Notes
This book gives general information. It isn't counselling or medical advice, and it's no substitute for a professional who knows your situation. NHS guidance is quoted as I found it in September 2026 and applies to England.
I've kept sources out of the chapters where I could so they read easily. Here they are by chapter, with the limits I'm aware of. Unless I say otherwise, I read the published summary of each paper and not the full text. I checked each paper for a retraction or correction notice in September 2026 and found none on the papers cited. Where a chapter isn't listed, it rests on my own reasoning. That includes chapters 1, 8 apart from one study, 9, 12, 13 and 16. Hannah, Gareth and every other example are invented for illustration.
Before you start. The advice on hearing is from the NHS page "Hearing loss". The signs of ADHD are from the NHS page "ADHD in adults".
Chapter 2. Stivers, Enfield, Brown, Englert, Hayashi, Heinemann, Hoymann, Rossano, de Ruiter, Yoon and Levinson, "Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, 2009, pages 10587 to 10592. The languages differed in average gap within a range of about 250 milliseconds of the overall mean. Levinson and Torreira, "Timing in turn-taking and its implications for processing models of language", Frontiers in Psychology 6, 2015, article 731. The list of five reasons is mine.
Chapter 3. Levinson and Torreira as above. Brenner, "The next-in-line effect", Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 12, 1973, pages 320 to 323. Bond, "The next-in-line effect: encoding or retrieval deficit?", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 48, 1985, pages 853 to 862. I couldn't obtain either paper or a summary, and the chapter says so. The experiments involved reading words in a group and not conversation, so applying them to a phone call is my step. That the most important sentence tends to come late in a turn is my observation. The quarter of the time that minds wandered is from Collins and colleagues, below, where the figure given is 24 per cent.
Chapter 4. Collins, Minson, Kristal and Brooks, "Conveying and detecting listening during live conversation", Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 153, 2024, pages 473 to 494. There were five studies and 1,225 participants. Bavelas, Coates and Johnson, "Listeners as co-narrators", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79, 2000, pages 941 to 952. There were 63 pairs of strangers. The listeners in that study were distracted by a task set by the experimenters and not by their own replies. My account of how narrators faltered at the ending is a paraphrase of the summary, which says they told their stories significantly less well, particularly at what should have been the dramatic ending. That a reply gives away inattention, and that people form a settled sense over many conversations, is my reasoning. I know of no study that has followed this over years.
Chapter 5. Singh Ospina, Phillips, Rodriguez-Gutierrez, Castaneda-Guarderas, Gionfriddo, Branda and Montori, "Eliciting the patient's agenda: secondary analysis of recorded clinical encounters", Journal of General Internal Medicine 34, 2019, pages 36 to 40. The clinician elicited the patient's agenda in 40 of 112 encounters and interrupted in 27 of those 40. The six-second figure therefore rests on 13 patients.
Chapter 6. Weger, Castle Bell, Minei and Robinson, "The relative effectiveness of active listening in initial interactions", International Journal of Listening 28, 2014, pages 13 to 31. The conversations were first meetings with trained partners, and the authors describe the differences in satisfaction and liking as small. My description of what active listening involved is the usual definition and isn't spelt out in the summary. Maisel and Gable, "The paradox of received social support: the importance of responsiveness", Psychological Science 20, 2009, pages 928 to 932.
Chapter 7. Derber, The Pursuit of Attention: Power and Individualism in Everyday Life, first published in 1979. I've given the distinction between shift and support responses from memory and haven't checked it against the book. The example exchanges are mine.
Chapter 8. Stivers and colleagues as above. That a short pause reads as thoughtfulness, and that people often continue after a pause, are my observations and common teaching in counselling, and I haven't sourced them.
Chapter 10. Kluger, Lehmann, Aguinis, Itzchakov, Gordoni, Zyberaj and Bakaç, "A meta-analytic systematic review and theory of the effects of perceived listening on work outcomes", Journal of Business and Psychology 39, 2024, pages 295 to 344. There were 664 effect sizes. These are correlations, and the studies measured how well people felt listened to, not how well anyone actually listened. Chapter 4 explains why those can differ.
Chapter 11. Pasupathi and Rich, "Inattentive listening undermines self-verification in personal storytelling", Journal of Personality 73, 2005, pages 1051 to 1085. The listeners were distracted by an assigned task. Gable, Reis, Impett and Asher, "What do you do when things go right? The intrapersonal and interpersonal benefits of sharing positive events", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 87, 2004, pages 228 to 245. The example of the son and the team is mine. That people conclude they're boring is my inference from Bavelas and colleagues.
Chapter 14. Gollwitzer and Sheeran, "Implementation intentions and goal achievement: a meta-analysis of effects and processes", Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 38, 2006, pages 69 to 119. The rule and its parts haven't been tested together, and what I say to expect is my expectation and not a finding.
Chapter 15. The signs of hearing loss are from the NHS page "Hearing loss". Urgent help routes are from the NHS page "Where to get urgent help for mental health".