Howard Giles

Research Overview

Dr. Giles's research and writings focus on intergenerational communication and aging across the lifespan, including with an “intergroup” perspective. The latter is a longstanding approach in social psychology and communication pertaining to the full range (ethnic, religious, gender, etc.) of global intergroup settings. It attends to phenomena and processes when individuals construe and communicate with each more in terms of their age categories and identities than their idiosyncratic personal attributes, temperaments, and moods. Dr. Giles's team's cross-cultural studies in North America, Africa, and Asia show that this behavior can be all-too-common, age-stereotypic, and negatively-valenced. Dr. Giles's work – both quantitative and qualitative - examines not only communicative manifestations of ageism, but also how older individuals communicate with younger adults (e.g., painful self-disclosures) and, comparatively, how the latter respond to the former (e.g., patronizing speech/nonverbals). Additionally, Dr. Giles and his team have examined grandchild-grandparent interactions, death and dying, and successful-unsuccessful aging, ultimately developing well-cited theories of predictive and explanatory value underlying these processes. In matters of aging, a fundamental and unique perspective of ours is that it is not only about age being in the mind and how old one feels, but that one is as old as one communicates, is communicated to, and is communicated about.