MONOGRAPHS

Understanding Interpersonal Communication
Edward Elgar Publishing, Understanding Series, forthcoming 2031/2032

This book examines the power of interpersonal communication to strengthen or harm us in a world increasingly shaped by disinformation, societal division, eroding trust, uncertainty, and artificial intelligence. Drawing on research in interpersonal communication competence, safe communication, and communicative resilience, it explores how we influence, interpret, trust, question, and support one another, and how our everyday encounters can either reinforce the challenges we face or strengthen our capacity to respond. Moving beyond conventional accounts of effective communication, the book develops a competence-based understanding of communicative resilience, examining how we can recognise harmful influence, protect one another, navigate differences, and deliberately harness communication’s power to connect, strengthen, and support healing.

Safe Communication: Preventing Harm and Building Resilience
Routledge (Taylor & Francis), forthcoming 2029

This book develops the Theory of Safe Communication, a communication-scientific framework explaining how human communication creates safety or contributes to preventable harm in complex, high-risk systems. Grounded in empirical analyses of safety-critical incidents across healthcare, aviation, emergency response, and public transportation, it examines why communication failures persist despite established safety procedures and how communication enables people to detect risks, establish shared understanding, and coordinate safe action under pressure. Introducing the SACCIA competence architecture and the distinction between Communication I and Communication II, the book advances a new understanding of communication as essential human safety infrastructure, with implications for research, education, and safety practice.

When the truth hurts: Toward a validation of the physician mistake disclosure (PMD) model
UMI Dissertation Publishing, 2011

My dissertation proposes and validates a typology of competent and incompetent medical error disclosure styles and empirically tests for mediation effects of disclosure skills on disclosure outcomes. The findings evidence consistent direct associations between competent disclosure skills and positive error disclosure outcomes, implying that the competent error disclosure is an important communication construct that may help physicians cope with medical errors and prevent negative disclosure outcomes such as patient anger, repeated errors, and malpractice litigation.