Chapter 6

The Nature of Nonverbal Communication

1. What is the Nonverbal Communication
a. Nonverbal Communication: behaviors and characteristics that convey meaning without the
use of words.
i. Nonverbal communication behaviors frequently accompany verbal messages to
clarify or reinforce them.
2. Five Characteristics of Nonverbal Communication
a. Nonverbal Communication is Present in Most Interpersonal Conversations
i. Most of our interpersonal communication includes at least some form of nonverbal
communication.
1. When we only have a few nonverbal signals to go on, we pay them extra
attention.
2. When people lose the ability to use one of the their senses to communicate,
they typically compensate by relying more heavily on their remaining senses.
ii. In electronically mediated communication, such as email, instant messaging, and
text messaging, we can introduce nonverbal cues through use of emoticons, the
familiar textual representations of facial expressions.
b. Nonverbal Communication Often Conveys More Information Than Verbal Communication
i. Jude Burgoon suggests that 65 to 70 percent of meaning comes from nonverbal
clues.
ii. Nonverbal Channels: the various behavioral forms that nonverbal communication
takes.
c. Nonverbal Communication is Usually Believed Over Verbal Communication
i. Experts thing we put more trust in nonverbal communication because most of us
believe people have a harder time controlling nonverbal signals than verbal ones.
ii. The human preference for believing nonverbal signals even when they conflict with
words is especially critical for detecting deception, because people often display
inconsistent verbal and nonverbal behaviors when theyre lying.
d. Nonverbal Communication is the Primary Means of Communicating Emotion
i. Emotion is a powerful influence on our behavior, and our primary way of
communicating how we feel is through our nonverbal behaviors.
1. Two channels of nonverbal behavior that are particularly important in
communicating emotion are facial expressions and vocal behaviors.
ii. Studies suggest that facial expressions of basic emotions are interpreted very
similarly across cultures.
iii. We may be more accurate at interpreting emotions through vocal cues than through
facial expressions.
1. This appears to be particularly true when the vocal channel is the only
channel we have access to, such as when were speaking with someone on
the telephone.
e. Nonverbal Communication Metacommunicates
i. We often use nonverbal behaviors such as facial expressions and gestures to
indicate how someone else should interpret our messages.
1. Ex: When a friend or relative whispers and covers her mouth with her hand,
those behaviors convey that what shes telling you is meant to be a secret.
3. Functions of Nonverbal Communication
a. Managing Conversations
i. Inviting Conversations: Three nonverbal cues are especially relevant for inviting
conversations: personal space, physical appearance, and eye contact.
ii. Maintaining Conversations: During a conversation, youll probably use gestures, eye
contact, and tone of voice as turn-taking signals: nonverbal signs that indicate when
each persons speaking turns begin and end.
iii. Ending Conversations: Changes in eye behavior and posture are particularly
common strategies for ending a conversation.
1. Left-positioning: signals that we are preparing to leave the site of
conversation.
b. Expressing Emotions
i. The two most expressive nonverbal channels for emotion are facial expressions and
vocal behaviors.
1. Facial expressions of emotion: facial expression is such a central part of our
experience as social beings that we begin signaling our emotions through
facial displays very early in life.
2. Vocal expressions of emotion: we sometimes can tell how a person is feeling
not by what he or she says but by the way his or her voice sounds.
a. Experimental research has show that many emotions affect the pitch
of the voice.
b. Sadness, unless it is extreme, typically does not cause the pitch of the
voice to change.
c. Maintaining Relationships
i. Attraction and Affiliation: many nonverbal behaviors send messages of attraction
and affiliation. Researchers call those immediacy behaviors.
ii. Power and Dominance: Power is the potential to affect another persons behaviors,
and dominance is the actual exercise of that potential.
1. Adults often convey messages about their power and status nonverbally.
2. Many of us also use artifacts, objects or visual features of an environment, to
be examined further below, as status symbols.
iii. Arousal and Relaxation: arousal refers to an increase in energy. Relaxation, which
we feel in situations of decreased energy, is the opposite of arousal.
1. We experience arousal in two fundamentally different ways depending on
whether it is accompanied by positive or negative emotions.
a. When it accompanied by positive emotions, we experience arousal as
excitement.
i. Increase eye contact with others, more laughter, faster rate of
speech, higher vocal pitch and volume, and closer proximity to
others.
b. When arousal is accompanied by negative emotions we experience
anxiety.
i. Fidgeting and random movement, nervous smiling or laugher,
the use of more gestures and self-adapters, higher vocal pitch
and rate of speech, and the use of more filler words.
2. We also experience relaxation in two different ways.
a. When relaxation is accompanied by positive emotion, we experience it
as contentment.
i. Smile more than usual, have a relaxed posture, and increase
our eye contact with and proximity to those around us.
b. When relaxation is accompanied by negative emotion, we experience
it as depression.
i. Smile less, make less frequent eye contact, and few gestures,
and more self-adapters.
ii. Some people suffer from clinical depression: a psychiatric
disorder thought to be caused by problem with chemical called
neurotransmitters.
d. Forming Impressions
i. Demographic Impressions: a persons demographic characteristics include his or
her age, ethnic background, and sex.
1. Research indicates that on the basis of visual cues, most of us can accurately
classify a person into broad categories for age and ethnicity.
2. Vocal behaviors tend to be particularly good clues as to a persons age, sex,
and sexual orientation.
ii. Sociocultural Impressions: peoples sociocultural characteristics include their
socioeconomic state, which is an index of how much money and education a person
has and how prestigious his or her career is.
1. Personal appearance is usually the most informative nonverbal channel for
forming sociocultural impressions.
e. Influencing Others
i. Creating Credibility: one of the most effective strategies for influencing other
peoples behaviors is to project an image of credibility.
1. We often create an image of credibility by adopting a personal appearance
that conveys expertise and authority.
2. Speaking loudly, quickly, and expressively, with a good deal of pitch
variation, makes a person sound more credible.
3. The use of eye contact and gestures that clarify a verbal message also
enhance a persons credibility.
ii. Promoting Affiliation: we are more persuaded by people we like than by people we
dont
1. One behavior that often contributes to a sense of affiliation is touch.
2. Affiliation is also enhanced by interactional synchrony, which is the
convergence of two peoples behaviors.
f. Concealing Information
i. One of the most commonly studied facial behaviors that can indicate deception is
smiling.
1. Not based on how much someone smiles, but how they smile.
ii. Attempting to conceal information can also influence certain vocal behaviors,
particularly the pitch of the voice.

Ten Channels of Nonverbal Communication
1. Facial Displays: the use of facial expression for communication.
a. According to the principle of facial primacy, the face communicates more information than
any other channel of nonverbal behavior.
b. Identity
i. The face is the most important visual clue that humans use to identify one another.
c. Attractiveness
i. Two properties that appear to be especially important in assessing attractiveness
are symmetry and proportionality.
1. Symmetry: refers to the similarity between the left and right sides of the face.
2. Proportionality: refers to the relative size of ones facial features.
a. Why rhinoplasty is one of the most commonly performed cosmetic
surgeries in the United States.
d. Emotion
i. Facial behavior is our primary means of communicating emotion.
ii. How accurately we decode emotions from other peoples facial expression depends
on several factors.
1. The emotion itself.
2. Sex: in general women tend to be better than men at decoding facial displays
of emotion.
3. People who are outgoing and extroverted tend to be better at interpreting
facial emotion displays than people who are shy or introverted.
2. Eye Behaviors
a. Oculesics: the study of eye behavior.
b. The eyes communicate more than any other part of the face.
c. Your pupils dilate when you look at someone you find physically attractive and when you
feel any kind of arousal, positive or negative.
3. Movement and Gestures
a. Your gait, or the way you walk, is one example of how your body movement can
communicate a particular message about you to others.
b. The study of movement is called kinesics.
c. The use of arm and hand movements to communicate is called gesticulation.
i. Research indicates that people use gestures even before they begin speaking.
ii. Gestures are divided into several forms:
1. Emblems: any gestures that have a direct verbal translation.
a. Ex: waving hello or goodbye
2. Illustrators: gestures that go along with a verbal message to clarify it.
a. Ex: if you hold up your hands a certain distance apart when you say
that fish you caught was this big
3. Affect Displays: gestures that communicate emotion, or affect.
a. Ex: some people wring their hands when they are nervous or cover
their mouths when they are surprised
4. Regulators: gestures that control the flow of conversation.
a. Ex: raising you hand when youre in a group and wish to speak
5. Adaptors: gestures that are used to satisfy some personal need.
a. Ex: scratching an itch or picking lint off ones shirt
b. When we do those behaviors to ourselves, we call them self-adaptors;
when they are direct at others, theyre called other-adaptors.
4. Touch Behaviors
a. Touch is the first of our five sense to develop.
i. Touch is the only sense without which we cannot survive.
ii. Hepatics: the study of how we use touch to communicate.
b. Affectionate Touch
i. Important because it contributes to our physical and mental well-being.
ii. Infants who regularly cuddled experience faster physical development than those
who are not.
c. Caregiving Touch
i. Caregiving touch is distinguished from affectionate touch because it doesnt
necessarily reflect any affection or positive emotion for the person being touched.
d. Power and Control Touch
i. Touch is sometimes used to exert power over other peoples behavior.
ii. We occasionally touch people merely to suggest a certain course of behavior.
1. Ex: when the host of a party puts his hand on a guests back to lead her in a
certain direction.
e. Aggressive Touch
i. Behaviors done to inflict physical harm, such as punching, pushing, kicking,
slapping, and stabbing, are forms of aggressive touch.
ii. Men are more likely than women to be the victims of violence at the hands of a
stranger, women are more likely than men to be victimized by a close relational
partner, such as a spouse.
iii. Using touch behaviors to inflict physical harm on others almost always constitutes a
criminal act.
1. Assault: threatening to hit somebody.
2. Battery: hitting someone.
f. Ritualistic Touch
i. Some touches are ritualistic, meaning that we do them as part of a custom or a
tradition.
1. Ex: shaking hangs as part of a greeting ritual
5. Vocal Behaviors
a. Vocalics: characteristics of the voice
i. Paralanguage: vocalic behaviors that go along with verbal behavior to convey
meaning.
b. The only aspect of spoken communication that is verbal is the words themselves.
Everything else about our voices is nonverbal.
i. Pitch: the pitch of the voice is an index of how high or deep it sounds.
ii. Inflection: refers to the variation in its pitch.
1. Voices that have a lot of inflection are usually called expressive.
2. Those who have little inflection are said to be monotone.
iii. Volume: an index of how loud or quiet ones voice is.
1. Everyones voice has an average volume, meaning that some people generally
speak more loudly that others.
iv. Rate: the average adult speaks at a rate of approximately 150 words per minute.
v. Filler Words: non-word sounds such as umm or er that many people use to fill
the silence during pauses while theyre speaking.
vi. Pronunciation: reflect how correctly a person combines vowel and consonant
sounds to say a word.
vii. Articulation (Enunciation): refers to how clearly one speaks.
viii. Accent: pattern of pronouncing vowel and consonant sounds that is representative
of a particular language or geographic area.
ix. Silence: the absence of sound.
6. The Use of Smell
a. Ofactics: the study of the sense of smell.
b. Memories
i. Smells can affect our communication behavior by influencing our memories and
moods.
ii. Olfactic Association: the tendency of odors to bring to mind specific memories.
c. Sexual Attraction
i. Research tells us that when we are looking for opposite-sex romantic partner, we
are drawn to people whose natural body scent is the most different from our own.
7. The Use of Space
a. Proxemics: the study of spatial use.
i. Explains that we each have a preferred amount of personal space that we carry like
an invisible bubble around us.
ii. How much personal space each of us prefers depends on our temperament, the type
of situation were in, and how well we know the people around us.
b. Anthropologist Edward T. Hall discovered that in Western cultures, people use four spatial
zones when interacting with one another.
i. Intimate Distance: 0 to 1.5 feet; the zone we willingly occupy with only our closest
and most intimate friend, family members, and romantic partners.
ii. Personal Distance: 1.5 to 4 feet; zone we occupy with other friends and relatives
iii. Social Distance: 4 to 12 feet; zone for customers, casual acquaintances, and others
whom we dont know very well
iv. Public Distance: 12 to 25 feet; applies when someone is giving a speech or
performing in front of a large audience
8. Physical Appearance
a. Halo Effect: the tendency to attribute positive qualities to physically attractive people.
i. Attractive people have higher self-esteem and date more frequently than less
attractive people.
ii. We are also nicer, more cooperative, and more lenient toward attractive people.
iii. Preference for beauty has a dark side.
1. Some people will go to dangerous extremes to achieve it eating disorders.
a. Anorexia nervous: derives from the desire to be thin as possible.
Excessive dieting and exercise, self-induced vomiting, and the abuse of
laxatives and diuretics.
b. Bulimia nervosa: characterized by bingeing on large quantities of food
and then compensating for overeating by vomiting , abusing laxative
or diuretics, and/or fasting.
9. The Use of Time
a. Chronemics: the way people use time.
b. The way we use time communicates messages about what we value.
c. Our use of time also sends messages about power.
10. The Use of Artifacts
a. Artifacts: are the objects and physical features within an environment that reflect who we
are and what we like.
i. Includes selection and placement of objects, use of light, and use of color.

Culture, Sex, and Nonverbal Communication (Two Major Influences on Verbal Communication)
1. Culture Influences Nonverbal Communication
a. Emblems
i. The specific messages that an emblem symbolizes often vary be culture.
1. Ex: gestures such as A-OK, thumbs up, and crossed fingers have sexual or
obscene meanings in many parts of the world.
b. Affect Displays
i. Some displays of affect (emotion) are specific to certain cultures.
1. Ex: In China women express emotional satisfaction by holding their
fingertips over their close mouths.
c. Personal Distance
i. People from Arab countries generally converse with each other at closer distances
than do U.S. Americans.
d. Eye Contact
i. In many Western cultures, direct eye contact signifies that someone is sincere,
trustworthy, and authoritative, whereas lack of eye contact elicits negative
evaluations from others. Some Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern cultures
emphasize the lack of eye contact as a sign of deference or respect for authority.
e. Facial Displays of Emotion
i. Research indicated that people around the world express emotions in highly similar
ways.
ii. What tends to differ across cultures is how expressive people are of emotion, with
those in individualistic cultures routinely being more emotionally expressive than
those in collectivistic cultures.
f. Greeting Behavior
g. Time Orientations
i. Some cultures are monochromic while others are polychromic.
h. Touch
i. People in high-contact cultures, which include France, Mexico, and Greece, touch
each other significantly more often than do people in low-contact cultures, such as
Japan, Sweden, and Finland.
ii. The United States is classified as a medium-contact culture.
i. Vocalics
i. Cultures differ in their filler words.
2. Sex Influences Nonverbal Communication
a. Emotional Expressiveness
i. Several studies document that women are more expressive than men with respect
to a variety of emotional states, including joy, affection, sadness, and depression.
ii. Some research indicates that men are more expressive than women of anger.
Although other studies have found no sex difference in anger expression.
b. Eye Contact
i. When communicating with other of their same sex, women engage in more eye
contact than do men.
ii. Research indicates that male-female pairs are similar to female-female pairs in
terms of eye contact.
c. Personal Space
i. In comparison to men, women are approached more closely, give way more readily
to others, stand and sit closer to each other, and tolerate more violations of their
personal space.
ii. In opposite-sex interactions, men are also more likely to violate womens personal
space than women are to violate mens.
d. Vocalics
i. On average, mens voices have a lower average pitch than do womens.
1. The primary reason why is that men have a larger voice box and longer voice
cords.
ii. Research indicates that men also use more filler words and pauses while speaking
than do women.
e. Touch
i. Men are more likely to touch women than women are to touch men, unless the
touch is occurring as part of a greeting.
ii. In same-sex pairs women touch each other more than men do.
f. Appearance
i. In Western cultures cosmetic use is significantly more common for women than for
men.

Improving Your Nonverbal Communication Skills
1. Interpreting Nonverbal Communication
a. Be Sensitive to Nonverbal Messages
i. Sensitivity to nonverbal behaviors is important because we cant interpret messages
unless we first take note of them.
b. Decipher the Meaning of Nonverbal Messages
i. Nonverbal messages sometimes carry multiple meanings.
ii. To improve your skill at deciphering nonverbal messages, try the following:
1. Be are of the situation.
2. Keep culture in mind.
3. Ask for clarification.
2. Expressing Nonverbal Messages
a. To improve your own skill at expressing nonverbal messages, try the following.
i. Learn from others.
ii. Practice being expressive.