stages of communication training. Ss were 14 male and 9 female students in a psychology of adjustment class. Results indicated that: (a) treatment and control groups did not differ in communication skills before they went through training; (b) the treatment group offered higher levels of communication skill after it had completed training than did the control group before it began training; (c) the control group offered levels of communication skill equal to those of the treatment group once the control group also had completed training. A similar pattern was found for discrimination skill. The effects of training cannot be dismissed as paper-and-pencil artifacts because others who were ignorant of the growth conditions concept reacted differently in brief unstructured interactions to those who had completed training.