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Chapter Summary

Chapter 1

This chapter lays the groundwork for studying the codes, processes, and functions of nonverbal communication. Nonverbal behaviors are a central and essential part of the communication process. They contribute significantly to the meaning that is extracted from communicative episodes and they influence communication outcomes. Possible reasons for this powerful impact include nonverbal cues being omnipresent, forming a sort of universal language system, adding to misunderstanding as well as understanding, expressing what verbal communication can't or shouldn't, having phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and interaction primacy, and being a trusted system of communication.

Before beginning a detailed study of nonverbal communication, it is first necessary to clarify what constitutes it. A wide range of definitions is possible, some of which use the concepts of information, behavior, and communication interchangeably. In this text, we distinguish among these three. It is also possible to generate different definitions depending on whether one takes a source, receiver, or message orientation. In this text, emphasis is on the latter approach, which regards as communication those behaviors that are used with regularity by a social community, are typically encoded with intent, and are typically decoded as intentional. In analyzing these perspectives, we have addressed a number of issues related to intentionality, awareness, propositionality, and meaning, including whether nonverbal behaviors are signs or symbols. The position advanced here is that the total nonverbal communication system includes a mix of signs and symbols with varying degrees of awareness, volition, and propositionality. Some emanate from our biological heritage. Others are the result of social forces. Together, they create a complex set of influences on how we communicate nonverbally.

The mix of signals derives from the various nonverbal codes that work together to produce a wide range of communication functions. To gain the fullest understanding of how these codes coordinate with one another and with the verbal code to achieve desired outcomes, nonverbal communication should be studied as a dynamic system that is highly integrated with verbal communication and should take into account cultural, contextual, and individual differences. This is the approach that will be followed throughout this text. 

Chapter 2

Cultures vary on a wide variety of characteristics, including collectivism versus individualism, immediacy, power distance, low- versus high-context, and gender orientation. These characteristics provide a partial explanation for some of the differences and similarities found when comparing nonverbal behavior across cultures. Some global patterns of cultural differences emerge in the literature. For example, Asian countries can be distinguished from other countries by their subtlety in expression and their relatively low levels of immediacy, especially when interacting in public contexts. The Mediterranean regions of Europe and Africa, the Middle East, Mexico, Central America, and South America stand out in terms of being highly expressive and immediate, whereas the United States stands out as the most individualistic. Of course, it is important to remember that these broad cultural comparisons ignore the diversity that occurs within cultures. Nonetheless, we hope this chapter has helped you appreciate and be sensitive to cultural variation in nonverbal behavior so that you can step away from your own cultural stereotypes when communicating with people from other cultural and co-cultural groups.

Chapter 3

The bio-evolutionary perspective explains the tendency to enact a given behavior, first by examining why that behavior might contribute to survival and/or procreation, and second by investigating the physiological correlates of the behavior through which those contributions are made. We have seen, for instance, that crying might ultimately contribute to our survival by preventing us from being immobilized by distress, and that the chemical composition of emotional tears may be responsible for the calming effect that crying often has on us. We've seen how being affectionate with a loved one can help bond us to that person emotionally, increasing our security and our reproductive opportunity, and how the hormone oxytocin plays a part in creating the feelings of bonding and attachment that go along with affection. And we have seen that our evaluation of someone's body odor predicts our physical attraction to that person, which discourages us from mating with people whose genetic information is too similar to our own.

The fact that these and other behaviors are affected by bio-evolutionary forces doesn't mean they aren't also subject to the influences of culture, however. Engaging in affectionate behavior is good for you and your relationships, but cultures still vary in how they show affection. As you consider the influences of culture and biology on nonverbal behavior, we want to encourage you not to adopt an either/or perspective, as though the cause of a given behavior were either culture or biology. Humans aren't that simplistic. As you learn more about nonverbal communication in this text, keep in mind that most behaviors are subject to multiple causes. The goal of research, therefore, is not to pin down which cause is the true cause, but rather to identify how influential each cause is. How much of the variation in a given behavior can we attribute to culture, for instance? How much to biology? How much to their interaction? These are all intriguing— and ongoing—questions for researchers in the field of nonverbal communication.

All explanations have their strengths and weaknesses, and the bio-evolutionary perspective is no exception. One of its most important strengths is its ability to account for behaviors that are consistent across cultures and time periods. If a behavior doesn't differ from culture to culture, it cannot be said to be culturally determined, which means that there is a good chance it is based on something broader than culture, such as a biological drive. Indeed, some of the behaviors we have discussed in this chapter— such as the preference for symmetry, for instance— are observed across cultures, across centuries, and even across species (nearly all species, in fact, are attracted to symmetry). A sociocultural explanation may be able to account for why people in a given culture prefer symmetry, but it cannot adequately explain the universality of this preference, whereas the bio-evolutionary perspective can.

One of the limitations of the bio-evolutionary approach is that it deals with causes that are sometimes difficult to see and appreciate. For example, consider the fact that aggressive parents tend to raise aggressive children. If you saw that occur, it would be easy to point to the aggressive environment in the household as the cause of the children's aggression. The parents always fought, they were abusive toward each other, they watched a lot of violent television—no wonder the children grew up to be aggressive. They obviously learned it from their parents. In this case, socialization is an obvious cause of the children's aggression, but is it the biggest cause? Perhaps the parents' genes predisposed them to be aggressive, and the children are aggressive because they inherited those genes. This isn't quite as apparent a cause as socialization or environment, but it may actually be a more influential one, and scientists would have ways of determining if it is. One of the keys to using a bio-evolutionary perspective, therefore, is to remember that cause-and-effect relationships aren't always obvious—sometimes we have to dig deeper than the environment, the culture, the media, or the politics to really understand human behavior. 

Chapter 4

In most interactions, appearance and adornment are the first nonverbal cues people notice. Because of this, appearance and adornment play a pivotal role in the formation of first impressions. People frequently make judgments of others based on appearance cues. Physically attractive people are often evaluated in accordance with the “what is beautiful is good” hypothesis, which specifies that outer beauty is associated with a host of positive internal qualities, ranging from likeability to intelligence. However, physically attractive people are also judged to be vain and materialistic, as the “what is beautiful is self-centered” hypothesis suggests. Thus, beauty comes with both advantages and disadvantages. Beauty is also both universal and in the eye of the beholder. Features judged as universally attractive include koinophilia, facial neotency combined with sexual maturity, face and body symmetry, the Golden Ratio, and waist-to-hip ratios of .70 for women and .90 to 1.0 for men. Preferences for body type and coloring are more culturally and individually variable, and people tend to evaluate people they like and people who are good communicators as more physically attractive. People are aware of the importance of physical appearance, leading them to make body image investments such as dieting and cosmetic procedures. Adornment cues, such as makeup, clothing, and perfume, are also used to intentionally project particular images. Finally, other olfactic cues, such as pheromones, can influence processes related to attraction even though they are emitted unintentionally. 

Chapter 5

Kinesics and vocalics relate to the visual and auditory senses for encoding and decoding messages. Each draws on strong nature and nurture tributaries and each is critically important to the development of children’s ability to communicate. Centuries of treatises on the methods and features of public oratory combined with modern-day scientific approaches to analyzing nonverbal behavior have resulted in numerous ways to categorize or group the nearly limitless possibilities for expression into more manageable units of analysis. The main approaches identify either (1) specific structures—movements or vocal features— that are part of the human’s expressive “equipment,” (2) specific communicative functions that kinesic and vocal expressions accomplish, or (3) specific meanings that constellations of behaviors convey. These basic coding systems introduce essential vocabulary for the study of nonverbal communication and the building blocks from which nonverbal expressions are crafted or comprehended. The large number of structural, functional, and meaning-based approaches is testament to the importance of these two coding systems. Each approach has its virtues in showing how many features are available for use in our kinesic and vocalic repertoires and how they can be put to use to communicate.

Despite a strong, innate foundation, the codes are governed powerfully by cultural, co-cultural, contextual, and personality norms that are learned at an early age. The visual and auditory codes play a major role in accomplishing all the communication functions we discuss in Part Three.

Chapter 6

Touch and distance are important forms of nonverbal communication. Haptic behavior is extremely powerful. Throughout the lifespan, positive forms of touch associate with health and social development. Touch can show love and affection or hate and violence. We use touch to comfort and congratulate others, to greet and depart from others, and to help us engage in instrumental tasks. Proxemic cues are also powerful. In fact, these cues are omnipresent in that there is always some measure of space (or no space) between communicators. Even when talking on the phone, communicators are aware that the partner is separated from them by space, and this alters the way communication occurs. People defend their private territories and personal space, and when they welcome people into these spaces, this welcoming behavior often signals some level of friendship, trust, and/or intimacy. Indeed, the nonverbal cues of haptics and proxemics are instrumental in helping people manage their dual needs for privacy and closeness. There are times when we want to put as much distance between ourselves and another person as possible, and there are other times when it may seem impossible to get close enough. These two nonverbal codes help us achieve both of these goals. 

Chapter 7

The environmental code and the chronemic code both play important roles in human communication. Elements from these codes are often used in a communicative fashion and may also provide a great deal of situational and contextual information. Environmental code elements act as communication cues by communicating meaning directly in symbolic form, providing a context for interaction, or guiding behavior by prompting rules for interaction. The elements of the environment and artifacts code can be classified as fixed-feature elements, which are relatively permanent and slow to change, and semifixed-feature elements, which are mobile and easily changed. In general, people in our culture have a much greater degree of control over semifixed than fixed features. Other cultures have a greater degree of control over features in both categories. Finally, some recent analysis indicates that some cultures are more oriented toward the use of elements of this code for communicative purposes (high-context cultures), whereas other cultures are less likely to do so (low-context cultures). Although the U.S. culture qualifies as a low-context culture, this chapter has shown that we still make extensive use of these code elements as part of communication.

We are still discovering the importance of the chronemic code elements, but it is already apparent that they are very relevant to all cultures. Physical and biological cycles appear to provide a fundamental framework for the experience of time. Moreover, individuals and groups vary in their psychological and cognitive constructions of time. Given that the elements of the chronemic code are often learned on an implicit basis and that there is great cultural and co-cultural variation in their use and meaning, many communication difficulties can be explained by an analysis of chronemic elements. Much is yet to be learned about this interesting and subtle code, especially in interpersonal and relational contexts.

Chapter 8

We have reiterated throughout this chapter that nonverbal and verbal codes are part of an indivisible communication system. Both streams have many linguistic properties in common. Both have semiotic capability, that is, the capacity to convey representational information, but the nonverbal codes also have iconic and imagistic properties that add complementary and sometimes competing meanings.

The differences in linguistic characteristics are paralleled by neurophysiological differences in the production and processing of nonverbal messages. Many parts of the brain are specialized to handle different aspects of communication. The limbic system and R-complex are especially central to emotions and reflexive actions. However, emerging research is confirming a high degree of integration and coordination of verbal and nonverbal processes, especially between the two hemispheres of the neocortex.

The production of oral communication thus depends on nonverbal cues for generating meaning, retrieving lexical items, segmenting discourse into phonemic chunks, and augmenting meaning. Other nonverbal cues signal speaker difficulty in the message construction process. On the receiving end, nonverbal cues also play a major role in the perception, comprehension, and recall of received messages. Although the verbal stream carries important, and sometimes overriding, information for many functions and receivers, nonverbal information prevails over verbal information for much of our interpretation of the meaning of social situations. Despite these differences, verbal and nonverbal codes are well integrated for achieving a variety of communicative functions. To treat them as independent systems is therefore an artificial and counterproductive distinction.

Greater reliance on nonverbal than verbal codes for meaning is the prevailing pattern but also varies with age, gender, communication function at stake, degree of congruence in meaning among channels, and individual biases. Among the nonverbal codes, visual ones often carry more weight than auditory and other ones, but with many exceptions. Reasons offered for these patterns of channel reliance include inborn tendencies, divisions of labor, structural properties that are suited for cerebral processing, units of meaning per time, alerting capacity, controllability, and parallel rather than serial processing. 

Chapter 9

The process of person perception involves selecting, organizing, and interpreting available information, which often comes in the form of nonverbal cues. Several cognitive heuristics and biases influence the perceptions that nonverbal cues lead us to form of others, including primacy, confirmation, recency, visual, stereotyping, egocentric, positivity, and negativity. Nonverbal cues from a number of codes have been shown to affect impressions on the physical, sociocultural, and psychological levels. Evidence indicates that impressions are more consensual and less accurate when they are of objective characteristics, but recent research suggests that first impressions of some internal characteristics (such as extroversion) can be accurate. Finally, a wide variety of cues affects impression formation on all three levels of judgment, and cues that affect impression formation are widely distributed in the behavioral flow of interaction. “Don’t judge a book by its cover” remains a prudent rule for social behavior, but much social life is nevertheless guided by WYSIWYG: “What you see is what you get.”

Chapter 10

The process of image management relates to the ways in which we portray ourselves to others. As we’ve seen in this chapter, this is an ongoing process that relies on our knowledge of how nonverbal behaviors and characteristics will be interpreted by others. Nonverbal behavior plays a central role in the ways we communicate messages about our sex and gender, age, and personality to those around us. “Just be yourself” may be commonly heard advice, but as you’ve seen, image management is a complex endeavor that engages multiple elements of nonverbal communication. 

Chapter 11

Emotions are powerful. They motivate people to take action, bond people together, and sometimes lead people to act in irrational ways. Emotions are adaptive because they help people cope with their changing environment. The internal experience of emotion is characterized by affect, cognition, and physiological changes; whereas the external expression of emotion is shaped by innate action tendencies as well as learned display rules. Researchers have different perspectives regarding the link between emotional experience and emotional expression. They disagree regarding the extent to which facial expressions are universal and provide a direct read-out of a person's internal emotional state. Some researchers see emotional expression as a combination of felt and feigned emotions. Other researchers believe that emotional expressions are shaped by social motives and the emotions that accompany those motives. The most significant nonverbal channels for emotional expression are the voice and the face, although people also communicate emotion nonverbally using body cues, activity cues, and physiological cues. Being able to express and manage emotions is an important communication skill. Emotionally intelligent people are able to recognize, understand, and manage their own emotions as well as the emotions of others.

Women appear to have an advantage over men when it comes to decoding emotional information and expressing positive emotion; men appear to have a small advantage over women when it comes to expressing anger and controlling emotional expressions. For both females and males, encoding and decoding ability increases from childhood through young adulthood. Being skilled at expressing and interpreting emotions is a valuable skill throughout the lifespan. 

Chapter 12

Relational communication is one of the principal functions that nonverbal communication accomplishes. Through nonverbal messages, people define and maintain their interpersonal relationships. Of the multifaceted themes of relational communication, intimacy and dominance are the two superordinate ones.

Among the nonverbal cues that signal whether people have an intimate or nonintimate relationship are immediacy cues. Key immediacy cues include positive forms of touch, close proxemic distancing, direct body orientation, gaze, kinesic and vocalic expressiveness, and spending time together. Many of these immediacy cues are also used when people flirt with one another, although they tend to be more ambiguous and submissive during courtship. People also communicate intimacy by showing affection toward one another, both directly and indirectly, by engaging in similar behaviors, and by reciprocating immediacy. Finally, the environment sets the stage for intimate communication. Factors such as lighting, temperature, and furniture arrangement can affect social interaction, as can the emotions people are experiencing within a given environment. Clearly, nonverbal communication is rich in its ability to create intimate interactions and foster close relationships. By the same token, nonverbal relational messages can express hostility, dislike, exclusion, or distrust. Thus, the nonverbal expressions of relational messages are potent means by which people gauge their own relationship and that of others. 

Chapter 13

Powerfulness-powerlessness and dominance-submission are fundamental components underlying communication. Principles of space and access, centrality, elevation, prerogative, interactional control, and intimidation/threat help explain why certain nonverbal cues are perceived as powerful or dominant. Credibility can also foster impressions of power and pave the way for persuasion. Scholars have identified five facets of credibility: (1) competence and authority; (2) character and trustworthiness; (3) composure and poise; (4) likability; and (5) dynamism or charisma. Physical appearance cues, such as uniforms and formal dress, are associated with authority. People are rated as more trustworthy and likable when they use eye contact, are vocally and facially pleasant, and speak in a conversational style. Composure and poise are conveyed through behaviors showing pleasantness, fluency, and a lack of anxiety. Finally, dynamic or charismatic individuals communicate energy, enthusiasm, expressiveness, and self-confidence. Many of the same nonverbal behaviors that are related to power and credibility are also related to social influence. These include a well groomed appearance, kinesic and vocal expressiveness, smiling, appropriate forms of touch, and vocal similarity. Several factors affect whether various nonverbal behaviors are successful in persuading others. These factors include how legitimate a request is, how expected a behavior was, and how the information was processed. After reading this chapter, it should be apparent that there is a fine line between power that is gained through intimidation, and power that is gained through social skill. People who gain power through the use of skilled nonverbal communication are usually more influential over time than those who use intimidation or threat. 

Chapter 14

Nonverbal behaviors play a major part in managing conversations during all phases and at all levels. They are instrumental in initiating and terminating conversations. Coupled with verbal behaviors, they signal approachability (during greetings) or pending inaccessibility (during terminations), convey supportiveness, and reaffirm the definition of the interpersonal relationship. During leave-taking, they also bolster verbal behaviors that summarize and bring closure to the interaction.

Within the conversation itself, nonverbal cues regulate turn-taking. Speakers employ them to signal their intentions to keep or relinquish the floor. Listeners use them to request or deny a turn and to provide backchannel support to the speaker. The manner in which communicators utilize these cues determines whether turn exchanges are smooth, overlapped, or interruptive. There are several models of how the turn exchange process works, one of the most promising of which appears to be the resource model.

Nonverbal cues also assist topic switches. Proxemic shifts, extra-interactional activities, silences, and paralinguistic cues are used to signal changes in conversational topics. This is important not only in preparing listeners for the new information to be introduced but also as an indicator of speaker competence.

Finally, conversations are coordinated through dyadic interactional sequences and patterns. Substantial evidence documents that people adapt to one another, producing synchrony, convergence, matching, mirroring, and reciprocity or dissynchrony, divergence, complementarity, and compensation. Many of the patterns appear to be biologically based or acquired early in life as infants and children first interact with caretakers. Several theories have been forwarded to explain and predict these interaction patterns; among them are affiliative conflict theory, arousal labeling theory, the sequential functional model, expectancy violations theory, discrepancy arousal theory, communication accommodation theory, and interaction adaptation theory. Research has recently begun to verify the effects of adaptation on such interaction outcomes as relational satisfaction and evaluations of communicators. It is clear that adaptation patterns have long-term implications for successful human relationships.

Chapter 15

Deception is a frequent, essential, and adaptive strategy in human communication. It takes many guises—from bald-faced lies to fibs to evasions and equivocations to concealment of relevant information. It is motivated by needs for resources, affiliative desires, relational considerations, and self-protection, and it is these motives that determine its morality and acceptability.

A mountain of research on deception displays has yet to find a consistent profile of nonverbal behaviors that signal deception. Deceivers engage in a combination of strategic and nonstrategic activities, the former to manage informational contents, behaviors, and overall image; the latter as inadvertent indications of emotional stress, cognitive effort, memory challenges, speech interference, or attempted suppression of leakage. However, the exact combination depends on the relational and cultural context, the preinteraction expectations, knowledge, goals, motivations, and communication skills of the actors, and characteristics of the interaction itself. Nonetheless, there are some indicators that can probabilistically suggest deception.

Accuracy in detecting deception is poor among experts and novices alike. It is hampered partly by stereotypes, biases, and heuristics that receivers apply when making judgments, but it is also hindered by the absence of a consistent set of indicators and by deceivers' savvy adaptation to receiver-signaled suspicions. Receivers' accuracy will be affected by the communication modality, their familiarity with the actor's baseline behavior, relational familiarity with the actor, suspicion level, personality, and sociodemographic factors of sex and age, among others. It will not be aided by an increase in confidence but it may be improved through training.