The textbook for this course is The Nonverbal Communication Reader, 3rd edition by Laura K. Gue

 APA STYLE

SHORT ESSAY

The textbook for this course is The Nonverbal Communication Reader, 3rd edition by Laura K. Guerrero & Michael L. Hecht, Waveland Press, 2008

Our textbook provides summaries of classic journal articles, written quite a few years ago. Attached, please find a review article entitled, Nonverbal Communication, that summarizes articles written from 2007-2018. it is not the most stimulating reading, but it does provide a good sense of the conclusions being drawn about nonverbal communication in a wide variety of contents, giving us an update on the information we have read and providing a valuable resource for those interested in doing additional research in the field.

Please read the Nonverbal Communication article and write a short essay in Microsoft Word, summarizing how the more recent work represented in article differs from what we have learned from reading the textbook. How has the study of nonverbal communication advanced in recent years? For example, have new interests in nonverbal communication developed? Have the methods used to study nonverbal communication changed? Do any of the recent studies contradict the findings of the older studies? As you are writing the essay, do your best to cite specific examples from the textbook and from the contemporary article (using APA style) to support your points and you compare the two.

As an area of study, nonverbal communication appears to labor under two problems of definition. The “nonverbal” label defines the area negatively: that communication which occurs without words. The other commonly applied label, “body language,” defines the area by analogy to language, but again in a kind of neg­ ative analogy to language—language enacted by the body rather than the voice, language typically without a grammar or vocabulary. While both definitions suffer limitations, most people do understand that communi­ cation study and research encompasses a very wide scope of human behavior. The scope of the subject mat­ ter also expands with a consideration of the disciplines that attend to it. Researchers have approached nonver­ bal communication from several disciplinary perspec­ tives, with anthropology, psychology, and communica­ tion representing the most active.

In the introduction to their handbook oriented to the psychological approaches, Matsumoto, Hwang, and Frank (2016a), opt for the widest definition, noting that researchers “embrac[e] the idea that NVC [nonverbal communication] encompasses almost all of human communication except the spoken or written word . . . . In this handbook, we define NVC as the transfer and exchange of messages in any and all modalities that do not involve words“ (p. xix).

While this review will also broadly define the nonverbal area, it will not address studies of sign lan­ guage, a specialized kind of nonverbal expression and one intended to function as a language with defined grammar and vocabulary.

A. Background and overview Hinshelwood (2015) presents a history of early

psychological work in nonverbal communication, recounting Freud’s explorations of unconscious trans­ fer of meaning and his correspondence about it with Jung and Ferenczi. This and other observations led to the acceptance of both a cognitive (and conscious) communication system and something else, what today

many refer to as nonverbal communication (p. 129). Hinshelwood then describes the development of study of animal “calls and gestures” (p. 130) as a communi­ cation system, though a non­linguistic one. He further describes it: “This is a second system, characterized by reference, action, and emotional arousal. It exists in parallel to our cognitive linguistic system” (p. 131), one that we share with animals.

Some years before Freud, Charles Darwin suggest­ ed an animal origin for nonverbal actions—especially emotional expression—something that eventually evolves into more sophisticated human communication (Jabr, 2010). Frank and Shaw (2016) specifically review nonverbal communication in the light of evolution, ask­ ing how human evolution might account for various aspects of nonverbal communication. They identify non­ verbal communication as signs, signals, and symbols; they include both the voluntary and involuntary quality of these actions. For example, they suggest that some nonverbal communication may simply signal fear, but that this, in turn, could be used to pass a message to other members of a group and thus function as danger signals (p. 55). Over time these evolved into more complex sig­ nifications. The evolutionary approach usually merits discussion in most introductory works.

As indicated in these psychological and anthropo­ logical approaches, nonverbal communication study reflects mixed origins. Manusov (2016) offers an overview of the “heritages” that led to current studies: linguistic, sociological, cultural, ethnological and psy­ chological. These key disciplines each take a slightly different approach.

The 1950s and 1960s saw the beginnings of a more systematic exploration of nonverbal behaviors with researchers like Hall (1959, 1966) exploring anthropological or cultural differences in the use of space (proxemics); Birdwhistell (1955, 1970) examin­ ing gestures; Ekman (1964, 1965) attending to facial expression; and Argyle and his colleagues (1965, 1968) studying gaze (Patterson, 2014, p. 172). Patterson notes

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Nonverbal Communication

Paul A. Soukup, S.J. [email protected]

1. Introduction

that these studies tended to focus only on a single chan­ nel of communication, partly due to the difficulty of measurement (p. 173). This period also saw the emer­ gence of some theories of nonverbal communication: the equilibrium theory of nonverbal intimacy (Argyle & Dean, 1965) and various affect­based theories (Patterson, 2014, p. 173). Beginning in the 1970s com­ munication scholars like Knapp (1978) attempted to bring these approaches together under the overarching rubric of communication.

Research in the latter part of the 20th century focused more on nonverbal behavior as “automatic processes” through which people manage everyday life (Patterson, 2014, p. 175). In his 2014 review, Patterson asks whether researchers have done too much work on the individual parts or channels of nonverbal behavior and not enough on the larger view:

How might we pursue important research ques­ tions and, at the same time, employ methods and measures that maximize the ecological validity of our results? I suggest that we frame nonverbal communication as a kind of adaptive system, serving social goals and constrained by several determinant factors (Patterson, 2011). Furthermore, in this system, the importance of both interaction settings and patterns of behavior (not isolated components) should be recognized. Finally, understanding nonverbal communication in interactions requires attention to the simultane­ ity of sending and receiving processes. (p. 176)

To this end, Patterson proposes four characteristics for future research: “an emphasis on the functions of non­ verbal communication”; a consideration of the antecedent factors of nonverbal communication, such as “biology, culture, gender, and personality”; an understanding of the settings in which the communica­ tion occurs; and a “focus on patterns of behavior” (2014, pp. 176–177).

Work on the various functions of nonverbal com­ munication has begun. Matsumoto, Hwang, and Frank (2016a), suggest these four functions for nonverbal behavior:

First, NVC can define communication by pro­ viding the backdrop for communication and by explaining or characterizing the context or set­ ting within which people will interact and behave . . . Second, NVC can comment on ver­ bal communication—that is, the actual words used—because NVC can occur when people are also talking. . . .Third, NVC can regulate our interaction episodes. Much of our conversations

are regulated by nonverbal cues so subtle that the average person does not notice them. Nodding, smiling, looking concerned or empa­ thetic are all NVBs that occurred during conver­ sations and signal the talker that the listener is listening and tracking the conversation. . . . Finally, NVC can be the message itself because it can occur without any words being spoken simultaneously. (p. xxi).

Parts of this approach appears in many studies, espe­ cially those examining the channels or contexts of non­ verbal behavior, since the behaviors themselves can fulfill several functions.

More specialized works focus on nonverbal com­ munication as a subset of pragmatics, that is, the study of language in use. Linguists often see nonverbal behaviors as qualifiers of the verbal; the pragmatics include tone of voice, facial expression, gestures, and so on. Wharton (2009) places such pragmatics in theo­ retical context and then suggests principles for their study, a taxonomy of pragmatic nonverbal behavior, and the codes and actions that allow people to under­ stand one another.

B. Method and plan This review presents work published on nonver­

bal communication between 2007 and 2018, examining peer reviewed journal publications, but also key books. Searches of the EBSCO Communication Source data­ base of over 600 journals, of library catalogues, and of Google Scholar yielded about 500 qualifying entries.

This review will first introduce some of the mate­ rials available for studying nonverbal communication, then present a short section on more theoretical writing about it. The next section will present research on non­ verbal behaviors sorted by channel—face and eyes, gestures, touch, paralinguistics, and body language. Section 5 reviews studies sorted by the contexts in which researchers have examined nonverbal communi­ cation. The next section will review some of the func­ tions under which scholars have studied nonverbal communication: expressing emotion, deception and detecting deception, and language study. The last major section will review studies that propose or explain the various research methods scholars use.

While these groups do reflect the contents of the various studies, one should note that many of the studies could well fit into more than one group: a study of facial expression, for example, could also examine the functions of those expressions. However, to make this review more concise, individual studies

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typically appear only once, though any decision about listing studies does manifest an inherent problem with the area.

Despite the number of studies, even a review of this length cannot aim to exhaust this important and growing area of communication research.

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2. Sources

In addition to the the journal articles, wich form the primary sources of data for this review, a number or scholars present summarires of work in accessible form in handbooks, overviews, textbooks, websites, and data depositories.

A. Handbooks and overviews Many handbooks of communication or psychol­

ogy include a section on nonverbal communication. Most of these chapters serve as reviews of relevant lit­ erature, summarizing key findings for others interest­ ed in the topics of the particular handbooks. For exam­ ple, Horowitz and Strack’s (2011) handbook on inter­ personal psychology features a chapter on “the role of nonverbal communication and interpersonal relations“ (Gifford, 2011). This chapter both describes and defines nonverbal behavior, offering a brief history of the studies of nonverbal behavior; some review of the theoretical approaches (particularly evolutionary bases for nonverbal behavior); a summary of the social psychological theories for nonverbal communi­ cation; several research methods, including decoding messages; and areas of complexity and influences on nonverbal communication. The latter include vari­ ables such as gender, culture, decoding ability, and decodability. The overview sketches various contexts for nonverbal communication, particularly relation­ ships, which introduces areas of study such as power and dominance, deception, and computer mediated communication. Finally Gifford introduces material on using nonverbal behavior in interpersonal areas. His review of relevant theories includes the historical move from one channel studies to more complex examples such as interaction adaption theory as well as different functional perspectives and finally parallel processing theories.

Westland (2015) offers a more general overview to “verbal and nonverbal communication in psy­ chotherapy,” presenting some of the research on the neurological foundations for nonverbal communica­ tion, then the research in child development dealing

with nonverbal areas, and finally research on the com­ plementarity of verbal and nonverbal communication. Other chapters cover material on nonverbal communi­ cation’s role in manifesting emotions and on how ther­ apists should attend to bodily signals. The NATO Advanced Study Institute on the Fundamentals of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication (Esposito, 2007) offers a fairly comprehensive introduction in the context of exploring biometric identification, pre­ senting papers in the proceedings of a conference on that theme.

Hook, Franks, and Bauer (2011) provide multi­ ple perspectives on social psychology’s role in com­ munication, addressing nonverbal communication in several chapters. De­Graft Aikins (2011) offers an introduction to the ways nonverbal communication figures in what she calls “multicultural life.” Some very helpful charts map out different kinds of non­ verbal behavior against key areas of influence. These include physical appearance, kinesics (movement), face and eye behavior, paralinguistics, proxemics (personal distances or space), and haptics (touch) mapped against cultural, gender, and personality and individual differences. Each cell of the chart gives a brief summary of key understandings. Highlighting cultural differences and every­day interaction, de­ Graft Aikins walks the reader through the multi level dimensions of nonverbal behavior in these various settings. In their chapter on evolution and communi­ cation, Franks and Dhesi (2011) include theories of the development of communication from nonverbal to verbal expression. A related book, but one directly addressing the social psychology of nonverbal communication comes from Kostić and Chadee (2015). Its chapters include material on the neurology and neuroscience of nonverbal expression and inter­ pretation; on vocalics and facial expression; and on nonverbal communication connected with romantic relationships, the expression of emotion, political campaigns, workplace interactions, psychology, and online settings.

Nelson and Brown (2012), whose handbook address­ es gender issues in communication, include material from studies of gender differences in nonverbal behavior; the findings, they argue, show how these behaviors both sup­ port gender roles and limit people in those roles.

B. Textbooks Many publishers offer textbooks for college

courses on nonverbal communication. These include new editions of the classic work by Mehrabian (1972/2017) as well as updated texts by well­known scholars: Burgoon, Guerrero, and Floyd (2010/2016), DeVito (2013), Moore, Hickson, and Stacks (2013), Matsumoto, Frank, and Hwang (2013), and Ivy and Wahl (2014). In addition some reprints of older texts are still available, such as those by Pease and Pease (2004) or Late and Eaves (2007).

C. Journals Given the scope of work on nonverbal communi­

cation, a number of specialized journals have become the locus for publishing much research: The Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, Gesture, and Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment. In addition, more general communication studies journals often publish relevant work: Human Communication Research, Communication Studies, Speech Communication, and the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.

D. Online resources In addition to the handbooks and textbooks, a

number of online resources exist, but of varying detail and quality, with general sites (Blatner, 2009; Givens, 2016a) or occupationally specific ones (Nurse Jon, n.d.)

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3. Theory

Nonverbal behaviors have given rise to a fairly substantial body of theory, ranging from the evolution­ ary descriptions of the origins or purpose of the pro­ duction and interpretation of these kinds of human activities to works dealing with larger questions of embodiedness as the condition of human life. A two­ volume collection, Body, Language, and Mind (Ziemke, Zlatev, & Frank, 2007; Frank, Dirven, Ziemke, & Bernardez, 2008) offers a comprehensive set of essays addressing questions of embodiment or “the bodily basis of phenomena such as meaning, mind, cognition, and language.” While not exclusively about nonverbal communication, the material does sit­ uate it in terms of linguistics, semiotics, cognition, phi­ losophy, and communication (see Ziem, 2011, for a review of both volumes). A more specifically language oriented theoretical approach comes from de Ruiter (2007), who compares understanding of nonverbal behavior based on three assumptions:

These assumptions have profound consequences for theories about the representations and pro­ cessing involved in gesture and speech produc­ tion. I associate these assumptions with three simplified processing architectures. In the Window Architecture, gesture provides us with a “window into the mind.” In the Language Architecture, properties of language have an influence on gesture. In the Postcard

Architecture, gesture and speech are planned by a single process to become one multimodal mes­ sage. . . . The Language Architecture and the Postcard Architecture differ from the Window Architecture in that they both incorporate a cen­ tral component which plans gesture and speech together, however they differ from each other in the way they align gesture and speech. (p. 21)

Pollio, Finn, and Custer (2016) take phenomenologi­ cal philosophy as their starting point for an empirical investigation into the meaning the body as it interacts with language systems. Mondada (2016) also consid­ ers the body, but from the starting point of social interaction. “Putting the body at the center of atten­ tion . . . repositions language as one among other modalities, and invites us to consider the involvement of entire bodies in social interaction, overcoming a logo­centric vision of communication, as well as a visuo­centric vision of embodiment” (p 336).

Irvine (2016) challenges “the gesture­first hypotheses about the evolution of language” (p. 221) by raising questions about key assumptions about the pre­conditions of language that depend on symbol use in early hominids. Irvine argues that the vocal channel offers greater possibility than the non­ verbal one. For more detail on the historical develop­ ment of theoretical approaches to nonverbal study, see Keating (2016) who provides a fairly detailed account of this area.

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4. Channels

“Channels” refers to places or behaviors people observe as sources of meaning. These include (follow­ ing the order of Matsumoto, Hwang, & Frank, 2016a) the environment (Patterson & Quadflieg, 2016) from which people draw cues for behavior or proper acting; personal appearance (Re & Rule, 2016); facial expres­ sions (Hwang & Matsumoto, 2016); voice and vocal characteristics (Scott & McGettigan, 2016); gesture (Cartmill & Goldin­Meadow, 2016); gaze (Adams & Nelson, 2016); smell (Haviland­Jones, Wilson, & Freybert, 2016); and posture and gait (Matsumo, Hwang, & Frank, 2016b). The more recent journal publications include work on face and eye behavior, gesture, touch, paralinguistics, and body.

A. Face and eyes The human face provides an extraordinary

amount of information, which people use for every­ thing from managing interactions to expressing emo­ tions and ideas. People signal liking by what they look at (Schotter, Berry, McKenzie, & Rayner, 2010 ); peo­ ple signal dominance and submission by eye gaze (Tang & Schmeichel, 2015); people make judgments of the attractiveness of others based on gaze direction (Ewing, Rhodes, & Pellicano, 2010), with direct eye contact leading to greater liking; people react more strongly to direct eye contact, showing more embar­ rassment, for example (Drummond & Bailey, 2013); and, although people think that they cannot detect deception because “liars avoid eye contact,” “meta­ analyses of deception literature have shown a non­sig­ nificant relationship between gaze and deception” (Mann, Vrij, Leal, Granhag, Warmelink, & Forrester, 2012, p. 205). Eye behavior appears so important and so central to human interaction and serves so many multiple essential functions that robotic researchers use nonverbal studies to assist in designing robot eyes that will provide eye contact and direct joint attention in a naturalistic manner (Onuki, Ishinoda, Tsuburaya, Miyata, Kobayashi, & Kuno, 2013; Mohammad & Nishida, 2013). Similar work by Foster and Oberlander (2007) led them to develop “a system that uses corpus­ based selection strategies to specify the head and eye­ brow motion of an animated talking head” (p. 305).

The eyebrows also play a large role in human sig­ naling, particularly in regulating conversation. Flecha­ García (2010) noted that “eyebrow raises occurred more frequently at the start of high­level discourse seg­ ments than anywhere else in the dialogue, and more frequently in instructions than in requests for or acknowledgments of information. Interestingly, con­ trary to the hypothesis queries did not have more rais­ es than any other type of utterance. Additionally, as predicted, eyebrow raises seemed to be aligned with pitch accents” (p. 542).

Other facial expression research has established that people mimic the expressions of others, with com­ plementary smiles occurring more quickly (Riehle, Kempkensteffen, & Lincoln, 2017). Ruiz­Soler and Beltran (2012) conclude that people typically follow a hierarchy in decoding facial expression, with the eyes and mouth appearing more important than the nose and chin. People find it easier to decode expression in dynamic interactions than in a single frame, suggesting that change plays a key role in interpreting others’ facial expressions (Bould & Morris, 2008), results con­ firmed by Schmidt, Bhattacharya, and Denlinger’s (2009) work on smiles and Sato and Yoshikawa’s (2007) studies of emotional arousal. Swerts and Krahmer (2008) also found that people more quickly decode expressions of prominence accompanied by verbal utterances. Similarly, Ruusuvuori and Peräkylä (2009) examine facial expression and verbal expres­ sion in storytelling, concluding “that facial expression can stretch the temporal boundaries of an action” and thus build up shared understanding (p. 377).

People make use of facial expression to draw conclusions about the emotions of others, with evi­ dence showing that they automatically process emo­ tions and have trouble when contradictory verbal cues appear (Preston & Stansfield, 2008). Not surprisingly, some people have the ability to create a Duchenne smile (one that involves both mouth and eyes), a help in persuading others (Gunnery & Hall, 2014). People can reliably understand six “universal expressions of emotion (happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, and surprise)” based on facial expression, even at different distances (Smith & Schyns, 2009, p. 1202), and they

use a combination of decoding strategies based on cat­ egories and dimensions (Mendolia, 2007) or structures and variants (Why & Huang, 2010) to accomplish this. Even in crowded spaces, like subway cars, humans retain this ability, though they adjust the use of percep­ tual cues due to enforced proximity (Aranguren & Tonnelat, 2014). People also judge the likeliness of aggressive behavior based on face width to height ratios, an implicit judgment that Carré, McCormick, and Mondloch (2009) attribute to evolutionary forces.

However, some factors do affect people’s abilities to interpret facial expressions or create bias in the inter­ pretation: mood (Forgas & East, 2008), power (Civile & Obhi, 2016), culture (Krys, Vauclair, Capaldi, Lun, Bond, Domínguez­Espinosa, Torres, Lipp, Manicam, Xing, Antalíková . . ., 2016; Hess, Blaison, & Kafetsios, 2016), and intergroup bias (Becker, Neel, & Anderson, 2010).

Finally, researchers have experimented with peo­ ple’s abilities to encode emotion through facial expres­ sion. Visser, Krahmer, and Swerts (2014) studied the display of surprise in children and adults, finding that age, social context, and the cause of the surprise mod­ erated the expressions. Namba, Kagamihara, Miyatani, & Nakao (2017) examined the expression of sadness, noting studies have shown “that drooping of the lip corners, raising of the chin, and oblique eyebrow movements (a combination of inner brow raising and brow lowering) express sadness,” but that controlled studies have not necessarily connected people’s experi­ encing sadness to these clues. Their study indicates that the same facial actions can also indicate other emo­ tions, including fear, anger, or disgust (p. 203). Other studies indicate no differences in the spontaneous expression of emotion between healthy and mentally ill participants (Peham, Bock, Schiestl, Huber, Zimmermann, Kratzer, Dahlbender, Biebl, & Benecke, 2015). However, “accurate recognition of facial expressions of negative emotions (anger, contempt, disgust, fear, and sadness) predicted less conflict engaging behaviors during conflict with . . . romantic partners,” something that leads to greater relational sat­ isfaction (Yoo & Noyes, 2016, p. 1).

B. Gestures Gesture seems almost synonymous with human

communication, inseparable from speech. As such it has attracted a great deal of study. In fact, for centuries scholars have debated a “gesture theory of language.” Wilcox (2009) reviews the contribution of William C. Stokoe to this thinking, describing his “semantic phonol­ ogy.” Armstrong (2008) situates the history more broad­

ly, identifying “common themes running through gestur­ al theories of the origin of language such that iconic vis­ ible gesture is more natural than speech as a communi­ cation device that solves the problem of accounting for the origin of arbitrary signs”; at the same time he acknowledges a lack of fossil evidence but counters by noting that “the first linguistic units are representations of objects and events in the world” (p. 289). Irvine (2016) challenges this view, “by identifying constraints on the emergence of symbol use.” She notes that

Current debates focus on a range of pre­condi­ tions for the emergence of language, including co­ operation and related mentalizing capacities, imi­ tation and tool use, episodic memory, and vocal physiology, but little specifically on the ability to learn and understand symbols. [She argues] that such a focus raises new questions about the plau­ sibility of gesture­first hypotheses, and so about the evolution of language in general. . . . [and] that existing uses of gesture in hominid communities may have prohibited the emergence of symbol use, rather than “bootstrapped” symbolic capaci­ ties as is usually assumed, and that the vocal channel offers other advantages in both learning and using language. (p. 221)

Nuessel (2007) and Wilcox (2012) offer critiques of the various positions in the gesture and language debates. By necessity, the gesture theory of language approach­ es take a diachronic stance in regard to gestures. Other diachronic approaches include different variables. In a festschrift Seyfeddinipur and Gullberg (2014) include essays dealing with gaze and gesture, with the latter encompassing cultural and situational approaches that take a generally diachronic view.

As noted earlier, the handbook edited by Matsumoto, Hwang, and Frank (2016a) takes the position that nonverbal behavior in general—and gestures in particular—can function either to moder­ ate other communication or to stand alone as com­ munication messages. Most of the studies of gesture in this line tend to take a synchronic approach. Several other literature reviews illustrate this. Willems and Hagoort (2007) review the neuroscience literature on co­speech gestures to explore how ges­ ture links to other communication channels. Wagner, Malisz, & Kopp (2014) focus their review on current understanding of “manual and head gesture form and function, of the principle functional interactions between gesture and speech aiding communication, transporting meaning, and producing speech. Furthermore, we present an overview of research on

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temporal speech­gesture synchrony, including the special role of prosody in speech­gesture alignment” (p. 209). They also include material on research methods and tools utilized in gesture analysis. Kipp, Neff, & Albrecht (2007) offer a detailed look at an “annotation scheme for conversational gestures” while Kong, Law, Kwan, Lai, & Lam (2015) report on a coding system that allows annotations; they present the resulting database of speech and gesture based on those annotations. Gawne and Kelly (2014) “look at whether gesture categorizations have any resonance with the ways that people other than ges­ ture researchers …