Johnson's Expectancy Violation Theory

Improved Essays
Johnson uses Expectancy Violation Theory and violation valence to explain how people perceive swearing, specifically in the workplace. Johnson notes that the basic premise of EVT is that individuals enter into an interaction with expectancies about how each person will behave; when these expectancies are violated, individuals experience arousal. A central tenet of EVT is that this arousal can be either positive or negative in valence. This is any behavior that falls outside a range of expected behaviors is theorized to produce cognitive arousal and trigger an interpretation-evaluation sequence that helps individuals cope with unexpected outcomes. Moreover, given the importance of violation valence in evaluating an expectancy violation …show more content…
Specifically, it is helpful to be familiar with; functions and frequency of swearing (swearing has been identified functionally as one of the several ways to express emotion in response to workplace stress to convey verbal aggression or to engage in deviant workplace behavior), consequences of swearing (not only is swearing more or less prevalent in different contexts, those who use swearing expressions often experience consequences for their language use), theoretical explanation for perceptions of swearing (EVT appears to be an appropriate theoretical framework for examining swearing), expectancy violation and perceptions of message (although expletives are relatively typical in everyday discourse, people still have prescriptive expectancies about whether such expressions should be used), and expectancy violations and perceptions of a speaker (swearers have been perceived as untrustworthy, therefore, swearing leads to evaluations of a swearer and that positively or neutrally valenced violations of nonverbal expectancies are positively associated with perceptions of expertise). More importantly, it is imperative to know that violation valence is when an expectation is violated, a positive or negative meaning is assigned to the given

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