Non-verbal Communication - Term Paper Example

Non-verbal Communication Affiliation The study of nonverbal communication and started in the 1950’s as a cross-disciplinary effort by linguists, psychiatrists, and anthropologists. An empirical research, widespread media attention, and books filled the studies in the 1960s as well as the 1970s. As the research gained momentum in the 1980s, however, attention to nonverbal cues waned. Today, there is a revival of interest in the field of nonverbal communication, particularly among the researchers studying emotion, personal perception, and psychophysiology. The future of nonverbal communication, therefore, lies as an interdisciplinary endeavor, the same point from where it started. The paper looks at the relationship that exists between the study of psychology and nonverbal communication. Addressing the importance of the perception side and the expression side helps the paper understand the role played by nonverbal communication in social psychology. The paper also analyzes the social actors undermining veridicality, self-perception as well as the interpersonal process of deception. Non-verbal Communication Introduction Psychology is the scientific study of the mind and human behavior, which includes how people think, behave, and communicate. Therefore, non-verbal communication is an essential tool in psychology as it involves communication effected by means other than words. These means include posture, facial expression, gesture, touch, and personal space. While nonverbal communication is an important topic among psychologists, the relationship between mainstream psychology and nonverbal communication research has varied over time. Therefore, it important to analyze the relationship between these two fields, and what might still happen in the future. The paper also covers the relationship between nonverbal communication and interpersonal interaction. Analysis Communication (whether verbal or nonverbal) is a construct of human’s making. People can see others talk, put a sad face or a crying child, but they cannot see ‘communication’. Therefore, communication is a construct applied to observable events. Nonverbal communication simply means sending and receiving messages/information and influence through the immediate environment, behavior, and appearance cues. Information is either informative or communicative. Information is communicative when its intention is conveying a definite meaning. Likewise, information is informative when it is emitted unconsciously. In nonverbal communication, psychologists focus on its relation to verbal messages, encoded meaning, development, and social impact. It also focuses on the differences between groups and individuals in their nonverbal behavior in using and understanding nonverbal communication. Nonverbal behavior is the behavior emitted without the encoder knowing while nonverbal communication involves the encoder and the decoder emitting and interpreting behaviors based on a shared meaning code. Many people misunderstand the nonverbal cues emitted by others because encoders may not be aware of the cues that they are sending. The process of conveying veridical information unintentionally through nonverbal cues is called leakage (Baron, 2012). Nonverbal communication operates on a give-and-take basis, which means that nonverbal communication is a product of the patterns of nonverbal behavior. Many people find nonverbal communication useful because, at its best, it provides information, regulates interactions, expresses intimacy, exercises influence, and manages impressions. Basically, these are the specific goals people pursue in their daily contacts with others. Successful and automatic social judgments and automatic behaviors are the dominant factors in the nonverbal communication system. Therefore, from a psychologist’s point of view, nonverbal communication is a highly pragmatic and efficient means of managing the human social worlds. The social nature of humans enable then to grow up in families, work in groups, and share many experiences with other people in different situations. Although using the verbal content during interactions is important, the nonverbal content has a greater impact on how humans think and feel about others and how they get along together. A speaker can change the meaning of his/her message by changing the facial expressions, tone of voice, or gestures. Characteristics of nonverbal communication Among the primary characteristic of nonverbal communication is that it is ever-present. People always communicate nonverbally, as long as there is a chance for auditory, tactile, visual, or olfactory information. People often notice the cues and behaviors that please them and bear on their welfare, such as a careful evaluation of the reaction of a personnel manager during an employment interview. Sending and receiving information through nonverbal communication occurs simultaneously. This means it’s a give-and-take situation whereby one person sends information using the nonverbal behavior and appearance. At the same time, he/she is receiving the receivers’ information by decoding the appearance and nonverbal communication of the receiver. The give-and-take sending and receiving of nonverbal signals is the background of coordination in social settings. Thirdly, nonverbal communication happens automatically without awareness. It involves sending and receiving behavioral signals in a coordinated and efficient manner without any monitoring of oneself. As a receiver receives the signals, they do not have to think about what the meaning is. This is because the mind registers and interprets the signals and cause fast judgments and reactions about others (Ambady et,al., 2000). For example, a smile disarms people the concerns about trouble, while the angry glare alerts people of potential threat or danger. This reflects a fourth characteristic which states terms nonverbal communication as cognitively efficient. People do not have to engage in unnecessary thinking as an act of trying to make sense of the world. Instead, people just take shortcuts and jump straight to judgment without much deliberation. Specific behaviors and cues do not have invariant meanings. Therefore, elements of nonverbal communication are also ambiguous in meaning. This is because the meaning of nonverbal messages highly depends on the pattern of behaviors and cues. Also, changing one nonverbal element can, therefore, alter the meaning of a signal. Social norms dictate the kind of acceptable behavior by the public. For example, a football player can pat his team-mate’s behind after a win, but such behavior is unacceptable in the office at a business meeting. Informative behavioral cues make nonverbal communication interesting as they are produced without conscious awareness and are considered as honest signals (Pentland, 2008). These signals leak reliable information about the inner feelings and state such as anger, fear, and surprise of the sender. General conditions include arousal, tiredness and calm, while attitudes include interest, dominance, empathy, and disappointments. Psychology of nonverbal communication Social psychology groups all nonverbal behavioral cues into five categories/codes: physical appearance, face and eyes behavior, space and environment, vocal behavior, and gestures and postures. Physical appearance and particularly attractiveness signal has a significant impact on how people perceive others. Many people believe in the “halo effect,” also called “what is beautiful is good.” That means that people associate socially desirable characteristics with physical attractive people. Similarly, there is a definite influence of the overall body shape on personality traits attribution. For example, thin people are considered to have little emotional stability, round individuals are considered high in openness (Gatti, 1965) Gestures and postures convey precise meaning or perform specific action. Research shows that gestures can be used to express emotions and accompany social, affective states like embarrassment and shame. Postures are imperative nonverbal cues as they convey three different types of messages-inclusion/exclusion, engagement, and rapport. Facing the opposite way while talking with others excludes them, while engagement means involving others in an interaction when in front of them. Rapport means one party imitating a second party because they like each other. Facial expressions and behaviors are the cues that account for cognitive states such as interest and emotions, psychological states such as pain and suicidal depression, and social behaviors like rapport and accord. Vocal behavior includes prosody, silences, turn-taking patterns, and linguistic and non-linguistic vocalizations. Non-linguistic vocalizations include laughter, yawns, cries, sobbing, and laughter. These vocalizations relate to high emotional states. Pauses and silences express hesitation and cognitive effort. Turn taking accounts for roles, status, dominance, and preference structures (Aviezer, et. Al., 2012). The technology of nonverbal communication People sense nonverbal communication cues unconsciously through the ears and eyes (Levenson, 1983). Similarly, cameras, microphones, and other sensors can also detect the same nonverbal cues. There is a process in how people observe behavior and how the perceptions develop in terms of social and emotional phenomena. Therefore, people can use automatic approaches based on machine learning to understand social and emotional phenomena automatically. The process of how machines such as computers and other devices can understand affective and social phenomena involves four steps. Many devices can sense and capture human behavior, for example, webcams, microphones, cameras, mobile devices, pressure captors, eye fish cameras, and others. The capture process involves the capturing devices to output the captured signals for analyzing. Person detection is the second step where a person identifies which parts of the captured signal (usually more than one person) corresponds to which person. This is because extracting nonverbal behavioral cues reliably only happens when it is clear which individual corresponds to the signal under analysis. Person detection includes substantial technologies such as speaker diarization, determining the person talking in the audio data, face detection, tracking, following people in a recorder video and others. In the behavioral cues detection step, the devices use the now processed and understood data to recognize more domains such as facial expressions, prosody extraction, gesture and posture recognition, laughter detection, and others. The last step involves behavior understanding whereby the devices infer information e.g. the relational attitude or the emotional state of the receiver from the nonverbal behavior cues detected. The step depends on pattern recognition and machine learning. Scientists dedicate most energies at recognition of emotions and social signals. Emotion and vocal behavior The term emotions describe subjective feelings that only last for a short time and psychological and mental states associated with different feelings. A definitive taxonomy of emotions does not exist, though many psychologists try to propose some definitions. However, there are two most commonly used models-discrete and dimensional. Many researchers involved in the study of vocal effects of emotion use the discrete model. This model groups all emotional states into few, sorted categories: sadness, anger, happiness, fear, surprise, and disgust. The dimensional model groups different emotions into three categories-valence, activity, and power or control. The primary channel for expressing one’s emotions among humans and animals is the voice. Emotions perception depends on the senders change in pitch, volume, and speaking rate, among other characteristics of sound. Future Insights The late psychologist Simmel developed the ‘sociology of senses.’ He concluded that sensory experiences, glances, and various encounters in everyday life bind people together. These sensory experiences help people appreciate and apprehend each other. The sense of impression such as hearing, smelling, and feeling others primarily give humans the access to the idea of who they are. Visual contact is paramount in initiating and coordinating a face-to-face interaction because the eyes have a ‘sociological function’ such as mutual glances. This information shows the successful fruits of many scientists who dedicate their efforts and attention on nonverbal communication and psychology. However, some aspects of the present resurgence leave some reservations. First, the number of psychologists doing research on nonverbal communication as a topic has decreased enormously since the 1970s (Delamater et al., 2011). The very few psychologists doing the research today only concentrate on health, emotion, gender, and personality research. The splintering across domains holds back the development of an integrated theory of nonverbal communication. Conclusion There are many ways of passing and receiving messages (communicating) without using words. Facial expressions, hand gestures, and others are the fundamentals of nonverbal communication. These elements are usually spontaneous and uncontrolled and can contradict a verbal message, emphasize it, distract from it, and even call for attention to important details. While, nonverbal communications is universally understood, it conveys the emotional context of a message. Sufficient understanding of nonverbal communication helps identify the original intent of an individual as it is very difficult to control all the non-verbal cues while lying. Therefore, people can pay attention and process the nonverbal cues easily and without realizing it. Attending to important cues such as distance, posture and touch helps the receiver evaluate and decode the message accurately. References Ambady, N., Bernieri, F., & Richeson, J. (2000). Towards a Histology of Social Behavior: Judgmental accuracy from Thin Slices of the Behavioral Stream. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol.32, pp.201-271. San Diego. Academic Press. Aviezer, H., Hillel,Y., & Alexander, T. (2012). Body Cues, Not Facial Expressions, Discriminate Between Intense Positive and Negative Emotions. Science, (Vol.338. Pp. 6111:1225) Baron, R. (2012). Social Perception: Social Psychology. (13th Ed.) Mumbai: Pearson Education, pp.79-109. Delamater, N., John, D., and Myers, D. (2011). Symbolic Communication and Language. Social Psychology. (7th Ed.) Pp. 166-196. Belmont. Cengage learning Gatti, F. (1965). Physique and Self-description of Temperament. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 29 (5), pp. 432-439. Levenson, R., & Gottman, J. (1983). Marital Interaction: Psychological linkage and Affective Exchange. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45, 587-597. Pentland, A. (2008). Human Computing and Machine understanding of Human Behavior : A Survey. In lecture Notes in Articial Intelligence. Vol. 4451, pp. 47-71. Springer Verlag Read More