Grounded in cognitive, affective, and behavioral elements, speech anxiety is a serious problem for a large number of people and has been found to affect career development as well as academic performance. This book presents intervention procedures that have been developed to help people cope with anxiety associated with each of these sources.

This comprehensive handbook provides a unique overview of the theory, methodologies and best practices in climate change communication from around the world. It fosters the exchange of information, ideas and experience gained in the execution of successful projects and initiatives, and discusses novel methodological approaches aimed at promoting a better understanding of climate change adaptation. Addressing a gap in the literature on climate change communication and pursuing an integrated approach, the handbook documents and disseminates the wealth of experience currently available in this field. Volume 2 of the handbook provides a unique description of the theoretical basis and of some of the key facts and phenomena which help in achieving a better understanding of the basis of climate change communication, providing an essential basis for successful initiatives in this complex field.

Franco Ferrarotti here offers a provocative look at the future of a world dominated by mass media--particularly television. He argues eloquently that the art of story-telling, the traditions of oral history, the simple pleasures of individual conversation are being lost, precisely because they embody qualities antithetical to the technological imperatives of mass society--qualities such as time to develop a thought, a thirst for details, patience, and a delight in the unexpected. He asserts that the mental habits prevailing in an age that places undue value on instantaneous images are incompatible with extended face-to-face dialogue.

The book reports on advanced theories and methods in two related engineering fields: electrical and electronic engineering, and communications engineering and computing. It highlights areas of global and growing importance, such as renewable energy, power systems, mobile communications, security and the Internet of Things (IoT). The contributions cover a number of current research issues, including smart grids, photovoltaic systems, wireless power transfer, signal processing, 4G and 5G technologies, IoT applications, mobile cloud computing and many more. Based on the proceedings of the first International Conference on Emerging Trends in Electrical, Electronic and Communications Engineering (ELECOM 2016), held in Voila Bagatelle, Mauritius from November 25 to 27, 2016, the book provides graduate students, researchers and professionals with a snapshot of the state-of-the-art and a source of new ideas for future research and collaborations.

Intellectuals today cringe when a politician speaks of the Second Coming, the millennium, or the Antichrist. Certain questions naturally arise about those who literally expect the end of the world in our day: Why do they think this? Why do some people believe them? How do their exhortations work to persuade an audience and to move that audience to actions and commitments? These are the motivating questions of Contemporary Apocalyptic Rhetoric, which describes "apocalyptic" as a rhetorical genre of discourse. Barry Brummett first recasts insights drawn from past scholarly and theological studies to demonstrate their relevance to contemporary apocalyptic, then examines a variety of "real" apocalyptic to illustrate the ways in which these rhetorical discourses actually work. The discussion focuses on those strategies, arguments, and stylistic features that are peculiar to apocalyptic and that support its social and political claims. Following an introductory first chapter, Chapter Two describes how apocalyptic rhetoric links a psychological context to an esoteric "grand order" underlying all of time and the cosmos. Chapter Three compares premillennial and postmillennial apocalyptic on three dimensions to show the different approaches they take to reach their audiences. Chapter Four describes specific rhetorical techniques designed to maintain a mystic persona and urge social and political commitments on audiences. The final two chapters apply the author's theories to secular and religious apocalyptic, both premillennial (Hal Lindsey and Ravi Batra) and postmillennial (Francis Fukuyama). Contemporary Apocalyptic Rhetoric will appeal to readers across many disciplines, includingcommunications, religion, sociology, and psychology.

The value of multi-disciplinary research lies in the exchange of ideas and methods across the traditional boundaries between areas of study. It could be argued that many of the advances in science and engineering take place because the ideas, methods and the tools of thought from one discipline become re-applied in another.
The topic of "the visual" has become increasingly important as advances in technology have led to multi-media and multi-modal representations, and extended the range and scope of visual representation and interpretation in our lives. Under this broad heading there are many different perspectives and approaches, from across the entire spectrum of human knolwedge and activity.
The editors and authors of this book aim to break down cross-disciplinary barriers, by bringing together people working in a wide variety of disciplines where visual representations and interpretations are exploited. Contributions come from researchers actively investigating visual representations and interpretations in a wide variety of areas, including art history, biology, clinical science, cognitive science, computer science, design, engineering, linguistics, mathematics, philosophy, physics, psychology, and sociology.
The book provides a forum for wide-ranging and multi-disciplinary contributions on visual representations and interpretations.
* Contributors include researchers actively investigating visual representations and interpretations
* Content spans a wide variety of areas including but not limited to biology, sociology, and computer science
* Discusses how new technology has affected "the visual" representation of information

This intriguing volume examines how the small group communication of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and their key advisors influenced the decisions to escalate the war in Vietnam from January 1961 to July 1965. Using an historical-critical research method, Moya Ann Ball traces the Vietnam decisions from the combative rhetoric of Kennedy's presidential campaign through the creation of a small group communication culture in the Kennedy administration, which, sustained and reinforced in the Johnson administration, became the motivating force behind the decisions to overtly escalate the war in July 1965. Ball asserts that this small group communication culture was formed by the convergence of such characteristics as the decision-making group's assembly effect, the group's reaction to situational demands, the sharing of dramatic communication, and normative behavior. The analysis is based on primary sources (many of them declassified through the author's efforts) from the Kennedy and Johnson Libraries, and on correspondence and interviews with advisors such as McGeorge Bundy, Robert S. McNamara, Walt W. Rostow, Dean Rusk, and James C. Thomson. Contrary to current literature, Ball uncovers that: Kennedy was not the "natural leader" of the Vietnam decision-making group, but became the leader in death that he had not been in life; the decision makers' communication rooted them rhetorically to a combat position from which it seemed impossible to move; Johnson stalled on overt action in Vietnam and, rather than leading his advisors, was led by them; and the decisions to escalate the war emerged in a "context of discovery" in the Kennedy administration and then were rationalized in a "context ofjustification" in the Johnson administration. Vietnam-on-the-Potomac will prove invaluable to communication specialists, political scientists, and historians.

In a comparison of communication in the U.S. presidential primaries of the twentieth century, Kendall examines the role of the candidates and the media during the period of primary elections. Drawing upon information from a broad array of sources, Kendall uncovers communication patterns that transcend time regarding political image, horse race coverage, and negative campaigning. She takes a strong communication perspective, arguing that the verbal context of the presidential primaries is an important factor overlooked in traditional studies. Topics covered include the effect of party rules on communication, the role of speeches and debates, the role of political advertising, and the media's construction of the primaries in the pre- television era and the age of television. Kendall examines the 1996 primaries in light of patterns discovered in earlier years, and she makes predictions and recommendations regarding the 2000 primaries. With its century-wide scope and the variety of research methods used, the book will be of considerable value to researchers, scholars, journalists and students involved with political communication and American presidential elections.

In this major new work, Thompson develops an original account of ideology and relates it to the analysis of culture and mass communication in modern Societies.

Thompson offers a concise and critical appraisal of major contributions to the theory of ideology, from Marx and Mannheim, to Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas. He argues that these thinkers - and social and political theorists more generally - have failed to deal adequately with the nature of mass communication and its role in the modern world. In order to overcome this deficiency, Thompson undertakes a wide-ranging analysis of the development of mass communication, outlining a distinctive social theory of the mass media and their impact.

Sponsored by the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Section of the American Sociological Association, Volume 10 of the Communication and Information Technologies Annual, Digital Distinctions & Inequalities, brings together nine studies of this increasingly important form of inequality. Drawn from four continents, the research provides a global overview of the current state of the field in different cultural contexts. As a whole, the volume illuminates the complexities of digital inequalities as they are manifested in groups and societies EURO"even when access is widespread. In their depth and breadth, the volume's contributions provide an indispensable guide to emergent forms of digital inequality as it rapidly evolves.

This handbook on Mediatization of Communication uncovers the interrelation between media changes and changes in culture and society. This is essential to understand contemporary trends and transformations. "Mediatization" characterizes changes in practices, cultures and institutions in media-saturated societies, thus denoting transformations of these societies themselves. This volume offers 31 contributions by leading media and communication scholars from the humanities and social sciences, with different approaches to mediatization of communication. The chapters span from how mediatization meets climate change and contribute to globalization to questions on life and death in mediatized settings. The book deals with mass media as well as communication with networked, digital media. The topic of this volume makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of contemporary processes of social, cultural and political changes. The handbook provides the reader with the most current state of mediatization research.

This comprehensive study examines the case of AM stereo and subsequent technologies to demonstrate the FCC's evolution from stern to reluctant regulator. It also examines emerging technologies, such as multichannel television sound, digital audio broadcasting, and high definition television, and discusses their impact on the evolution of broadcast regulation. In the 1980s the tension between governmental control and the marketplace resulted in the FCC's deregulation of TV and radio, electing to set only technical operating parameters and allowing legal operation of any system that meets those minimal standards. Huff argues that this approach is likely to influence regulatory approaches to other new developments in broadcast technologies. The extensive overview of the industry and the study of the interrelationships between the technologies will appeal to communication scholars in the fields of radio and television as well as interest industry professionals.

This book provides listening researchers, educators, and practitioners with an analysis of listening behavior from current perspectives developed by scholars concerned with the way humans process oral messages. The chapters offer a useful base for applying what the authors know about the complexities of listening to improving listening skills in personal relationships, academic, work, and social settings. Contributors from communication, education, psychology, reading, audiology, and learning skills fields offer their perspectives on how we can understand listening, extending our present theoretical base into exciting new dimensions.

Everybody Eats tells the story of food justice in Greensboro, North Carolina-a midsize city in the southern United States. The city's residents found themselves in the middle of conversations about food insecurity and justice when they reached the top of the Food Research and Action Center's list of major cities experiencing food hardship. Greensboro's local food communities chose to confront these high rates of food insecurity by engaging neighborhood voices, mobilizing creative resources at the community level, and sustaining conversations across the local food system. Within three years of reaching the peak of FRAC's list, Greensboro saw an 8 percent drop in its food hardship rate and moved from first to fourteenth in FRAC's list. Using eight case studies of food justice activism, from urban farms to mobile farmers markets, shared kitchens to food policy councils, Everybody Eats highlights the importance of communication-and communicating social justice specifically-in building the kinds of infrastructure needed to create secure and just food systems.

Although the figure of irony has enjoyed extensive attention through important contributions to the diverse literatures addressing figurative thought and language, it still remains relatively in the background compared to other figures such as metaphor and metonymy. The present volume, together with a 2017 collection by Angeliki Athanasiadou and Herbert L. Colston, aims to the further exploration of verbal and situational irony, its gestural accompaniments, its comprehension and interpretation, its constructional diversity and its cooperation with other figures such as metaphor and hyperbole. The present volume is a highly interesting collection of chapters dealing with both theoretical investigations and descriptive applications of a central figure pervading human thought and language. Its aim is to draw more attention to irony's diversity and its concomitant connections to other aspects of figurativeness.

One might be surprised, astonished or indignant seeing men and women prostrating themselves in front of other men and other women. Or one might feel it is right to bow down before God, Allah, the saints, the Holy Virgin or the gods. Kings into Gods: How Prostration Shaped Eurasian Civilizations investigates the reasons why men prostrate themselves before deities or before powerful men. Through an in-depth historical and cultural analysis, this book highlights the connection between rituality and royalty within the Eurasian civilizations. The narrative and iconic documentation gathered and analyzed concerns the Greek and Roman world, the Mongolian civilization during the Middle Ages, the Hindu and Chinese civilizations, the Islamic civilization in India in the fourteenth century, the Mughal civilization and European civilization in the late Middle Ages. The different forms of the rituals in the courts of kings and emperors are tightly connected with the concept of royalty. The prostration is an act of humiliation of defeated enemies, a means to establish a abysmal distance between powerful elite and the people, a way of creating hierarchies within the elite itself.

How do individuals perceive the increasingly open-ended nature of mediated surveillance? In what ways are mediated surveillance practices interwoven with identity processes, political struggles, expression of dissent and the production of social space? One of the most significant issues in contemporary society is the complex forms and conflicting meanings surveillance takes. Media, Surveillance and Identity addresses the need for contextualized social perspectives within the study of mediated surveillance. The volume takes account of dominant power structures (such as state surveillance and commercial surveillance) and social reproduction as well as political economic considerations, counter-privacy discourses, and class and gender hegemonies. Some chapters analyse particular media types, formats or platforms (such as loyalty cards or location based services), while others account for the composite dynamics of media ensembles within particular spaces of surveillance or identity creation (such as consumerism or the domestic sphere). Through empirically grounded research, the volume seeks to advance a complex framework of research for future scrutiny as well as rethinking the very concept of surveillance. In doing so, it offers a unique contribution to contemporary debates on the social implications of mediated practices and surveillance cultures.

Even in our most casual encounters with strangers -- when we are looking at each other, talking, or standing in line -- legal systems with elaborate codes, authorized exceptions, and procedures for sanctioning deviance operate with a remarkable degree of success. In this pathbreaking book, Michael Reisman describes how law is an integral and indispensable part of every social interaction. The private sphere or civic order that the liberal state is committed to preserving and in which it tries to refrain from legislating, says Reisman, is not a legal vacuum but the zone of microlaw -- some of it just, some unsatisfactory, and some tyrannical.

Interweaving numerous real-life examples with a detailed review of the scientific literature of many disciplines, Reisman shows the extent to which microlegal systems function in our own lives. More important, he draws on the criteria of ethics and legal philosophy to demonstrate that, paradoxically, efforts to improve microlaw may threaten the very autonomy of the private sphere that central is to the liberal state.

The Social Psychology of Nonverbal Communication gathers together leading nonverbal communication scholars from around the world to offer insight into a range of issues within the nonverbal literature with the aim to rethink current approaches to the subject.

A critique of conventional approaches to communication research, the authors argue that the impact of gender on research practives has been ignored. By exploring gender issues, and conducting applied research in the areas of mass and interpersonal communication, therapeutic interaction, and rhetoric, they critique traditional scholarship and offer novel alternatives. The authors take intact theories and methods and show their applicability (or lack thereof) to the study of women's communication. The adaptations allow researchers to conduct more accurate, sensitive, and theoretically sound analyses of womens' communication than those promoted by traditional paradigms.

Misunderstandings in technology-mediated communication can be due to a lack of tone and facial expression on the part of the speaker, which provide additional context clues into the meaning of the message beyond textual representation. As technology becomes more of a ubiquitous element in our interactions with one another, further study into the ways in which language and humor are conveyed online and impact human communication is essential. Analyzing Language and Humor in Online Communication presents a compendium of research into virtual communities, online communication, social networks, and the ways that language, and humor in particular, are being conveyed and understood in these digital environments. Emphasizing examples from popular culture and contemporary media, this innovative publication fills the current void in the literature by focusing specifically on humor creation and perception in the digital age. Students, researchers, linguists, psychologists, media professionals, and sociologists will find this publication to be a unique reference source.