research on nonverbal communication indicates that

Nonverbal Communication Skills: 19 Theories & Findings

In it, he introduces the concept of dramaturgy, which compares everyday social interactions to actors’ portrayals of characters, suggesting that one’s social interactions are analogous to a string of varying performances (Ritzer, 2021).

Goffman’s work also included the concept of impression management. The key to impression management includes appearance; your manner of interacting; and the attitudes conveyed through gestures, facial expressions, and nonverbal skills (Ritzer, 2021).

William Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage.”

I’m not a trained actor, but teaching public speaking courses has made me aware that audiences seem to prefer speakers who use a variety of hand gestures. These gestures signify the speaker as “warm, agreeable, and energetic” (Goman, 2021).

Just that nugget of information has taught me to incorporate hand gestures to develop my public speaking skills.

What other nonverbal communication skills enhance daily interactions?

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Positive Communication Exercises (PDF) for free . These science-based tools will help you and those you work with build better social skills and better connect with others.

This Article Contains:

What is nonverbal communication, 9 types of nonverbal communication skills, is nonverbal communication important, 2 psychology theories and models, 8 fascinating research findings, importance in counseling and healthcare, resources from positivepsychology.com, a take-home message.

Nonverbal communication is a way to convey information “achieved through facial expressions, gestures, touching (haptics), physical movements (kinesics), posture, body adornment (clothes, jewelry, hairstyle, tattoos, etc.), and even the tone, timbre, and volume of an individual’s voice (rather than spoken content)” (Navarro & Karlins, 2008, p. 2–4).

In this YouTube video, Joe Navarro explains several nonverbal communication cues, exposes some myths, and discusses his work with nonverbal communication in law enforcement.

Marco Iacoboni (2008, p. 81), author of Mirroring People , takes it a step further, stating that “gestures accompanying speech have a dual role of helping the speakers to express their thoughts and helping the listeners/viewers understand what is being said.”

To competently read body language, Navarro and Karlins (2008) provide suggestions such as rigorous observation and a familiarity with the person’s baseline behaviors. They also recommend watching for changes, or ‘tells.’

Navarro and Karlins (2008) advise becoming familiar with universal behaviors and contextualizing nonverbal cues. However, cultural norms could inhibit rigorous observation.

Characteristics of nonverbal communication

The United States is considered a low-context communication culture (MacLachlan, 2010). This means that much of the information in a message comes directly from words rather than through implication or body language.

This style of communication involves lots of verbal detail so as not to confuse listeners. Low-context cultures rely less on nonverbal communication, which can obscure or censor portions of the message.

Nonverbal communication is culturally determined, and it is largely unconscious. It indicates the speaker’s emotional state. When nonverbal cues conflict with the verbal message, it may convey confusion or deception (Navarro & Karlins, 2008).

Finally, nonverbal communication varies by gender and displays power differentials, information effective leaders can use to influence others (Hybels & Weaver, 2015; Henley, 1977).

Nonverbal communication of successful leaders

It’s essential for leaders to read body language, also known as decoding. Deciphering between engagement (e.g., nodding, tilting the head, open body postures) and disengagement (e.g., body tilting away, crossed arms and legs) can be the difference between success and failure (Goman, 2021).

Successful actors could be considered professional first-impression artists. Like actors, leaders often find themselves center stage; they must learn the art of creating first impressions.

Subjective awareness and the ability to express yourself nonverbally are known as encoding – crucial for positive first impressions. Advice from professional actors includes a maintaining a pleasant facial expression, good posture, pausing, breathing, relaxing, and avoiding hiding your hands (Shellenbarger, 2018).

This video , 8 Things Successful People Do to Look Confident , provides quick tips for confident body language even if you’re not feeling confident.

First impressions are said to be formed in less than seven seconds (Goman, 2021). In this short time, others formulate labels such as “powerful,” “submissive,” or “trustworthy.” Evolved leaders incorporate mindfulness to help.

Naz Beheshti (2018) states, “Evolved leaders… use nonverbal tools mindfully and deliberately to reinforce their message.” She goes on to say, “this lifts the value of your communication and your value as a leader” (Beheshti, 2018).

Awareness of self, others, and the situation (mindfulness) allows us to ensure that our gestures and body language align with our spoken words. This creates congruence and generates trustworthiness (Beheshti, 2018; Newberg & Waldman, 2013).

This means we are analyzing several, simultaneous nonverbal cues. A frustrated person may tap their foot, cross their arms, and tightly squeeze their biceps (Jones, 2013). These clusters may cross over and include a variety of nonverbal categories, summarized below.

1. Kinesics

Kinesics is the study of how we move our body, specifically the head, hands, body, and arms (Jones, 2013). This includes sending messages through facial expressions, gestures, eye contact, and posture.

Haptics is the study of touch or coming into physical contact with another person (Hybels & Weaver, 2015). Throughout history, touch has been surrounded by mystery and taboo. We are perplexed by healing touch and riveted by stories of infants who perished due to lack of touch. Touch can denote relationship, status, power, and personality (Henley, 1977).

Cultural norms dictate guidelines regarding touch. Mindfulness regarding social and environmental settings is prudent. We greet a friend at an informal party differently than we would greet a boss or coworker in a professional setting.

3. Proxemics

The study of space and distance is called proxemics, and it analyzes how people use the space around them (Hybels & Weaver, 2015).

This YouTube video is a fun demonstration of students completing a school project on personal space and the discomfort felt by both humans and animals when social norms are violated.

4. Territory

Territory is often used to display power or reveal a lack thereof.

“'[P]osture expansiveness,’ positioning oneself in a way that opens up the body and takes up space, activated a sense of power that produced behavioral changes in a subject independent of their actual rank or role in an organization” (Goman, 2021).

Expansiveness conveys power.

5. Environment

Environment includes objects we use to adorn ourselves and the artifacts we surround ourselves with in order to create an impression. These objects provide nonverbal cues that help others form impressions (Jones, 2013).

6. Paralinguistics

Paralinguistics, also known as vocalics, is the study of how we speak and involves pitch, volume, rate of speech, tone, quality, tempo, resonance, rhythm, and articulation to help determine the context of the message (Jones, 2013).

7. Chronemics

Chronemics is the study of time, including how it is used. Nancy Henley (1977, p. 43), author of Body Politics: Power, Sex & Nonverbal Communication , asserts “Time is far from a neutral philosophical/physical concept in our society: it is a political weapon.”

Henley (1977, p. 47) describes the concept of “ritual waiting,” stating, “The more important the person, the longer we will ungrudgingly wait for the service or honor of attention.”

8. Attractiveness

The power of drawing attention to oneself doesn’t rely on physical appeal alone. Although facial symmetry and fashion of adornment are important (Jones, 2013), people who master good eye contact, have a lively face, offer encouragement, and use open gestures are also considered attractive (Kuhnke, 2012).

9. Olfactics

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Nonverbal communication is very important, as you could reveal unintentional information, as well as cause your communication to be misinterpreted.

Leakage: Unintentional messages

Teaching social–emotional skills to incarcerated people provided me with a powerful lesson about the nuances of nonverbal communication. On a particularly challenging day, I thought it wise to meditate and center myself prior to entering the jail. However, upon seeing me, the people inside began inquiring what was going on with me. What did they detect?

Nonverbal leakage can be shown through micro-expressions, which are “very fast facial movements lasting 1/25 to 1/5 of a second” and indicate a person’s real feelings (Ekman, 2003, p. 214).

This YouTube video is the opening scene of the series Lie to Me , based on the work of Paul Ekman regarding micro-expressions.

Varying statistics on the value of nonverbal communication may cause concern for those less practiced, but which statistics are accurate?

Crossed messages

The original research from Mehrabian and Ferris (1967) regarding nonverbal communication is widely interpreted. Elizabeth Kuhnke (2012, p. 10), author of Body Language for Dummies , interprets the study, saying, “55% of the emotional message in face-to-face communication results from body language.”

A nonverbal communication formula often cited is 7–38–55, which indicates 7% of the message comes from words, 38% vocal, and 55% facial. However, Lapakko (2007) believes this formula is reckless, faulty, and misleading. Sometimes the nonverbal elements of a message, such as gestures with directions, are incredibly important, and at other times incidental.

In addition, what something “means” in communication is connected to such variables as culture, history of the relationship, people’s intentions, personal experiences, time of day and specific words used. It would be naive to suggest all these nuances could be neatly quantified, and therefore attributing a precise formula to nonverbal communication is flawed in many ways.

So regardless of statistics and formulas, we know that nonverbal communication is essential and that people skilled at both reading and interpreting body language tend to enjoy greater success in life than those not skilled (Goleman, 1997).

Basic emotion theory

Basic emotion theory (BET) posits that emotions are a “grammar of social living” that situate us in the social and moral order of society (Keltner, Sauter, Tracy, & Cowen, 2019, p. 133). In addition, emotions structure interactions, particularly in relationships that matter. BET is integral to emotional expression.

Foundational to BET is the assumption that emotional expressions coordinate social interactions in three ways:

• Through rapid conveyance of important information to aid in decision making
• To evoke specific responses
• To serve as incentives for others’ actions

This is accomplished through reward systems such as parents smiling and caressing a child who exhibits specific behaviors (Keltner et al., 2019).

BET initially focused on six basic emotions. Literature reveals there are over 20 emotions with distinct, multimodal expressions, providing a deeper structure and highlighting the advancing nature of emotional expression (Keltner et al., 2019).

Neural resonance

Two people who like each other will mirror each other’s facial expressions, gestures, postures, vocalics, and movements. This is known as neural resonance, and it aids the accurate transfer of information from one person to another (Newberg & Waldman, 2013).

To fully understand what another is saying, “you have to listen to and observe the other person as deeply and fully as possible” (Newberg & Waldman, 2013, p. 81). Neural resonance uses mirror neurons to create cooperation, empathy, and trust.

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Studying nonverbal communication is revealing and intriguing. Most experts will include aspects such as eyes, facial expressions, and hands, but digging deeper reveals less-acknowledged nonverbal nuggets.

1. The benefits of yawning

Yawning is one of the fastest and simplest ways to lower mental stress and anxiety (Waldman & Manning, 2017). Social norms dictate that we refrain from yawning in specific settings, but yawning has many benefits. Did you know that snipers are taught to yawn before pulling the trigger (Waldman & Manning, 2017)?

According to Waldman and Manning (2017), yawning stimulates alertness and concentration; optimizes brain activity and metabolism; improves cognitive functioning; increases recall, consciousness, and introspection; decreases stress and relaxes the upper body; recalibrates a sense of timing; enhances social awareness and empathy; and increases sensuality and pleasure.

2. Feet don’t lie

According to Navarro and Karlins (2008), the most honest part of our body is our feet, as demonstrated by small children who dance with happiness or stomp in frustration. Many people look to the face for truth; Navarro and Karlins take the opposite approach:

“When it comes to honesty, truthfulness decreases as we move from the feet to the head” (Navarro & Karlins, 2008, p. 56), reasoning that emotions are suppressed through fabricated facial expression.

3. Gestures that help

Gestures improve memory and comprehension skills. Gestures may convey information that can influence how listeners respond, depending on the hand being used. “We tend to express positive ideas with our dominant hand and negative ideas with the other hand” (Newberg & Waldman, 2013, p. 44).

4. The eyes have it

“Social network circuits are stimulated through face-to-face eye contact, decreasing cortisol, and increasing oxytocin. The result is increased empathy, social cooperation, and positive communication” (Newberg & Waldman, 2013, p. 135).

Eyes reveal a lot about us. When we are aroused, troubled, concerned, or nervous, our blink rate increases. Once we relax, our blink rate returns to normal (Navarro & Karlins, 2008).

5. Power posing for success

Body language affects how others see us and how we view ourselves. In this YouTube video, Amy Cuddy discusses her research on power posing and how it affects success.

Amy Cuddy’s book is also discussed in our article listing books on imposter syndrome .

6. Fingers crossed

One explanation of the origin of crossing fingers for good luck comes from early beliefs in the power of the cross. The intersection of the digits, epitomizing the cross, was thought to denote a concentration of good spirits and served to anchor a wish until it came true (Keyser, 2014).

7. Fake positivity is harmful

Positivity that doesn’t register in your body or heart can be harmful. According to Barbara Fredrickson (2009, p. 180), “fake smiles, just like sneers of anger, predict heart wall collapse.” To truly benefit from a smile, touch, or embrace, you need to slow down and make it heartfelt.

8. Stand up straight

Poor posture can reduce oxygen intake by 30%, resulting in less energy (Gordon, 2003). Stooping over can make us look and feel old and out of touch. By straightening up, we can make significant differences in how we think and feel. The effect is bi-directional; attitude influences posture, just as posture influences attitude.

Good rapport between clients and practitioners stems from mirroring and synchronicity associated with neural resonance (Finset & Piccolo, 2011; Newberg & Waldman, 2013).

Carl Rogers’s Client-Centered Therapy is based on an empathetic understanding of clients. Nonverbal communication provides valuable information for both the client and the therapist. Showing you like and accept a client may be the most important information a therapist can convey (Finset & Piccolo, 2011).

Nonverbal patterns in therapy evolve over time. Specific behaviors that further the therapeutic process include “a moderate amount of head nodding and smiling; frequent, but not staring, eye contact; active, but not extreme, facial responsiveness; and a warm, relaxed, interested vocal tone” (Finset & Piccolo, 2011, p. 122).

Conscious awareness of nonverbal cues can aid in rapport building. Leaning toward the other signals comfort, whereas leaning away or crossing your arms signals discomfort (Navarro & Karlins, 2008).

Torsos and shoulder blades seem innocuous; however, blading away (turning slightly) from another person shows discomfort, while blading toward or facing another squarely shows a level of comfort (Navarro & Karlins, 2008).

Open palms are an ancient sign of trustworthiness that help establish rapport and are considered nonthreatening (Kuhnke, 2012). Hidden hands (placed in pockets or behind backs) signal disconnection and reluctance to engage. To display respect, keep an open posture with your muscles relaxed and weight evenly distributed.

Mirroring and matching go a long way to show synchronicity. Be careful to avoid mimicry, which signals disrespect (Kuhnke, 2012). Too much of a good thing can jeopardize credibility. An extended, fixed gaze into another’s eyes or effortful smiling can seem awkward, or worse.

This short YouTube video explains the dynamics of fluctuating facial expressions, based on the work of Charles Darwin and Paul Ekman.

This Silent Connections worksheet is an exercise for groups that combines mindfulness and nonverbal communication to build connections.

Someone who lacks the ability to make eye contact during conversation can be easily misinterpreted. To overcome this nonverbal communication issue, our Strategies for Maintaining Eye Contact can be very useful.

Our blog post 49 Communication Activities, Exercises, and Games includes six nonverbal communication activities for adults and three nonverbal exercises that work for families and children.

The blog post What Is Assertive Communication? 10 Real-Life Examples includes nonverbal qualities that complement and enhance assertive statements. Hints for eye contact, facial expressions, and posture can be found throughout.

In the blog post Cultivating Social Intelligence : 3 Ways to Understand Others , we discuss characteristics of social intelligence, including body language.

If you’re looking for more science-based ways to help others communicate better, this collection contains 17 validated positive communication tools for practitioners. Use them to help others improve their communication skills and form deeper and more positive relationships.

17 Exercises To Develop Positive Communication

17 Positive Communication Exercises [PDFs] to help others develop communication skills for successful social interactions and positive, fulfilling relationships.

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Nonverbal communication is an essential communication skill. Nonverbal expertise aids in delivering clear messages and forming positive impressions. It doesn’t have to be a big gesture to make a difference. Gently stroking the hand of a grieving friend speaks volumes.

Viewing life as a series of dramatic performances, as implied by both Shakespeare and Goffman, can add a sense of intrigue and adventure to enhancing nonverbal communication. These essential skills will help us achieve goals.

Just as the highly motivated thespian will study and polish their craft, anyone wanting to succeed in their career or interpersonal relationships can study and practice the nuances of nonverbal communication.

Actors and public speakers often practice their craft in front of a mirror or videotape themselves to reflect on strengths and weaknesses.

This article includes a myriad of resources to help improve nonverbal communication skills with many additional resources available.

By starting with something as simple as posture, we exit stage right, headed toward the competency of center stage. Break a leg!

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Positive Communication Exercises (PDF) for free .

• Beheshti, N. (2018, September 20). The power of mindful nonverbal communication. Forbes . Retrieved April 26, 2021, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/nazbeheshti/2018/09/20/beyond-language-the-power-of-mindful-nonverbal-communication/?sh=6f40b3d71501
• Ekman, P. (2003). Emotions revealed: Recognizing faces and feelings to improve communication and emotional life . Holt Paperbacks.
• Finset, A., & Piccolo, L. D. (2011). Nonverbal communication in clinical contexts. In M. Rimondini (Ed.), Communication in cognitive-behavioral therapy (pp. 107–128).  Springer Science + Business Media.
• Fredrickson, B. L. (2009). Positivity . Crown Publishing Group.
• Goffman, E. (1956). The presentation of self in everyday life . University of Edinburgh.
• Goleman, D. (1997). Emotional intelligence . Bantam Trade Paperback.
• Goman, C. K. (2018, August 26). 5 Ways body language impacts leadership results. Forbes. Retrieved May 1, 2021, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolkinseygoman/2018/08/26/5-ways-body-language-impacts-leadership-results/?sh=5c1b235c536a
• Gordon, J. (2003). Energy addict: 101 Physical, mental, & spiritual ways to energize your life . Berkley Publishing Group.
• Henley, N. M. (1977). Body politics: Power, sex and nonverbal communication . Simon & Schuster.
• Hybels, S., & Weaver, R. L. (2015). Communicating effectively . McGraw-Hill Education.
• Iacoboni, M. (2008). Mirroring people: The new science of how we connect with others . Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Jones, R. (2013). Communication in the real world: An introduction to communication studies . University of Minnesota Libraries.
• Keltner, D., Sauter, D., Tracy, J., & Cowen, A. (2019). Emotional expression: Advances in basic emotion theory. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior , 43 (3), 133–160.
• Keyser, H. (2014, March 21). Why do we cross our fingers for good luck? Mental Floss . Retrieved May 27, 2021, from https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/55702/why-do-we-cross-our-fingers-good-luck
• Kuhnke, E. (2012). Body language for dummies . John Wiley & Sons.
• Lapakko, D. (2007). Communication is 93% nonverbal: An urban legend proliferates. Communication and Theater Association of Minnesota Journal , 34 (2), 7–19.
• MacLachlan, M. (2010, February 12). Cross-cultural communication styles: High and low context. Communicaid. Retrieved May 10, 2021, from https://www.communicaid.com/cross-cultural-training/blog/high-and-low-context/
• Mehrabian, A., & Ferris, S. R. (1967). Inference of attitudes from nonverbal communication in two channels.  Journal of Consulting Psychology, 31 (3), 248–252.
• Navarro, J., & Karlins, M. P. (2008). What every body is saying . Harper-Collins.
• Newberg, A. M., & Waldman, M. R. (2013). Words can change your brain . Avery.
• Ritzer, G. (2021). Essentials of sociology (4th ed.). SAGE.
• Shellenbarger, S. (2018, January 30). The mistakes you make in a meeting’s first milliseconds. Wall Street Journal . Retrieved May 22, 2021, from https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-mistakes-you-make-in-a-meetings-first-milliseconds-1517322312
• Waldman, M. R., & Manning, C. P. (2017). NeuroWisdom: The new brain science of money, happiness, and success . Diversion Books.

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Annual Review of Psychology

Volume 70, 2019, review article, nonverbal communication.

• Judith A. Hall 1 , Terrence G. Horgan 2 , and Nora A. Murphy 3
• View Affiliations Hide Affiliations Affiliations: 1 Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA; email: [email protected] 2 Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Flint, Michigan 48502, USA; email: [email protected] 3 Department of Psychology, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California 90045, USA; email: [email protected]
• Vol. 70:271-294 (Volume publication date January 2019) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010418-103145
• First published as a Review in Advance on September 26, 2018
• Copyright © 2019 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved

The field of nonverbal communication (NVC) has a long history involving many cue modalities, including face, voice, body, touch, and interpersonal space; different levels of analysis, including normative, group, and individual differences; and many substantive themes that cross from psychology into other disciplines. In this review, we focus on NVC as it pertains to individuals and social interaction. We concentrate specifically on ( a ) the meanings and correlates of cues that are enacted (sent) by encoders and ( b ) the perception of nonverbal cues and the accuracy of such perception. Frameworks are presented for conceptualizing and understanding the process of sending and receiving nonverbal cues. Measurement issues are discussed, and theoretical issues and new developments are covered briefly. Although our review is primarily oriented within social and personality psychology, the interdisciplinary nature of NVC is evident in the growing body of research on NVC across many areas of scientific inquiry.

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The Nonverbal Communication of Positive Emotions: An Emotion Family Approach

This review provides an overview of the research on nonverbal expressions of positive emotions, organised into emotion families, that is, clusters sharing common characteristics. Epistemological positive emotions (amusement, relief, awe, and interest) are found to have distinct, recognisable displays via vocal or facial cues, while the agency-approach positive emotions (elation and pride) appear to be associated with recognisable visual, but not auditory, cues. Evidence is less strong for the prosocial emotions (love, compassion, gratitude, and admiration) in any modality other than touch, and there is little support for distinct recognisable signals of the savouring positive emotions (contentment, sensory pleasure, and desire). In closing, some limitations of extant work are noted and some proposals for future research are outlined.

A central strand of contemporary research on emotions is the study of nonverbal expressions. To date, most studies of emotional communication treat positive emotion as a unitary category, that is, “joy” or “happiness.” However, in recent years researchers are increasingly examining expressions of a range of diverse positive emotional states. This article provides an overview of that work, focusing on the study of adults (for a recent developmental review, see Sauter, McDonald, Gangi, & Messinger, 2014 ). This review is structured using an emotion family approach, organising the research on nonverbal signals of positive emotions into epistemological, prosocial, savouring, and agency-approach positive emotions. Epistemological emotions entail a change in one’s knowledge state, prosocial emotions emphasise a focus on others’ wellbeing, savouring emotions relate to enjoying physiologically pleasurable stimuli, and agency-approach emotions involve a tendency to approach potentially rewarding stimuli. In the final section, general conclusions and limitations are noted and some proposals for future research are outlined. In order to provide an overview, Table 1 provides a summary of the nonverbal facial, vocal, and bodily cues that have been found to occur in the communication of each of the 13 positive emotions reviewed in the current article. Table 2 gives a summary of studies that have examined nonverbal communication of specific positive emotions, with information about the channel of communication examined, whether the focus was on perception, production, or both, as well as the cultures included.

Nonverbal cues found in the communication of 13 positive emotions.

Note. All sources can be found in the reference list. a , Ruch (1995) ; b , Banse and Scherer (1996) ; c , Ambadar et al. (2009) ; d , Haidt and Keltner (1999) ; e , Shiota et al. (2003) ; f , Hess et al. (2002) ; g , Campos et al. (2013) ; h , Sauter, Eisner, Calder, et al. (2010) ; i , Dael et al. (2012) ; j , Mortillaro et al. (2011) ; k , Reeve (1993) ; l , Schröder (2003) ; m , Krumhuber and Scherer (2011) ; n , Gonzaga et al. (2001) ; o , Hertenstein et al. (2009) ; p , Hertenstein et al. (2006) ; q , Juslin and Laukka (2003) ; r , Hammerschmidt and Jürgens (2007) ; s , Eisenberg et al. (1989) ; t , Ricci-Bitti et al. (1996) ; u , Wehrle et al. (2000) ; v , Fernandez-Dols et al. (2011) ; w , Fujimura and Suzuki (2010) ; x , Wallbott (1998) ; y , Tracy et al. (2014) ; z , Tracy and Matsmoto (2008) ; aa , Tracy and Robins (2008) .

Behavioural studies that have examined nonverbal communication of specific positive emotions.

Note. Only studies that have examined multiple positive emotional states within a single study are included. Production denotes studies that include measures of the physical cues of the expressions, regardless of the method of elicitation. Stars denote studies that employed spontaneously produced expressions. Positive emotions are in bold. Where not specified in the original article, culture is inferred from authors’ affiliations. Abbreviations: S = speech intonation; V = vocalisations; F = facial expressions; B = bodily cues; T = touch; AV = audiovisual.

Mapping Emotions to Expressions

One feature of the investigation of nonverbal expressions of emotions is the use of objective cues like acoustic information and analyses of facial and bodily muscle movements. In mapping emotional states onto physical cues, researchers attempt to establish links between emotion and behaviour without relying on subjective self-report as a primary measure. Emotions are typically either inferred from antecedent events or known in advance when expressions are posed. A complementary approach to measuring objective cues employs perceptual measures such as ratings or classification tasks, to establish how perceivers judge others’ emotional expressions. The majority of studies to date have examined the perception, rather than production, of emotional expressions. The logic is that perceivers can only consistently map an emotional state to an observed nonverbal expression if there is a link between an emotional state and that expression in the expresser. For example, if observers consistently infer that a person who is laughing is amused, that is taken to demonstrate a link between laughter and amusement, which is assumed to exist not only in the observer but also in the expresser.

Though a wealth of empirical evidence points to consistent mappings between nonverbal expressions and subjective emotional states for a limited set of emotions (see Lench, Flores, & Bench, 2011 , for a meta-analysis) considerable variability has also been noted ( Scarantino, 2015 ). Emotional expressions do not always occur when an emotional state is experienced, and conversely, some configurations of nonverbal behaviours occur despite an individual not experiencing the emotional state that the expression supposedly maps onto. Recent accounts claiming links between emotional states and nonverbal signals have emphasised the probabilistic nature of these associations (see Levenson, 2011 ; Roseman, 2011 ). Only when unlearned triggers occur would the link to behaviour (including nonverbal expressions) be rigid ( Ekman, 2007 ). For example, experiencing a sudden loss of physical support would be linked to fear behaviours, and tasting a strong bitter flavour would elicit disgust behaviours. For positive emotions, unlearned triggers may include gentle touch and sweet tastes. The probability of a fixed association between subjective state and nonverbal behaviour is thought to depend on the prototypicality of the antecedent event, and relatedly, on the intensity of the emotional experience ( Scarantino, 2015 ). Importantly for the current discussion, however, a claim of an association between a nonverbal behaviour and a subjective emotional state does not depend on a perfect one-to-one mapping between the two.

Emotion Families

How best to conceptualise the structure of human emotions is an issue on which views range widely. Nevertheless, most theorists would agree that each emotional state is not equally similar to all other emotional states. One way to operationalise these similarities is the notion of “emotion families” proposed by Ekman (1992) , that is, groups of emotional states sharing common characteristics. Such clustering could be done on the basis of features such as antecedent events, nonverbal expressions, or patterns of appraisals or action tendencies.

Most research to date has presumably examined only a single positive emotion (“happiness”) because all positive emotions have been considered part of a single emotion family, as positive emotions are all characterised by positive valence. Some accounts have posited shared mechanisms of positive emotions, such as facilitating approach ( Davidson & Irwin, 1999 ) or increasing one’s repertoire of thoughts and actions ( Fredrickson, 1998 ). An alternative possibility is that positive emotion space is comprised of multiple emotion families that share additional characteristics. An analysis of the English emotion lexicon has lent support to this kind of structure: words cluster together around multiple positive emotional concepts ( Shaver, Schwartz, Kirson, & O’Connor, 1987 ), and there is some preliminary evidence suggesting that nonverbal behaviours may also cluster into conceptually meaningful positive emotion families ( App, McIntosh, Reed, & Hertenstein, 2011 ; Simon-Thomas, Keltner, Sauter, Sinicropi-Yao, & Abramson, 2009 ). Building on this work, the current review is organised in sections of possible families of positive emotions ( Simon-Thomas et al., 2009 ), discussing nonverbal expressions of epistemological, prosocial, savouring, and agency-approach positive emotions in turn. However, given the scarcity of proposed classifications of positive emotions, this division is necessarily preliminary. This is true both in terms of whether specific emotion categories are best classified into one or the other superordinate category, and in terms of whether this structure is useful for establishing commonalities across subsets of positive emotions. In addition to providing an overview of extant research, one aim of the current review is to evaluate whether this proposed classification fits the available evidence on nonverbal communication of emotions.

Epistemological Positive Emotions

Some positive emotional states involve a change in the individual’s understanding of, or knowledge about, the world. These emotions can be considered epistemological positive emotions. They can, for example, involve the seeking out of new information (i.e., interest), or the realisation that an expected negative event will not occur (i.e., relief). The new information need not in itself be positive, but the change in knowledge results in a positive emotional state. The epistemological positive emotions include interest, relief, amusement, and awe.

Amusement, the feeling of finding something funny, is a positive subjective state that can result from a resolution of incongruity ( Carroll, 2013 ). In recent years, the nonverbal behaviour of amusement has been the focus of a considerable body of research, both in studies examining auditory and visual communication. This research has primarily examined laughter, a vocal and facial suite of behaviours associated with amusement (for reviews on laughter see Owren & Amoss, 2014 ; Ruch & Ekman, 2001 ). Experimental work has established that amusement induction (e.g., funny movies) reliably induces laughter (e.g., Ruch, 1995 ), though most research has focused on whether observers infer amusement from others’ laughter. In a recent study using a multimodal corpus of emotional expressions, amusement was found to be the best recognised of all 12 emotions studied across modalities ( Bänziger, Mortillaro, & Scherer, 2012 ). The demonstration by Bänziger and colleagues that laughter can be recognised from visual cues alone extends earlier findings that have described the facial movements associated with amusement without directly linking production and perception. Several studies have noted that amusement is linked to Duchenne smiles, that is, smiles co-occurring with raised cheeks ( Campos, Shiota, Keltner, Gonzaga, & Goetz, 2013 ; Hess, Beaupré, & Cheung, 2002 ; Shiota, Campos, & Keltner, 2003 ). In particular, spontaneous amusement has been linked to intense smiles with open jaws, and perceivers also judge smiles with those characteristics as expressing amusement ( Ambadar, Cohn, & Reed, 2009 ). Notably, this configuration of cues has been found to communicate amusement across several cultures ( Haidt & Keltner, 1999 ).

A small body of research has examined full-body cues associated with emotions, with recent findings suggesting that bodily cues can under some conditions convey affective information more clearly than facial expressions ( Aviezer, Trope, & Todorov, 2012 ). Data is lacking for most positive emotions, but a recent study examined the bodily configuration associated with amusement as well as a few additional positive emotions ( Dael, Mortillaro, & Scherer, 2012 ). Employing discriminant analyses of body movements, configurations of movements expressing amusement were accurately classified, and evidence for a prototypical response pattern was established. Specifically, discontinuous touching and a straight head position was found to be characteristic of amusement, and the authors suggested that this likely reflects a laughter response pattern involving the entire body.

Laughter has also been found to communicate amusement via auditory perception alone (see Owren & Amoss, 2014 , for a review) via both nonverbal vocalisations and speech inflection (e.g., Cowie & Cornelius, 2003 ; Sauter, Eisner, Calder, & Scott, 2010 ; Simon-Thomas et al., 2009 ). Notably, this pattern is consistent across cultures ( Cordaro, Keltner, Tshering, Wangchuk, & Flynn, 2016 ; Laukka et al., 2013 ; Sauter, Eisner, Ekman, & Scott, 2010 ; Sauter & Scott, 2007 ). In sum, amusement can be clearly communicated using either visual or auditory cues of laughter across cultures. Laughter has been linked to emotional states other than amusement, including schadenfreude ( Szameitat et al., 2009 ), and is part of the response to the tactile stimulation of being tickled, which may or may not be accompanied by an emotional state (see Harris & Alvarado, 2005 ). Nevertheless, the link between the emotional state of amusement and nonverbal signals of laughter appears to be robust across modalities and cultural groups.

There is growing interest from emotion researchers in awe, the feeling of being in the presence of something greater than oneself (see Stellar et al., 2017 ; Valdesolo et al., 2017 ). Awe, which is often elicited by views of nature, has been suggested to involve a need for cognitive accommodation, that is, the adjustment of one’s ideas of what is possible in the world ( Keltner & Haidt, 2002 ). However, only a few studies have investigated the nonverbal communication of awe, though there has been considerable consistency across those studies. Examinations of facial expressions of awe have shown that smiling rarely occurs, but rather, awe is associated with head movements forward and up, widened eyes, an open mouth with a slightly dropped jaw, and raised inner eyebrows ( Campos et al., 2013 ; Shiota et al., 2003 ). These facial changes may in part facilitate the hypothesised function of awe, that is, the enhanced processing of information to aid the cognitive accommodation sought during experiences of awe. However, no study to date has examined the recognition of facial signals of awe, though one study has found high levels of recognition across two cultural groups for Indian dance segments expressing the closely related state wonder ( Hejmadi, Davidson, & Rozin, 2000 ).

Participants posing awe expressions also frequently produced visible inhalations ( Shiota et al., 2003 ), and awe has also been associated with voiced exhalations ( Simon-Thomas et al., 2009 ). Such prototypical vocal awe displays are well recognised by naive listeners ( Simon-Thomas et al., 2009 ). This suggests that awe is reliably communicated via auditory signals, in addition to having a consistent configuration of facial cues. It is also worth noting that awe has been linked to goosebumps, which have been posited to serve a signalling function for profound positive experiences ( Maruskin, Thrash, & Elliot, 2012 ); that positive emotion can be inferred from perceiving goosebumps may be an interesting hypothesis for further study.

Interest, the feeling of wanting to learn more about something, functions to motivate exploration and has been proposed to be a primary affect ( Tomkins, 1995 ). However, results on the nonverbal communication of interest are conflicting. For example, interest being associated with an open mouth ( Mortillaro, Mehu, & Scherer, 2011 ) is contradicted by results linking interest to lip presses ( Campos et al., 2013 ). Furthermore, in Bänziger et al.’s (2012) multimodal study, interest was overall the worst recognised positive emotion out of the six included in the study, with speech intonation even less well recognised than facial displays. This contrasts with earlier findings that have found high levels of recognition for interested speech prosody, characterised by fast rate of speech and a great vocal frequency range ( Banse & Scherer, 1996 ). There is more consistency in the results of studies of nonverbal vocalisations, with exclamations of interest recognisable ( Simon-Thomas et al., 2009 ) even across cultural boundaries ( Laukka et al., 2013 ).

In terms of full body movements, interest is characterised by facing straight ahead and leaning forward, likely linked to the motivation to approach associated with interest ( Dael et al., 2012 ; see also de Meijer, 1989 ). However, this bodily configuration is not unique to interest and expressions are sometimes misclassified as pride.

It has been suggested that awe and interest may be best explained as variations of a single emotion, as both involve some degree of cognitive accommodation, though interest is thought to be less intense ( Campos et al., 2013 ). However, the only recognition study to date to include both awe and interest found low rates of confusion between the two for nonverbal vocalisations ( Simon-Thomas et al., 2009 ). Could it be that there is more overlap between the facial than vocal configurations of awe and interest? Facial expressions of interest, like those of awe, do not typically involve smiling, but rather an open mouth ( Mortillaro et al., 2011 ; Reeve, 1993 ). However, the eye configuration often seen in awe with wide open eyes stands in contrast to the mild squinting or eye closure associated with interest ( Mortillaro et al., 2011 ; Reeve, 1993 ). This suggests some differentiation, but at present, it is not known whether perceivers can differentiate between facial expressions of awe and interest. In sum, there is evidence for recognisable nonverbal vocalisations of interest, but evidence on facial expressions is less clear-cut, in particular with regard to the relationship between awe and interest configurations.

Relief is a positive emotional experience that occurs when an unpleasant emotional experience ceases. If the unpleasant experience is ongoing, relief is elicited when it ends, or upon learning that it will end sooner than expected. If the negative experience is anticipated to occur in the future, relief results from finding out that the negative experience will not occur. Relief can also be the result of a negative experience being less bad than had been expected. Multiple studies of nonverbal vocalisations have established that relief can be very reliably inferred from sighs. For example, Schröder (2003) found that relief was recognised at near-ceiling levels by listeners. This finding has since been replicated ( Sauter, Eisner, Calder, et al., 2010 ; Simon-Thomas et al., 2009 ) and extended to show that relief elicits sighs across cultures ( Laukka et al., 2013 ; Sauter, Eisner, Ekman, et al., 2010 ).

Relief can also be recognised from visual cues alone ( Bänziger et al., 2012 ), though no work has yet tested whether visual cues of relief are consistent across cultures. Facially, prototypical relief expressions are characterised by a low-intensity smile, preceded by mouth opening, eye closure, and the head moving up ( Krumhuber & Scherer, 2011 ). In terms of global body movements, only one study to date has included relief ( Dael et al., 2012 ). A statistical classifier could accurately classify relief expressions and differentiate them from other (positive) emotions, but the only distinguishing feature of the relief expressions was that of retiring one’s hands in one’s pockets.

Summary: Epistemological Positive Emotions

To summarise, there is clear support that all of the epistemological positive emotions examined to date (amusement, relief, awe, and interest) have distinct, recognisable displays via vocal or facial cues. These, together with pride (see section below) arguably constitute the strongest candidates for positive emotions associated with specific, identifiable nonverbal expressions.

Prosocial Positive Emotions

Positive emotions can serve the function of orienting people towards the welfare of others and to foster profound social relationships. It has been argued that increased concern for others is a central aspect of many positive emotions, though it is particularly pronounced for certain emotions ( Keltner, 2009 ). The prosocial positive emotions include love, compassion (sometimes called sympathy), gratitude, and admiration. These emotions stand in contrast to positive emotions that enhance the individual experiencing the emotion, such as pride.

A consensus definition of love is lacking in the literature, and both whether it is an emotion and whether it is positive have been questioned ( Lamy, 2016 ). Nevertheless, love is typically conceptualised as a positive emotion that stimulates com-mitment to intimate relationships ( Campos et al., 2013 ). Nonverbal signals of love may reward prosocial behaviour and signal prosocial intent ( Hertenstein, Keltner, App, Bulleit, & Jaskolka, 2006 ).

Several studies have established an association between bodily movements and love. One study examined couples in romantic relationships as they interacted with each other in a series of semistructured discussions. Self-reported feelings of love correlated with head nods, Duchenne smiles, and forward leans ( Gonzaga, Keltner, Londahl, & Smith, 2001 ). Consistent with these results, a study examining posed expressions found that love was associated with Duchenne smiles, mutual gaze, affiliative hand gestures, open posture, and forward leans ( Campos et al., 2013 ). It is notable that these studies have highlighted movements beyond the face, such as postural shifts and hand gestures. However, love may in fact be preferentially communicated via a completely different type of signal, namely touch ( App et al., 2011 ). App and colleagues found that, when given an unrestricted choice of expression modality between touch, face, or body, touch was preferred to bodily or facial cues for expressing love, and signals of love were identified more accurately from observed touch than from facial or bodily movement. This corroborates studies showing that love can be reliably communicated from touch, typically using hugging or stroking movements ( Hertenstein, Holmes, McCullough, & Keltner, 2009 ), in both North American and Spanish participants ( Hertenstein et al., 2006 ).

In contrast, the evidence that love can be communicated via vocal signals is less strong. A meta-analysis of vocal communication of emotion grouped positive emotions into “happiness” and “love-tenderness” ( Juslin & Laukka, 2003 ). Speech inflected with love was characterised by slow speech rate, low voice intensity, low pitch level, and little pitch variability, but had the lowest decoding levels of all the emotions examined. This aligns with findings from the communication of emotions via nonverbal vocalisations, where only modest recognition rates have been found for vocalisations of love (affection), both within and across cultures ( Laukka et al., 2013 ). The authors concluded that love may lack a distinct type of vocalisation. Furthermore, affection vocalisations were commonly confused with interest, an epistemological rather than prosocial emotion. Frequent misclassifications of speech intonation pattern of tenderness have also been found in a study with a statistical classifier model using acoustic information ( Hammerschmidt & Jürgens, 2007 ). Speech expressing tenderness was specifically misclassified as expressing sensual satisfaction, which could be considered a savouring positive emotion. Thus, there is evidence that love is communicated via touch and full-body movement, but it does not appear to be associated with unique, clearly recognisable vocal cues.

Compassion, sometimes referred to as sympathy, is a desire to help in response to perceiving another’s suffering (see Stellar et al., 2017 ). It is differentiated from empathy, which is the vicarious experiencing of another’s suffering, because feeling compassion does not necessarily involve suffering and theorists have conceptualised it as a positive emotional experience ( Goetz, Keltner, & Simon-Thomas, 2010 ). Several studies have shown that compassion is marked by some facial features of sadness, combined with approach behaviours such as forward leans ( Eisenberg et al., 1989 ; see also de Meijer, 1989 ). This differs from facial displays of love because of the absence of smiling, and differs from sadness due to the signals of approach in compassion. However, visual expressions of compassion are poorly recognised and often mistaken for sadness (e.g., Haidt & Keltner, 1999 ).

Consistent with the pattern of results for visual displays, the study of vocal expressions has found low levels of accuracy for recognition of nonverbal vocalisations of compassion ( Simon-Thomas et al., 2009 ). An analysis of classification errors revealed that love and gratitude vocalisations were often identified as expressions of compassion, suggesting that vocalisations of all of those emotions may be used to communicate a general prosocial state of affiliation.

The strongest evidence for signals of compassion comes from the study of touch, with patting and stroking movements recognised as expressions of compassion across two cultural groups ( Hertenstein et al., 2006 ). This is supported by a direct comparison across channels of communication, where participants favoured touch over face and body for expressing compassion ( App et al., 2011 ). Naive participants were also more accurate in identifying compassion from observed touch as compared to facial and bodily displays, and in line with findings from studies of recognition from vocal cues, errors classifying touch tended to occur between compassion and love. In sum, evidence for a distinct, recognisable display of compassion from visual or auditory cues is weak, but rather, compassion appears to be preferentially signalled via touch.

Gratitude is what we feel when someone lends us a helping hand. It has been conceptualised as a positive emotional state caused by appreciating benefits perceived to be intentionally bestowed upon oneself, and it is thought to be important for promoting social relationships ( Algoe & Haidt, 2009 ; see also Armenta et al., 2017 ; Stellar et al., 2017 ). Though gratitude is marked by behavioural tendencies, such as reciprocating ( Algoe & Haidt, 2009 ), little research has examined nonverbal expressions of this prosocial emotion and results to date are weak.

Gratitude has been found to lack a reliable visual expressive display ( Campos et al., 2013 ) and to be poorly recognised from nonverbal vocalisations ( Simon-Thomas et al., 2009 ). In contrast, touch has been shown to communicate gratitude ( Hertenstein et al., 2009 ; Hertenstein et al., 2006 ), but the most frequent way to express gratitude was a handshake, suggesting a conventionalised signal that may not generalise beyond particular cultural groups.

The experience of admiration is triggered by the perception of another’s extraordinary achievement ( Algoe & Haidt, 2009 ). We may feel admiration when learning of someone having a brilliant insight, or when experiencing an exceptional artistic accomplishment, such as a virtuoso musical performance. Said achievement should be outside of the moral domain, as witnessing moral virtue triggers elevation ( Algoe & Haidt, 2009 ), which has not yet been studied in the context of nonverbal communication. Admiration is a positive emotion that has received little attention from researchers of nonverbal communication, and the available evidence holds only limited promise for the notion that admiration may be signalled via nonverbal expressions.

In a study of nonverbal vocalisations, Schröder (2003) found that recognition levels were nearly at ceiling for expressions of admiration. However, this was also the case when only segmental information was provided (i.e., transcriptions such as “wow”), suggesting that these exclamations may be conventionalised emblems, rather than fully nonverbal vocalisations like sighs and screams.

In a more recent study by Bänziger et al. (2012) , moderate levels of recognition were found from both visual and auditory signals of admiration when presented alone, but there was a marked advantage for audiovisual presentation. This may suggest that there is relatively little redundancy in expressions of admiration, such that visual and auditory cues complement each other. Notably, expressions of admiration were frequently mistaken for surprise, which likely reflects the conceptual overlap between these two emotions, as both involve an unexpected event ( Algoe & Haidt, 2009 ).

Summary: Prosocial Positive Emotions

Current evidence indicates that the prosocial emotions (love, compassion, gratitude, and admiration) are not reliably communicated in any modality other than touch. This is clear support for the proposal that the most effective mode of communication of an emotion may depend in part on the emotion’s social function ( App et al., 2011 ), with prosocial emotions playing a particularly important role in intimate social relationships.

Savouring positive emotions

An obvious way that positive emotions are triggered is from thinking about or experiencing enjoyable stimuli such as food or sex. Such savouring positive emotions include contentment, sensory pleasure, and sexual desire. The roots of savouring emotions are likely linked to unconditioned stimuli like food and touch, that fulfil basic needs.

Contentment

Contentment has been defined as an emotion accompanying satisfaction of one’s basic needs. Sometimes called satisfaction, it is the feeling of enjoying a quiet rest after completing a good day’s work. The central appraisal features that characterise contentment do not differentiate it well from other positive emotions ( Campos et al., 2013 ). Conflation between contentment and other positive emotional states has also been found in the study of vocal signals. Specifically, nonverbal vocalisations of contentment were often confused with (sensual) pleasure across several studies ( Sauter, Eisner, Calder, et al., 2010 ; Sauter & Scott, 2007 ). It is not clear whether visual cues of contentment are specific to that emotion; posed displays have been shown to primarily feature smiling ( Campos et al., 2013 ). Specifically, Duchenne smiles and smiles with the lips pressed together occurred frequently in expressions of contentment, but given the ubiquity of smiling in positive emotions it remains to be established whether facial expressions of contentment can be recognised.

Sensory Pleasure

Sensory pleasure is the enjoyment of a physical stimulus, such as food or sex. Sensory pleasure can be elicited from unconditional stimuli such as pleasant touch, but also through learned associations. For example, one can experience pleasure from tasting flavours that are at first exposure not typically judged to be pleasant (e.g., coffee, wine). Although pleasure has been included in a number of studies of nonverbal behaviour, results to date do not clearly point to a unique, recognisable signal for this emotional state.

As noted, vocal signals of pleasure are frequently confused with contentment (e.g., Sauter & Scott, 2007), and though recognition rates for pleasure are relatively high within culture, they appear to be culturally variable ( Sauter, Eisner, Ekman, et al., 2010 ). However, given that posed expressions of pleasure are perceived as inauthentic ( Bänziger et al., 2012 ), it remains to be tested whether genuine-sounding vocalisations of pleasure are shared across cultural boundaries.

In terms of bodily movements, pleasure has been found to be associated with a prototypical response pattern consisting of tilting the head upwards and away, accompanied by asymmetrical arm movements ( Dael et al., 2012 ). However, no study to date has examined whether observers can infer pleasure from others’ bodily movements.

Examining facial cues of positive emotions, Ricci-Bitti, Caterina, and Garotti (1996) described the facial changes associated with pleasure as closed eyes in combination with a Duchenne smile. This was corroborated by a more recent study ( Mortillaro et al., 2011 ), which found that facial expressions of pleasure were characterised by smiling, eye closure, and mouth opening. Complementing this work, there is some evidence suggesting that perceivers can recognise pleasure from facial cues. However, this seems to be the case primarily for pleasure expressions of high intensity ( Wehrle, Kaiser, Schmidt, & Scherer, 2000 ) and for audiovisual displays ( Bänziger et al., 2012 ). It is worth noting that confusion patterns for pleasure expressions are highly variable; they have been interpreted primarily as love/tenderness ( Bänziger et al., 2012 ), interest ( Mortillaro et al., 2011 ), and pride ( Wehrle et al., 2000 ). The variation in emotion stimuli used in these studies renders these inconsistencies difficult to interpret, and highlight the need for consistency in studies in this area. One contributing factor, however, may be that the emotion most closely related to pleasure, at least for facial expressions, is not another positive emotion, but rather pain. Detailed analysis of facial movements during pleasure and pain have supported the notion that there is overlap between the facial configurations of these two states ( Fernandez-Dols, Carrera, & Crivelli, 2011 ), though observers are able to distinguish these expressions at greater than chance levels in the absence of contextual cues ( Hughes & Nicholson, 2008 ). However, the studies examining overlap in facial expressions between pleasure and pain have specifically focused on sexual pleasure; sexual enjoyment may differ from other forms of sensory pleasure, both in terms of facial configurations and on other features, such as action tendencies.

Sexual Desire

Desire is a state that leads a person to seek out opportunities for sexual activity ( Gonzaga, Turner, Keltner, Campos, & Altemus, 2006 ). It differs from sensory pleasure, which may also contain a sexual element, in that the contact has not yet occurred. Only a few studies have examined the nonverbal expressions of sexual desire.

Just a single study to date has examined the visual cues of desire ( Gonzaga et al., 2006 ). It showed that self-reported feelings of desire in a semistructured interaction correlated with lip licks, bites, and puckering during interactions with a romantic, sexual partner. These sexual displays were also correlated with the partner’s self-reported sexual desire, but whether these displays are explicitly recognised as signalling desire has not yet been tested.

Evidence on vocal signals of desire is mixed. One study found that nonverbal vocalisations of desire were poorly recognised, with errors distributed across many other response alternatives, possibly due to large variability among the desire expressions ( Simon-Thomas et al., 2009 ). In contrast, Laukka et al. (2013) found that lust was one of the best recognised vocalisation types of the nine positive emotions in their study. Recognition levels were however still moderate, because sounds were frequently conflated with relief, serenity, and positive surprise. It may be that the inconsistency between these studies can be accounted for by differences between desire and lust, but it cannot currently be concluded that desire is associated with a nonverbal signal in any modality.

Summary: Savouring Positive Emotions

There is currently little support for distinct recognisable signals of the savouring positive emotions (contentment, sensory pleasure, and desire). The overlap between them in terms of confusion errors may be an indication that these do not constitute states with distinct signals; the extent to which other criteria do differentiate these emotional states will be a worthwhile question for future research.

Agency-Approach Positive Emotions

Though not all positive emotions facilitate approach towards reward-related actions (e.g., Gable & Harmon-Jones, 2008 ), some, including elation and pride, are characterised by approach tendencies. These emotions are more individual than many of the other positive emotions, that is, they do not primarily involve a positive interaction with another person: they may not require the involvement of a social partner at all (i.e., elation) or they may involve others only for social comparison (i.e., pride).

Elation is a highly aroused positive emotional state caused by an unexpected positive event ( Mortillaro et al., 2011 ), such as winning the lottery. Closely related states are enthusiasm, triumph, and excitement; these are discussed together here as there is currently little theoretical differentiation made between these states. Elation is however differentiated from joy (sometimes called happiness), which typically refers to a positive emotional state in a more general sense. Elation is distinct from joy both in terms of the specificity of the target state, and in terms of levels of arousal, since elation is characterised by particularly high arousal.

In a study of emotional speech prosody comparing segments differing in arousal, most emotion pairs (e.g., panic and anxiety) were found to frequently be confused ( Banse & Scherer, 1996 ). However, elation and joy were rarely mistaken for each other, suggesting that they may have distinct prosodic contours, although recognition levels for both were moderate.

Several studies have demonstrated that nonverbal vocalisations of enthusiasm and triumph are not well recognised, and it has been suggested that this emotional state may lack a clear vocal nonverbal signature ( Schröder, 2003 ). Consistent with this notion, Bänziger et al. (2012) found that vocal signals of elated joy were poorly recognised, and frequently confused with amusement. Simon-Thomas et al. (2009) found that elation in the form of triumph was poorly recognised from nonverbal vocalisations, while enthusiasm was recognised with moderate levels of accuracy. Notably, enthusiasm and triumph were frequently mistaken for each other, underscoring the overlap between these two states.

Facial expressions of elation are marked by smiles accompanied by widened eye aperture ( Ricci-Bitti et al., 1996 ) or Duchenne smile together with raised eyebrows ( Mortillaro et al., 2011 ). In terms of recognition, judges can differentiate elated facial expressions well from related states such as pleasure and happiness, especially when viewing high-intensity, dynamic expressions ( Wehrle et al., 2000 ; see also Fujimura & Suzuki, 2010 , for a similar finding).

Several studies have examined full-body cues associated with elation. Wallbott (1998) found that elation was characterised by high movement activity and fast and expansive movements (see also de Meijer, 1989 , for a similar result). Specifically, the arms were stretched out and the head was tilted up and back. A discriminant analysis yielded high levels of accuracy for elevated joy expressions. Consistent with these findings, a more recent study found high accuracy for full-body cues submitted to a discriminant analysis, though the specific movements for elated joy were repetitive vertical movement of the arms and knees ( Dael et al., 2012 ). However, recognition data from full-body cues associated with elated joy is currently missing.

In sum, elation is linked to reliable patterns of facial and bodily movements, but not to a type of nonverbal vocalisation.

Pride is a positive, self-conscious emotion triggered by the completion of a goal; it is thought to play a role in enhancing the individual’s social status ( Tracy & Robins, 2007 ). We feel proud when accomplishing a challenging goal, be it academic, athletic, or personal. Pride is the positive emotion whose nonverbal communication has been studied most extensively (see Tracy, Weidman, Cheng, & Martens, 2014 , for a review).

Evidence for consistent and recognisable visual displays of pride is strong. Prototypical displays are characterised by a combination of bodily and facial changes, specifically expanded posture, a head tilt back, and a small smile ( Tracy et al., 2014 ). This expression is produced spontaneously in pride-eliciting situations and communicates pride also across cultural boundaries ( Tracy & Matsumoto, 2008 ; Tracy & Robins, 2008 ). Notably, facial cues alone are insufficient for perceivers to differentiate pride from joy ( App et al., 2011 ; Mortillaro et al., 2011 ; Wehrle et al., 2000 ) and conversely, pride is frequently misclassified as elation when bodily cues of pride are judged in the absence of facial information ( Dael et al., 2012 ; Wallbott, 1998 ).

In contrast, several studies have shown that pride is not well recognised from auditory signals, with classification errors distributed across both positive and negative emotions ( Bänziger et al., 2012 ; Simon-Thomas et al., 2009 ).

To summarise, pride is communicated via a combination of postural and bodily cues, but not from vocalisations or facial expressions alone.

Summary: Agency-Approach Positive Emotions

The findings available to date suggest that agency-approach positive emotions (elation and pride) are associated with recognisable visual, but not auditory, cues. The consistency seen for the emotions in this emotion family may point to positive emotions characterised by a strong approach motivation being preferentially communicated via visual signals.

Conclusions, Limitations, and a Look to the Future

This article has provided an overview of the literature on the nonverbal communication of positive emotions. This research provides support for three main conclusions. Firstly, this work shows that there are a range of expressions that communicate positive emotions. The study of a wide range of nonverbal cues is crucial, as many emotions are only reliably communicated via one channel of communication or a combination of channels. Secondly, the reviewed results demonstrate that there are a number of positive emotions that are associated with unique, recognisable signals. Specifically, the fact that many of the studies reviewed have found evidence of recognition of positive emotions, when examining them in the context of other positive emotions, attests to the signal clarity of these expressions (see Table 2 ). Thirdly, the available findings indicate that the notion of emotion families may be useful as a way to distinguish between positive emotions, based on the associated nonverbal behaviour (see Ellsworth & Smith, 1988 , for evidence based on appraisal profiles). The epistemological positive emotions (amusement, relief, awe, and interest) have distinct, recognisable displays via vocal or facial cues. The recognisability of these signals suggests that the nonverbal communication of these emotional states may be adaptive in an evolutionary sense. They may, together with pride, be the most likely candidates for potentially basic positive emotions, equivalent to the set of negative emotions that are reliably communicated via nonverbal signals (e.g., fear, disgust, anger). The agency-approach positive emotions (elation and pride) appear to be associated with recognisable visual, but not auditory, cues. This could indicate that these emotions are primarily communicated with others in relatively close proximity, since auditory cues (e.g., screams) may travel further than visual ones (e.g., eyebrow raising). However, the relatively conspicuous bodily cues associated with both elation and pride are indicative of signals that could be inferred from others from a distance. Furthermore, there is limited data on the production of vocal cues associated with elation and pride; hopefully future studies will explore this issue. Evidence is less strong for clear signals of the prosocial emotions (love, compassion, gratitude, and admiration) in any modality other than touch. This is consistent with previous findings that have highlighted the preferential communication of prosocial emotions via touch and is thought to reflect the fact that these emotions primarily occur in intimate relationships ( App et al., 2011 ). Finally, there is little support for distinct recognisable signals of the savouring positive emotions (contentment, sensory pleasure, and desire), which may suggest that these emotions are not associated with communicative functions, though they may nevertheless serve adaptive functions for the individual who is experiencing them.

The suggestion of some consistencies in patterns of results within the proposed emotion families is not intended to imply that these categories are necessarily the best possible conceptualisation of positive emotion space. Nevertheless, current evidence points to possible superordinate classes of positive emotions, in addition to underlining the differentiation between specific positive emotional states. It is also worth noting that a number of positive emotions have not been studied at all yet in the context of nonverbal behaviour; future work may for example examine the communication of ecstasy, devotion, and hope.

These findings overturn some previous assumptions about the nonverbal communication of positive emotions. Specifi-cally, all positive emotions were once thought to share a nonverbal signal in the form of a smile (e.g., Ekman, 1992 ). It is well established that smiling does not always provide a direct read-out of felt enjoyment (e.g., Kraut & Johnston, 1979 ), but the findings reviewed here go beyond this point to reveal that some positive emotions, like interest, are reliably expressed and recognised by facial cues other than smiling. In addition, some positive emotional states are reliably communicated via nonfacial signals. Smiling may nevertheless provide a signal of general positive emotion or prosocial orientation, but the available data suggests that more detailed characterisations of configurations of cues are likely more informative than using single, global descriptive categories such as smiling.

The present review included only studies with adult participants, but it is worth considering how this work connects to the developmental literature (reviewed in Sauter et al., 2014 ). It is well established that already very early in development, infants are sensitive to nonverbal signals of positive emotion from others and also that they produce such signals themselves. There is, for example, evidence that infants produce laughter in response to playful physical games. Notably, similarities between developmental and adult samples have been found across multiple modalities. Even very young infants show differentiation between different kinds of smiles in both perception and production, but little work focusing on early development has included comparisons between multiple kinds of positive emotions. Research on emotion perception in older children has in some cases included several positive emotions and shown considerable differentiation, but data on many aspects of the development of nonverbal communication of specific positive emotions are lacking. Addressing this gap in the research literature will be a worthwhile challenge for future research.

It is worth noting some limitations of the extant data, particularly as this may inform further research pursuits in this field. There is a great need for more cross-cultural research in the study of nonverbal communication of positive emotions. With the exception of a handful of studies noted in the relevant sections, the displays of most positive emotions have not been tested across cultures for any channel of communication. It is well established that cultures vary in their orientations to different types of positive affect ( Tsai, Knutson, & Fung, 2006 ), but the extent to which culture shapes emotional signals varies greatly across positive emotions (e.g., Sauter, Eisner, Ekman, et al., 2010 ). More research in this area is thus needed, particularly given the importance of cross-cultural findings for evolutionary arguments on emotions.

A number of studies have demonstrated a communication advantage for multimodal expressions (e.g., Bänziger et al., 2012 ). The vast majority of studies to date have focused on expressions within a single modality. Research on unimodal communication can provide a tough test of emotion recognition, but including multimodal expressions will be an important next step to increasing ecological validity. Relatedly, it is an obvious limitation that so much of this research relies on posed emotional expressions; here the study of positive emotions has an advantage compared to that of negative emotions in that there are generally fewer ethical concerns with inducing intense emotional experiences in the laboratory.

Finally, there is enormous variability in terms of the measures, target emotions, and paradigms in the studies conducted to date. Although open exploration is crucial for discovery, hopefully the maturation of this field of research will begin to yield greater convergence on methods and emotions over the coming years.

Author note: The writing of this article was supported by Grant 275-70-033 to the author from The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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4 Nonverbal Communication

Introduction

When we think about communication, we most often focus on how we exchange information using words. While verbal communication is important, humans relied on nonverbal communication for thousands of years before we developed the capability to communicate with words. Nonverbal communication is a process of generating meaning using behavior other than words (Depaulo & Friedman, 1998). Rather than thinking of nonverbal communication as the opposite of or as separate from verbal communication, it’s more accurate to view them as operating side by side—as part of the same system.

The content and composition of verbal and nonverbal communication also differs. In terms of content, nonverbal communication tends to do the work of communicating emotions more than verbal. In terms of composition, although there are rules of grammar that structure our verbal communication, no such official guides govern our use of nonverbal signals. Likewise, there are not dictionaries and thesauruses of nonverbal communication like there are with verbal symbols. Finally, whereas we humans are unique in our capacity to abstract and transcend space and time using verbal symbols, we are not the only creatures that engage in nonverbal communication (Hargie, 2011).

These are just some of the characteristics that differentiate verbal communication from nonverbal, and in the remainder of this chapter, we will discuss in more detail the principles, functions, and types of nonverbal communication and conclude with some guidance on how to improve our nonverbal communication competence.

4.1 Principles and Functions of Nonverbal Communication

A channel is the sensory route on which a message travels. Verbal, or word-based, communication usually only relies on one channel, because spoken language is transmitted through sound and picked up by our ears, and text based communication is picked up by our eyes. All five of our senses, on the other hand, can take in nonverbal communication. Since most of our communication relies on visual and auditory channels, those will be the primary focus. But, we can also receive messages and generate meaning through touch, taste, and smell. To define further nonverbal communication, we need to distinguish between vocal and verbal aspects of communication. Verbal and nonverbal communication include both vocal and non-vocal elements. A vocal element of verbal communication is spoken words—for example, “Come back here.” A vocal element of nonverbal communication is paralanguage (Qiang, 2013). Paralanguage is the vocalized but not verbal part of a spoken message, such as speaking rate, volume, and pitch. (In other words, paralanguage is everything that comes out of your throat as a sound, but is not a word.) Non-vocal elements of verbal communication include the use of unspoken symbols to convey meaning. Non-vocal elements of nonverbal communication include body language such as gestures, facial expressions, and eye contact. Gestures are non-vocal and nonverbal since most of them do not refer to a specific word like a written or signed symbol does.

Nonverbal Communication Conveys Important Information

You have probably heard that more meaning is generated from nonverbal communication than from verbal. Some studies have claimed that 90 percent of our meaning is derived from nonverbal signals, but more recent and reliable findings claim that it is closer to 65 percent (Guerrero & Floyd, 2006). We may rely more on nonverbal signals in situations where verbal and nonverbal messages conflict and in situations where emotional or relational communication is taking place (Hargie, 2011). For example, when someone asks a question and we are not sure about the “angle” they are taking, we may hone in on nonverbal cues to fill in the meaning. For example, the question “What are you doing tonight?” could mean any number of things, but we could rely on posture, tone of voice, and eye contact to see if the person is just curious, suspicious, or hinting that they would like company for the evening.

We also put more weight on nonverbal communication when determining a person’s credibility (Burgoon, Birk, & Pfau, 1990). For example, if a classmate delivers a speech in class and her verbal content seems well researched and unbiased, but her nonverbal communication is poor (her voice is monotone, she avoids eye contact, she fidgets), she will likely not be viewed as credible. Conversely, in some situations, verbal communication might carry more meaning than nonverbal. In interactions where information exchange is the focus, at a briefing at work, for example, verbal communication likely accounts for much more of the meaning generated. Despite this exception, a key principle of nonverbal communication is that it often takes on more meaning in interpersonal and/or emotional exchanges.

Nonverbal Communication Is More Involuntary than Verbal

We verbally communicate involuntarily in some instances (Porter, ten Brinke, & Wallace, 2012). These types of exclamations are often verbal responses to a surprising stimulus. For example, we say “owww!” when we stub our toe or scream “stop!” when we see someone heading toward danger. Involuntary nonverbal signals are much more common. Although most nonverbal communication is not completely involuntary, it is more below our consciousness than verbal communication. Therefore, it is more difficult to control.

The involuntary nature of much nonverbal communication makes it more difficult to control or “fake” (Porter, ten Brinke, & Wallace, 2012). For example, although you can consciously smile a little and shake hands with someone when you first see them, it is difficult to fake that you are “happy” to meet someone. Nonverbal communication leaks out in ways that expose our underlying thoughts or feelings. Spokespeople, lawyers, or other public representatives who are the “face” of a politician, celebrity, corporation, or organization must learn to control their facial expressions and other nonverbal communication so they can effectively convey the message of their employer or client without having their personal thoughts and feelings leak through. Poker players, therapists, police officers, doctors, teachers, and actors are also in professions that often require them to have more awareness of and control over their nonverbal communication.

Have you ever tried to conceal your surprise, suppress your anger, or act joyful even when you weren’t? Most people whose careers don’t involve conscious manipulation of nonverbal signals find it difficult to control or suppress them. While we can consciously decide to stop sending verbal messages, our nonverbal communication always has the potential of generating meaning for another person, whether we mean it to or not. The teenager who decides to shut out his dad and not communicate with him still sends a message with his “blank” stare (still a facial expression) and lack of movement (still a gesture). In this sense, nonverbal communication is “irrepressible” (Andersen, 1999).

Nonverbal Communication Is More Ambiguous

We know that the symbolic and abstract nature of language can lead to misunderstandings, but nonverbal communication is even more ambiguous (Neill, 2017). As with verbal communication, most of our nonverbal signals can be linked to multiple meanings, but unlike words, many nonverbal signals do not have any one specific meaning. If you have ever had someone wink at you and did not know why, you have probably experienced this uncertainty. Did they wink to express their affection for you, their pleasure with something you just did, or because you share some inside knowledge or joke?

Just as we look at context clues in a sentence or paragraph to derive meaning from a particular word, we can look for context clues in various sources of information like the physical environment, other nonverbal signals, or verbal communication to make sense of a particular nonverbal cue. Unlike verbal communication, however, nonverbal communication does not have explicit rules of grammar that bring structure, order, and agreed-on patterns of usage (Neill, 2017). Instead, we implicitly learn norms of nonverbal communication, which leads to greater variance. In general, we exhibit more idiosyncrasies in our usage of nonverbal communication than we do with verbal communication, which also increases the ambiguity of nonverbal communication.

Nonverbal Communication Is More Credible

Although we can rely on verbal communication to fill in the blanks sometimes left by nonverbal expressions, we often put more trust into what people do over what they say. This is especially true in times of stress or danger when our behaviors become more instinctual and we rely on older systems of thinking and acting that evolved before our ability to speak and write (Andersen, 1999). This innateness creates intuitive feelings about the genuineness of nonverbal communication, and this genuineness relates back to our earlier discussion about the sometimes involuntary and often subconscious nature of nonverbal communication. An example of the innateness of nonverbal signals can be found in children who have been blind since birth but still exhibit the same facial expressions as other children. In short, the involuntary or subconscious nature of nonverbal communication makes it less easy to fake, which makes it seem more honest and credible. We will learn more about the role that nonverbal communication plays in deception later in this chapter.

4.2 Functions of Nonverbal Communication

A primary function of nonverbal communication is to convey meaning by reinforcing, substituting for, or contradicting verbal communication. Nonverbal communication is also used to influence others and regulate conversational flow. Perhaps even more important are the ways in which nonverbal communication functions as a central part of relational communication and identity expression.

Nonverbal Communication Conveys Meaning

Nonverbal communication conveys meaning by reinforcing, substituting for, or contradicting verbal communication. As we’ve already learned, verbal and nonverbal communication are two parts of the same system that often work side by side, helping us generate meaning.

In terms of reinforcing verbal communication, gestures can help describe a space or shape that another person is unfamiliar with in ways that words alone cannot. Gestures also reinforce basic meaning—for example, pointing to the door when you tell someone to leave. Facial expressions reinforce the emotional states we convey through verbal communication. For example, smiling while telling a funny story better conveys your emotions (Hargie, 2011). Vocal variation can help us emphasize a particular part of a message, which helps reinforce a word or sentence’s meaning. For example, saying, “How was your weekend?” conveys a different meaning than “How was your weekend ?”

Nonverbal communication can substitute for verbal communication in a variety of ways. Nonverbal communication can convey a great deal of meaning when verbal communication is not effective because of language barriers. Language barriers are present when a person has not yet learned to speak or loses the ability to speak. For example, babies who have not yet developed language skills make facial expressions, at a few months old, that are similar to those of adults and therefore can generate meaning (Oster, Hegley, & Nagel, 1992). People who have developed language skills but cannot use them because they have temporarily or permanently lost them can still communicate nonverbally. Although it is always a good idea to learn some of the local language when you travel, gestures such as pointing or demonstrating the size or shape of something may suffice in basic interactions.

Nonverbal communication is also useful in a quiet situation where verbal communication would be disturbing; for example, you may use a gesture to signal to a friend that you are ready to leave the library. Crowded or loud places can also impede verbal communication and lead people to rely more on nonverbal messages (Krauss, Chen, & Chawla, 1996). Getting a server or bartender’s attention with a hand gesture is definitely more polite than yelling, “Hey you!” Finally, there are just times when we know it is better not to say something aloud. If you want to point out a person’s unusual outfit or signal to a friend that you think his or her date is a loser, you are probably more likely to do that nonverbally.

Last, nonverbal communication can convey meaning by contradicting verbal communication. As we learned earlier, we often perceive nonverbal communication to be more credible than verbal communication. This is especially true when we receive mixed messages , or messages in which verbal and nonverbal signals contradict each other. For example, a person may say, “You can’t do anything right!” in a mean tone but follow that up with a wink, which could indicate the person is teasing or joking. Mixed messages lead to uncertainty and confusion on the part of receivers, which leads us to look for more information to try to determine which message is more credible. If we are unable to resolve the discrepancy, we are likely to react negatively and potentially withdraw from the interaction (Hargie, 2011). Persistent mixed messages can lead to relational distress and hurt a person’s credibility in professional settings.

Nonverbal Communication Influences Others

Nonverbal communication can be used to influence people in a variety of ways, but the most common way is through deception (Vrij, Hartwig, & Granhag, 2019). Deception is typically thought of as the intentional act of altering information to influence another person, which means that it extends beyond lying to include concealing, omitting, or exaggerating information. While verbal communication is to blame for the content of the deception, nonverbal communication partners with the language through deceptive acts to be more convincing. Since most of us intuitively believe that nonverbal communication is more credible than verbal communication, we often intentionally try to control our nonverbal communication when we are engaging in deception. Likewise, we try to evaluate other people’s nonverbal communication to determine the veracity of their messages (Vrij, Hartwig, & Granhag, 2019). Students initially seem surprised when we discuss the prevalence of deception, but their surprise diminishes once they realize that deception is not always malevolent, mean, or hurtful. Deception obviously has negative connotations, but people engage in deception for many reasons (to excuse our own mistakes, be polite to others, or influence others’ behaviors or perceptions).

The fact that deception served an important evolutionary purpose helps explain its prevalence among humans today. Species that are capable of deception have a higher survival rate. Other animals engage in nonverbal deception that helps them attract mates, hide from predators, and trap prey (Andersen, 1999). To put it bluntly, the better at deception a creature is, the more likely it is to survive. So, over time, the humans that were better liars were the ones that got their genes passed on. However, the fact that lying played a part in our survival as a species does not give us a license to lie.

Aside from deception, we can use nonverbal communication to “take the edge off” a critical or unpleasant message in an attempt to influence the reaction of the other person. We can also use eye contact and proximity to get someone to move or leave an area. For example, hungry diners waiting to snag a first-come-first-serve table in a crowded restaurant send messages to the people who have already eaten and paid that it’s time to go. People on competition reality television shows like Survivor and Big Brother play what they have come to term a “social game.” The social aspects of the game involve the manipulation of verbal and nonverbal cues to send strategic messages about oneself in an attempt to influence others. Nonverbal cues such as length of conversational turn, volume, posture, touch, eye contact, and choices of clothing and accessories can become part of a player’s social game strategy. Although reality television is not a reflection of real life, people still engage in competition and strategically change their communication to influence others, making it important to be aware of how we nonverbally influence others and how they may try to influence us.

Nonverbal Communication Regulates Conversational Flow

Conversational interaction has been likened to a dance, where each person has to make moves and take turns without stepping on the other’s toes. Nonverbal communication helps us regulate our conversations so we do not end up constantly interrupting each other or waiting in awkward silences between speaker turns. Pitch, which is a part of vocalics, helps us cue others into our conversational intentions. A rising pitch typically indicates a question and a falling pitch indicates the end of a thought or the end of a conversational turn. We can also use a falling pitch to indicate closure, which can be very useful at the end of a speech to signal to the audience that you are finished, which cues the applause and prevents an awkward silence that the speaker ends up filling with “That’s it” or “Thank you.” We also signal our turn is coming to an end by stopping hand gestures and shifting our eye contact to the person who we think will speak next (Hargie, 2011). Conversely, we can “hold the floor” with nonverbal signals even when we are not exactly sure what we are going to say next. Repeating a hand gesture or using one or more verbal fillers can extend our turn even though we are not verbally communicating at the moment.

Nonverbal Communication Affects Relationships

To relate successfully to other people, we must possess some skill at encoding and decoding nonverbal communication. The nonverbal messages we send and receive influence our relationships in positive and negative ways and can work to bring people together or push them apart. Nonverbal communication in the form of tie signs, immediacy behaviors, and expressions of emotion are just three of many examples that illustrate how nonverbal communication affects our relationships.

Immediacy behaviors play a central role in bringing people together. Some scholars have identified them as the most important function of nonverbal communication (Andersen & Andersen, 2005). Immediacy behaviors are verbal and nonverbal behaviors that lessen real or perceived physical and psychological distance between communicators and include things like smiling, nodding, making eye contact, and occasionally engaging in social, polite, or professional touch (Comadena, Hunt, & Simonds, 2007). Immediacy behaviors are a good way of creating rapport, or a friendly and positive connection between people. Skilled nonverbal communicators are more likely to be able to create rapport with others due to attention-getting expressiveness, warm initial greetings, and an ability to get “in tune” with others, which conveys empathy (Riggio, 1992). These skills are important to help initiate and maintain relationships.

While verbal communication is our primary tool for solving problems and providing detailed instructions, nonverbal communication is our primary tool for communicating emotions. This makes sense when we remember that nonverbal communication emerged before verbal communication and was the channel through which we expressed anger, fear, and love for thousands of years of human history (Andersen, 1999). Touch and facial expressions are two primary ways we express emotions nonverbally. Love is a primary emotion that we express nonverbally and that forms the basis of our close relationships. Although no single facial expression for love has been identified, it is expressed through prolonged eye contact, close interpersonal distances, increased touch, and increased time spent together, among other things. Given many people’s limited emotional vocabulary, nonverbal expressions of emotion are central to our relationships.

Nonverbal Communication Expresses Our Identities

Nonverbal communication expresses who we are. Our identities (the groups to which we belong, our cultures, our hobbies and interests, etc.) are conveyed nonverbally through the way we set up our living and working spaces, the clothes we wear, the way we carry ourselves, and the accents and tones of our voices (Canfield, 2002). Our physical bodies give others impressions about who we are, and some of these features are more under our control than others are. Height, for example, has been shown to influence how people are treated and perceived in various contexts. Our level of attractiveness also influences how we perceive ourselves and how people perceive us. Although we can temporarily alter our height or looks—for example, with different shoes or different color contact lenses—we can only permanently alter these features using more invasive and costly measures such as cosmetic surgery. We have more control over some other aspects of nonverbal communication in terms of how we communicate our identities. For example, the way we carry and present ourselves through posture, eye contact, and tone of voice can be altered to present ourselves as warm or distant depending on the context.

Aside from our physical body, artifacts , which are the objects and possessions that surround us, also communicate our identities. Examples of artifacts include our clothes, jewelry, and space decorations. In all the previous examples, implicit norms or explicit rules can affect how we nonverbally present ourselves. For example, in a particular workplace, it may be a norm (implicit) for people in management positions to dress casually, or it may be a rule (explicit) that different levels of employees wear different uniforms or follow particular dress codes. We can also use nonverbal communication to express identity characteristics that do not match up with who we actually think we are. Through changes to nonverbal signals, a capable person can try to appear helpless, a guilty person can try to appear innocent, or an uninformed person can try to appear credible.

4.3 Types of Nonverbal Communication

Just as verbal language is broken up into various categories, there are also different types of nonverbal communication. As we learn about each type of nonverbal signal, keep in mind that nonverbals often work in concert with each other, combining to repeat, modify, or contradict the verbal message being sent.

The word kinesics comes from the root word kinesis , which means “movement,” and refers to the study of hand, arm, body, and face movements (Harrigan, 2005). Specifically, this section will outline the use of gestures, head movements and posture, eye contact, and facial expressions as nonverbal communication.

There are three main types of gestures: adaptors, emblems, and illustrators (Andersen, 1999). Adaptors are touching behaviors and movements that indicate internal states typically related to arousal or anxiety. Adaptors can be targeted toward the self, objects, or others. In regular social situations, adaptors result from uneasiness, anxiety, or a general sense that we are not in control of our surroundings. Many of us subconsciously click pens, shake our legs, or engage in other adaptors during classes, meetings, or while waiting as a way to do something with our excess energy. Public speaking students who watch video recordings of their speeches notice nonverbal adaptors that they did not know they used. In public speaking situations, people most commonly use self- or object-focused adaptors.

Emblems are gestures that have a specific agreed-on meaning within a cultural context. A hitchhiker’s raised thumb, the “OK” sign with thumb and index finger connected in a circle with the other three fingers sticking up, and the raised middle finger are all examples of emblems that have an agreed-on meaning or meanings with a culture. Emblems can be still or in motion; for example, circling the index finger around at the side of your head says “He or she is crazy,” or rolling your hands repeatedly in front of you says “Move on.”

Head Movements and Posture

We group head movements and posture together because they are often both used to acknowledge others and communicate interest or attentiveness. In terms of head movements, a head nod is a universal sign of acknowledgement in cultures where the formal bow is no longer used as a greeting. In these cases, the head nod essentially serves as an abbreviated bow. An innate and universal head movement is the headshake back and forth to signal “no.” This nonverbal signal begins at birth, even before a baby has the ability to know that it has a corresponding meaning. Babies shake their head from side to side to reject their mother’s breast and later shake their head to reject attempts to spoon-feed (Pease & Pease, 2004). This biologically based movement then sticks with us to be a recognizable signal for “no.” We also move our head to indicate interest. For example, a head up typically indicates an engaged or neutral attitude, a head tilt indicates interest and is an innate submission gesture that exposes the neck and subconsciously makes people feel more trusting of us, and a head down signals a negative or aggressive attitude (Pease & Pease, 2004).

There are four general human postures: standing, sitting, squatting, and lying down (Hargie, 2011). Within each of these postures, there are many variations, and when combined with particular gestures or other nonverbal cues they can express many different meanings. Most of our communication occurs while we are standing or sitting. One interesting standing posture involves putting our hands on our hips and is a nonverbal cue that we use subconsciously to make us look bigger and show assertiveness. When the elbows are pointed out, this prevents others from getting past us as easily and is a sign of attempted dominance or a gesture that says we are ready for action. In terms of sitting, leaning back shows informality and indifference, straddling a chair is a sign of dominance (but also some insecurity because the person is protecting the vulnerable front part of his or her body), and leaning forward shows interest and attentiveness (Pease & Pease, 2004).

Eye Contact

We also communicate through eye behaviors, primarily eye contact (Glaeser & Paulus, 2015). While eye behaviors are often studied under the category of kinesics, they have their own branch of nonverbal studies called oculesics , which comes from the Latin word oculus , meaning “eye.” The face and eyes are the main point of focus during communication, and along with our ears, our eyes take in most of the communicative information around us. The saying “The eyes are the window to the soul” is actually accurate in terms of where people typically think others are “located,” which is right behind the eyes (Andersen, 1999). Certain eye behaviors have become tied to personality traits or emotional states, as illustrated in phrases like “hungry eyes,” “evil eyes,” and “bedroom eyes.”

Aside from regulating conversations, eye contact is also used to monitor interaction by taking in feedback and other nonverbal cues and to send information. Our eyes bring in the visual information we need to interpret people’s movements, gestures, and eye contact. A speaker can use his or her eye contact to determine if an audience is engaged, confused, or bored and then adapt his or her message accordingly. Our eyes also send information to others. People know not to interrupt when we are in deep thought because we naturally look away from others when we are processing information.

Making eye contact with others also communicates that we are paying attention and are interested in what another person is saying.

Facial Expressions

Our faces are the most expressive part of our bodies. Think of how photos are often intended to capture a particular expression “in a flash” to preserve for later viewing. Even though a photo is a snapshot in time, we can still interpret much meaning from a human face caught in a moment of expression, and basic facial expressions are recognizable by humans all over the world. Much research has supported the universality of a core group of facial expressions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust. The first four are especially identifiable across cultures (Andersen, 1999). However, the triggers for these expressions and the cultural and social norms that influence their displays are still culturally diverse.

Since you are likely giving speeches in this class, let’s learn about the role of the face in public speaking. Facial expressions help set the emotional tone for a speech. In order to set a positive tone before you start speaking, briefly look at the audience and smile to communicate friendliness, openness, and confidence. Facial expressions communicate a range of emotions. They can be used to infer personality traits and make judgments about a speaker’s credibility and competence. Facial expressions can communicate that a speaker is tired, excited, angry, confused, frustrated, sad, confident, smug, shy, or bored. Even if you are not bored, for example, a slack face with little animation may lead an audience to think that you are bored with your own speech, which is not likely to motivate them to be interested. So make sure your facial expressions are communicating an emotion, mood, or personality trait that you think your audience will view favorably, and that will help you achieve your speech goals.

Think of how touch has the power to comfort someone in moment of sorrow when words alone cannot. This positive power of touch is countered by the potential for touch to be threatening because of its connection to sex and violence. To learn about the power of touch, we turn to haptics , which refers to the study of communication by touch (Hannaford & Okamura, 2016). We probably get more explicit advice and instruction on how to use touch than any other form of nonverbal communication. A lack of nonverbal communication competence related to touch could have negative interpersonal consequences; for example, if we do not follow the advice we have been given about the importance of a firm handshake, a person might make negative judgments about our confidence or credibility. A lack of competence could have more dire negative consequences, including legal punishment, if we touch someone inappropriately (intentionally or unintentionally).

Touch is necessary for human social development, and it can be welcoming, threatening, or persuasive. Research projects have found that students evaluated a library and its staff more favorably if the librarian briefly touched the patron while returning his or her library card, that female restaurant servers received larger tips when they touched patrons, and that people were more likely to sign a petition when the petitioner touched them during their interaction (Andersen, 1999). Conversely, casual touching can be interpreted as demeaning or sexist, especially when crossing genders, generations or cultures.

We learned earlier that paralanguage refers to the vocalized but nonverbal parts of a message. Vocalics is the study of paralanguage, which includes the vocal qualities that go along with verbal messages, such as pitch, volume, rate, vocal quality, and verbal fillers (Andersen, 1999).

Pitch helps convey meaning, regulate conversational flow, and communicate the intensity of a message. Even babies recognize a sentence with a higher pitched ending as a question. We also learn that greetings have a rising emphasis and farewells have falling emphasis. Of course, no one ever tells us these things explicitly; we learn them through observation and practice. We do not notice some more subtle and/or complex patterns of paralanguage involving pitch until we are older. Children, for example, have a difficult time perceiving sarcasm, which is usually conveyed through paralinguistic characteristics like pitch and tone rather than the actual words being spoken. Adults with lower than average intelligence and children have difficulty reading sarcasm in another person’s voice and instead may interpret literally what they say (Andersen, 1999).

Paralanguage provides important context for the verbal content of speech. For example, volume helps communicate intensity. A louder voice is usually thought of as more intense, although a soft voice combined with a certain tone and facial expression can be just as intense. We typically adjust our volume based on our setting, the distance between people, and the relationship. In our age of computer-mediated communication, TYPING IN ALL CAPS is equated with yelling. A voice at a low volume or a whisper can be very appropriate when sending a covert message or flirting with a romantic partner, but it would not enhance a person’s credibility if used during a professional presentation.

Speaking rate refers to how fast or slow a person speaks and can lead others to form impressions about our emotional state, credibility, and intelligence and is situated within cultures. As with volume, variations in speaking rate can interfere with the ability of others to receive and understand verbal messages. A slow speaker could bore others and lead their attention to wander. A fast speaker may be difficult to follow, and the fast delivery can actually distract from the message. Speaking a little faster than the normal 120–150 words a minute, however, can be beneficial, as people tend to find speakers whose rate is above average more credible and intelligent (Buller & Burgoon, 1986). When speaking at a faster-than-normal rate, it is important that a speaker also clearly articulate and pronounce his or her words. The following is a review of the various communicative functions of vocalics:

• Repetition. Vocalic cues reinforce other verbal and nonverbal cues (e.g., saying, “I’m not sure” with an uncertain tone).
• Complementing. Vocalic cues elaborate on or modify verbal and nonverbal meaning (e.g., the pitch and volume used to say “I love sweet potatoes” would add context to the meaning of the sentence, such as the degree to which the person loves sweet potatoes or the use of sarcasm).
• Accenting. Vocalic cues allow us to emphasize particular parts of a message, which helps determine meaning (e.g., “ She is my friend,” or “She is my friend,” or “She is my friend ”).
• Substituting. Vocalic cues can take the place of other verbal or nonverbal cues (e.g., saying, “uh huh” instead of “I am listening and understand what you’re saying”).
• Regulating. Vocalic cues help regulate the flow of conversations (e.g., falling pitch and slowing rate of speaking usually indicate the end of a speaking turn).
• Contradicting. Vocalic cues may contradict other verbal or nonverbal signals (e.g., a person could say, “I’m fine” in a quick, short tone that indicates otherwise).

Proxemics refers to the study of how space and distance influence communication (Hall, 1968). We only need look at the ways in which space shows up in common metaphors to see that space, communication, and relationships are closely related. For example, when we are content with and attracted to someone, we say we are “close” to him or her. When we lose connection with someone, we may say he or she is “distant.” In general, space influences how people communicate and behave.

Proxemic Distances

We all have varying definitions of what our “personal space” is, and these definitions are contextual and depend on the situation and the relationship (Hall, 1968). Although our bubbles are invisible, people are socialized into the norms of personal space within their cultural group. Scholars have identified four zones for Americans.

Public Space

Public space starts about twelve feet from a person and extends out from there. It is formal and not intimate (Hall, 1968). This is the least personal of the four zones. It would typically be used when a person is engaging in a formal speech and is removed from the audience to allow the audience to see or when a high profile or powerful person like a celebrity or executive maintains such a distance as a sign of power or for safety and security reasons.

Social Space

Communication that occurs in the social zone, which is four to twelve feet away from our body, is typically in the context of a professional or casual interaction, but not intimate or public (Hall, 1968). This distance is preferred in many professional settings because it reduces the suspicion of any impropriety. The expression “keep someone at an arm’s length” means that someone is kept out of the personal space and kept in the social/professional space. If two people held up their arms and stood so just the tips of their fingers were touching, they would be around four feet away from each other, which is perceived as a safe distance because the possibility for intentional or unintentional touching does not exist. It is also possible to have people in the outer portion of our social zone but not feel obligated to interact with them, but when people come much closer than six feet to us then we often feel obligated to acknowledge their presence.

Personal Space

Personal and intimate zones refer to the space that starts at our physical body and extends four feet (Hall, 1968).These zones are reserved for friends, close acquaintances, and significant others. Much of our communication occurs in the personal zone, which is what we typically think of as our “personal space bubble” and extends from 1.5 feet to 4 feet away from our body. Even though we are getting closer to the physical body of another person, we may use verbal communication at this point to signal that our presence in this zone is friendly and not intimate. Even people who know each other could be uncomfortable spending too much time in this zone unnecessarily.

Intimate Space

As we breach the invisible line that is 1.5 feet from our body, we enter the intimate zone, which is reserved for only the closest friends, family, and romantic/intimate partners (Hall, 1968). It is impossible to ignore completely people when they are in this space, even if we are trying to pretend that we are ignoring them. A breach of this space can be comforting in some contexts and annoying or frightening in others. We need regular human contact that is not just verbal but also physical. We have already discussed the importance of touch in nonverbal communication, and in order for that much-needed touch to occur, people have to enter our intimate space.

So what happens when our space is violated? Although these zones are well established in research for personal space preferences of Americans, individuals vary in terms of their reactions to people entering certain zones, and determining what constitutes a “violation” of space is subjective and contextual. For example, another person’s presence in our social or public zones does not typically arouse suspicion or negative physical or communicative reactions, but it could in some situations or with certain people. However, many situations lead to our personal and intimate space being breached by others against our will, and these breaches are more likely to be upsetting, even when they are expected.

We have all had to get into a crowded elevator or wait in a long line. In such situations, we may rely on some verbal communication to reduce immediacy and indicate that we are not interested in closeness and are aware that a breach has occurred. People make comments about the crowd, saying, “We’re really packed in here like sardines,” or use humor to indicate that they are pleasant and well-adjusted and uncomfortable with the breach like any “normal” person would be. Interestingly, as we will learn in our discussion of territoriality, we do not often use verbal communication to defend our personal space during regular interactions. Instead, we rely on nonverbal communication (like moving, crossing our arms, or avoiding eye contact) to deal with breaches of space.

Chronemics refers to the study of how time affects communication. Personal time refers to the ways in which individuals experience time (Bruneau, 2011). The way we experience time varies based on our mood, our interest level, and other factors. Think about how quickly time passes when you are interested in and therefore engaged in something. People with past-time orientations may want to reminisce about the past, reunite with old friends, and put considerable time into preserving memories and keepsakes in scrapbooks and photo albums. People with future-time orientations may spend the same amount of time making career and personal plans, writing out to-do lists, or researching future vacations, potential retirement spots, or what book they are going to read next.

Physical time refers to the fixed cycles of days, years, and seasons. Physical time, especially seasons, can affect our mood and psychological states. Some people experience seasonal affective disorder that leads them to experience emotional distress and anxiety during the changes of seasons, primarily from warm and bright to dark and cold (summer to fall and winter).

Cultural time refers to how large groups of people view time. Polychronic people do not view time as a linear progression that needs to be divided into small units and scheduled in advance. Polychronic people keep schedules that are more flexible and may engage in several activities at once. Monochronic people tend to schedule their time more rigidly and do one thing at a time. A polychronic or monochronic orientation to time influences our social realities and how we interact with others.

Additionally, the way we use time depends in some ways on our status. For example, doctors can make their patients wait for extended periods of time, and executives and celebrities may run consistently behind schedule, making others wait for them. Promptness and the amount of time that is socially acceptable for lateness and waiting varies among individuals and contexts. Chronemics also covers the amount of time we spend talking. We have already learned that conversational turns and turn-taking patterns are influenced by social norms and help our conversations progress. We all know how annoying it can be when a person dominates a conversation or when we cannot get a person to contribute anything.

Personal Presentation and Environment

Personal presentation involves two components: our physical characteristics and the artifacts with which we adorn and surround ourselves. Physical characteristics include body shape, height, weight, attractiveness, and other physical features of our bodies. We do not have as much control over how these nonverbal cues are encoded as we do with many other aspects of nonverbal communication. Although ideals of attractiveness vary among cultures and individuals, research consistently indicates that people who are deemed attractive based on physical characteristics have distinct advantages in many aspects of life. This fact, along with media images that project often unrealistic ideals of beauty, have contributed to booming health and beauty, dieting, gym, and plastic surgery industries.

Have you ever tried to change your “look?” An example might be big changes in how you present yourself in terms of clothing and accessories. A younger version of you in high school might embrace wearing clothes from the local thrift store daily. Of course, most of them were older clothes, so you were going for a “retro” look, which that might suit you at that age. Later in the last years of college, you might as if you are entering a new stage of adulthood, so you might start wearing business-casual clothes to school every day, embracing the “dress for the job you want” philosophy. In both cases, these changes will definitely affect how others perceived you Television programs like What Not to Wear seek to show the power of wardrobe and personal style changes in how people communicate with others.

4.4 Nonverbal Communication Competence

As we age, we internalize social and cultural norms related to sending (encoding) and interpreting (decoding) nonverbal communication. In terms of sending, the tendency of children to send unmonitored nonverbal signals reduces as we get older and begin to monitor and perhaps censor or mask them (Andersen, 1999). Likewise, as we become communicators that are more experienced we tend to think that we become better at interpreting nonverbal messages. In this section, we will discuss some strategies for effectively encoding and decoding nonverbal messages. As we have already learned, we receive little, if any, official instruction in nonverbal communication, but you can think of this chapter as a training manual to help improve your own nonverbal communication competence. As with all aspects of communication, improving your nonverbal communication takes commitment and continued effort.

Guidelines for Sending Nonverbal Messages

First impressions matter. Nonverbal cues account for much of the content from which we form initial impressions, so it is important to know that people make judgments about our identities and skills after only brief exposure. Our competence regarding and awareness of nonverbal communication can help determine how an interaction will proceed and, in fact, whether it will take place at all. People who are skilled at encoding nonverbal messages are more favorably evaluated after initial encounters. This is likely due to the fact that people who are more nonverbally expressive are also more attention getting and engaging and make people feel more welcome and warm due to increased immediacy behaviors, all of which enhance perceptions of charisma.

Nonverbal Communication is Multichannel

Be aware of the multichannel nature of nonverbal communication. We rarely send a nonverbal message in isolation. For example, a posture may be combined with a touch or eye behavior to create what is called a nonverbal cluster (Pease & Pease, 2004). Nonverbal congruence refers to consistency among different nonverbal expressions within a cluster. Congruent nonverbal communication is more credible and effective than ambiguous or conflicting nonverbal cues. Even though you may intend for your nonverbal messages to be congruent, they could still be decoded in a way that does not match up with your intent, especially since nonverbal expressions vary in terms of their degree of conscious encoding. In this sense, the multichannel nature of nonverbal communication creates the potential of both increased credibility and increased ambiguity.

Nonverbal Communication Affects Our Interactions

Nonverbal communication affects our own and others’ behaviors and communication. Changing our nonverbal signals can affect our thoughts and emotions. Knowing this allows us to have more control over the trajectory of our communication, possibly allowing us to intervene in a negative cycle. You might start to exhibit nonverbal clusters that signal frustration when you are waiting in line to get your driver’s license renewed and the man in front of you does not have his materials organized and is asking unnecessary questions.

You might cross your arms, a closing-off gesture, and combine that with wrapping your fingers tightly around one bicep and occasionally squeezing, which is a self-touch adaptor that results from anxiety and stress. The longer you stand like that, the more frustrated and defensive you will become, because that nonverbal cluster reinforces and heightens your feelings. Increased awareness about these cycles can help you make conscious moves to change your nonverbal communication and, subsequently, your cognitive and emotional states (McKay, Davis, & Fanning, 1995).

Nonverbal Communication Regulates Conversations

The ability to encode appropriate turn-taking signals can help ensure that we can hold the floor when needed in a conversation or work our way into a conversation smoothly, without inappropriately interrupting someone or otherwise being seen as rude. People with nonverbal encoding competence are typically more “in control” of conversations. This regulating function can be useful in initial encounters when we are trying to learn more about another person and in situations where status differentials are present or compliance gaining or dominance are goals.

Even though verbal communication is most often used to interrupt another person, interruptions are still studied as a part of chronemics because it interferes with another person’s talk time. Instead of interrupting, you can use nonverbal signals like leaning in, increasing your eye contact, or using a brief gesture like subtly raising one hand or the index finger to signal to another person that you would like to take the floor.

Nonverbal Communication Relates to Listening

Part of being a good listener involves nonverbal-encoding competence, as nonverbal feedback in the form of head nods, eye contact, and posture can signal that a listener is paying attention and the speaker’s message is received and understood. Active listening, for example, combines good cognitive listening practices with outwardly visible cues that signal to others that we are listening. Listeners are expected to make more eye contact with the speaker than the speaker makes with them, so it is important to “listen with your eyes” by maintaining eye contact, which signals attentiveness. Listeners should also avoid distracting movements in the form of self, other, and object adaptors. Being a higher self-monitor can help you catch nonverbal signals that might signal that you are not listening, at which point you could consciously switch to more active listening signals.

Nonverbal Communication Relates to Impression Management

The nonverbal messages we encode also help us express our identities and play into impression management. Being able to control nonverbal expressions and competently encode them allows us to better manage our persona and project a desired self to others—for example, a self that is perceived as competent, socially attractive, and engaging. Being nonverbally expressive during initial interactions usually leads to impressions that are more favorable. So smiling, keeping an attentive posture, and offering a solid handshake help communicate confidence and enthusiasm that can be useful on a first date, during a job interview, when visiting family for the holidays, or when running into an acquaintance at the grocery store.

Guidelines for Interpreting Nonverbal Messages

We learn to decode or interpret nonverbal messages through practice and by internalizing social norms. Following the suggestions to become a better encoder of nonverbal communication will lead to better decoding competence through increased awareness. Since nonverbal communication is more ambiguous than verbal communication, we have to learn to interpret these cues as clusters within contexts. My favorite way to increase my knowledge about nonverbal communication is to engage in people watching. Just by consciously taking in the variety of nonverbal signals around us, we can build our awareness and occasionally be entertained. Skilled decoders of nonverbal messages are said to have nonverbal sensitivity, which, very similarly to skilled encoders, leads them to have larger social networks, be more popular, and exhibit less social anxiety (Riggio, 1992).

Recognize that Certain Nonverbal Signals are Related

The first guideline for decoding nonverbal signals is to recognize that certain nonverbal signals are related. Nonverbal rulebooks are not effective because they typically view a nonverbal signal in isolation, similar to how dictionaries separately list denotative definitions of words. To get a more nuanced understanding of the meaning behind nonverbal cues, we can look at them as progressive or layered. For example, people engaging in negative critical evaluation of a speaker may cross their legs, cross one arm over their stomach, and put the other arm up so the index finger is resting close to the eye while the chin rests on the thumb (Pease & Pease, 2004). A person would not likely perform all those signals simultaneously. Instead, he or she would likely start with one and then layer more cues on as the feelings intensified. If we notice that a person is starting to build related signals like the ones above onto one another, we might be able to intervene in the negative reaction that is building. Of course, as nonverbal cues are layered on, they may contradict other signals, in which case we can turn to context clues to aid our interpretation.

Read Nonverbal Cues in Context

We can gain insight into how to interpret nonverbal cues through personal contexts. People have idiosyncratic nonverbal behaviors, which create an individual context that varies with each person. Even though we generally fit into certain social and cultural patterns, some people deviate from those norms. For example, some cultures tend toward less touching and greater interpersonal distances during interactions. The United States falls into this general category, but there are people who were socialized into these norms who as individuals deviate from them and touch more and stand closer to others while conversing. As the idiosyncratic communicator inches toward his or her conversational partner, the partner may inch back to reestablish the interpersonal distance norm. Such deviations may lead people to misinterpret sexual or romantic interest or feel uncomfortable. While these actions could indicate such interest, they could also be idiosyncratic. As this example shows, these individual differences can increase the ambiguity of nonverbal communication, but when observed over a period of time, they can actually help us generate meaning.

Try to compare observed nonverbal cues to a person’s typical or baseline nonverbal behavior to help avoid misinterpretation. In some instances, it is impossible to know what sorts of individual nonverbal behaviors or idiosyncrasies people have because there is not a relational history. In such cases, we have to turn to our knowledge about specific types of nonverbal communication or draw from more general contextual knowledge.

Figure 4.1: Consider a wink as an example of ambiguous, nonverbal communication. Jonathan Safa. 2018. Unsplash license . https://unsplash.com/photos/ITH_dM_RQLk

Figure 4.2: Hand gestures are helpful in reinforcing verbal communication. Johan Godínez. 2020. Unsplash license . https://unsplash.com/photos/dDYRYivNzbI

Figure 4.3: The “OK” hand gesture is an example of an emblem. Elena Rabkina. 2020. Unsplash license . https://unsplash.com/photos/QH8aF3B0gYQ

Figure 4.4: Public space. Kindred Grey. 2022. CC BY 4.0 . Includes Person by mungang kim from NounProject and Person by mungang kim from NounProject (both NounProject license ).

Figure 4.5: Social space. Kindred Grey. 2022. CC BY 4.0 . Includes Person by mungang kim from NounProject and Person by mungang kim from NounProject (both NounProject license ).

Figure 4.6: Personal space. Kindred Grey. 2022. CC BY 4.0 . Includes Person by mungang kim from NounProject and Person by mungang kim from NounProject (both NounProject license ).

Figure 4.7: Intimate space. Kindred Grey. 2022. CC BY 4.0 . Includes Person by mungang kim from NounProject and Person by mungang kim from NounProject (both NounProject license ).

Section 4.1 and 4.2

Andersen, P. A. (1999). Nonverbal communication: Forms and functions . Mayfield.

Andersen, P. A., & Andersen, J. F. (2005). Measures of perceived nonverbal immediacy. In V. Manusov (Ed.), The sourcebook of nonverbal measures: Going beyond words (pp. 113-126). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Burgoon, J. K., Birk, T., & Pfau, M. (1990). Nonverbal behaviors, persuasion, and credibility. Human communication research , 17 (1), 140-169. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.1990.tb00229.x

Canfield, A. (2002). Body, identity and interaction: Interpreting nonverbal communication . Retrieved December 29, 2021 from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED473237.pdf

Comadena, M. E., Hunt, S. K., & Simonds, C. J. (2007). The effects of teacher clarity, nonverbal immediacy, and caring on student motivation, affective and cognitive learning. Communication Research Reports, 24 (3), 241-248. https//doi.org/10.1080/08824090701446617

Depaulo, B. M., & Friedman, H. S. (1998). Nonverbal communication. In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (pp. 3–40). McGraw-Hill.

Hargie, O. (2011). Skilled interpersonal interaction: Research, theory, and practice . Routledge.

Krauss, R. M., Chen, Y., & Chawla, P. (1996). Nonverbal behavior and nonverbal communication: What do conversational hand gestures tell us? Advances in experimental social psychology , 28 , 389-450. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60241-5

Neill, S. (2017). Classroom nonverbal communication . Routledge.

Oster, H., Hegley, D., & Nagel, L. (1992). Adult judgments and fine-grained analysis of infant facial expressions: Testing the validity of a priori coding formulas. Developmental Psychology, 28 (6), 1115–1131. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.28.6.1115

Porter, S., ten Brinke, L. & Wallace, B. (2012). Secrets and lies: Involuntary leakage in deceptive facial expressions as a function of emotional intensity. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 36 (1), 23–37. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-011-0120-7

Qiang, K. A. N. G. (2013). Paralanguage. Canadian Social Science , 9 (6), 222-226. https://doi.org/10.3968/j.css.1923669720130906.3832

Riggio, R. E. (1992). Social interaction skills and nonverbal behavior. In R. S. Feldman (Ed.), Applications of nonverbal behavioral theories and research (pp. 3–30). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Vrij, A., Hartwig, M., & Granhag, P. A. (2019). Reading lies: Nonverbal communication and deception. Annual review of psychology , 70 (1), 295-317. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010418-103135

Section 4.3

Bruneau, T. (2011). Chronemics and the verbal-nonverbal interface. In The relationship of verbal and nonverbal communication (pp. 101-118). De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110813098.101

Buller, D. B., & Burgoon, J. K. (1986). The effects of vocalics and nonverbal sensitivity on compliance. Human Communication Research, 13 (1), 126–44.

Hall, E. T. (1968). Proxemics. Current Anthropology, 9 (2), 83–95.

Glaeser, G., & Paulus, H. F. (2015). The language of our eyes. In The evolution of the eye (pp. 183-209). Springer, Cham.

Hannaford, B., & Okamura, A. M. (2016). Haptics. In Springer handbook of robotics (pp. 1063-1084). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32552-1_42

Harrigan, J. A. (2005). Proxemics, kinesics, and gaze. In J. A. Harrigan, R. Rosenthal, & K. R. Scherer (Eds.), The new handbook of methods in nonverbal behavior research (pp. 137–198). Oxford University Press.

Pease, A., & Pease, B. (2004). The definitive book of body language . Bantam.

Section 4.4

McKay, M., Davis, M., & Fanning, P. (1995). Messages: Communication skills book (2nd ed.). New Harbinger Publications.

A process of generating meaning using behavior other than words

Vocalized but not verbal part of a spoken message, such as speaking rate, volume, and pitch

Verbal and nonverbal behaviors that lessen real or perceived physical and psychological distance between communicators and include things like smiling, nodding, making eye-contact, and occasionally engaging in social, polite, or professional touch

The objects and possessions that surround us

Touching behaviors and movements that indicate internal states typically related to arousal or anxiety

Gestures that have a specific agreed-on meaning within a cultural context

Study of eye behaviors and movements in nonverbal communication

Refers to the study of communication by touch

The study of paralanguage

The study of how space and distance influence communication

The study of how time affects communication

Communication in the Real World Copyright © by Faculty members in the School of Communication Studies, James Madison University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Linking Nonverbal Rapport to Health Outcome: Testing an Organizational Pathway Model

Affiliations.

• 1 Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore.
• 2 Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore.
• PMID: 34313173
• DOI: 10.1080/10410236.2021.1957244

A growing body of research on medical communication indicates that nonverbal rapport (e.g., smiling, eye contact, closer proximity) is central to productive health care delivery. However, mechanisms integral to the process by which nonverbal rapport influences health improvement remain under-researched. This study breaks new grounds in proposing and testing mediation pathways that take into account organizational factors. We conducted a cross-sectional survey in a private hospital in Singapore among 417 patients to examine their communication with physicians and nurses. Results indicated that nonverbal rapport did not have a significant direct relationship with perceived health outcome in both the patient-physician dyad and the patient-nurse dyad. Instead, communication satisfaction and organizational identity completely mediated this relationship. In addition, respect positively moderated the relationship between nonverbal rapport and communication satisfaction in both dyads, while health literacy was not a significant moderator. The findings suggest that the organizational context should be considered in pathways research.

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Nonverbal behaviour as communication: Approaches, issues, and research

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This chapter provides the surveys of the large cross-disciplinary literature on nonverbal communication. Research that has revealed relationships between nonverbal decoding and interpersonal social skills among adults and encoding skills and social competence among adolescents point to the importance of continued investigations of these aspects of individual performance. Sigmund Freud's approach to the investigation of nonverbal behaviour as communication appears to have taken the analogies of the riddle or perhaps the obscure text that can be made meaningful by the application of accepted interpretive principles. The chapter stresses that nonverbal behaviour, as a communication skill, is usefully understood when discussed in role- and setting-defined contexts. The skill is based upon evidence picked up directly or indirectly from the environment, and it is used for the attempted achievement of whatever issue may be required at the time of the performance. The chapter discusses themes and techniques for analysis, and emphasises the special features of one particular context, that of international politics.

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Types of Nonverbal Communication

Often you don't need words at all

 Tim Robberts / Getty Images

Why Nonverbal Communication Is Important

• How to Improve

Nonverbal communication means conveying information without using words. This might involve using certain facial expressions or hand gestures to make a specific point, or it could involve the use (or non-use) of eye contact, physical proximity, and other nonverbal cues to get a message across.

A substantial portion of our communication is nonverbal. In fact, some researchers suggest that the percentage of nonverbal communication is four times that of verbal communication, with 80% of what we communicate involving our actions and gestures versus only 20% being conveyed with the use of words.

Every day, we respond to thousands of nonverbal cues and behaviors, including postures, facial expressions, eye gaze, gestures, and tone of voice. From our handshakes to our hairstyles, our nonverbal communication reveals who we are and impacts how we relate to other people.

9 Types of Nonverbal Communication

Scientific research on nonverbal communication and behavior began with the 1872 publication of Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals . Since that time, a wealth of research has been devoted to the types, effects, and expressions of unspoken communication and behavior .

Nonverbal Communication Types

While these signals can be so subtle that we are not consciously aware of them, research has identified nine types of nonverbal communication. These nonverbal communication types are:

• Facial expressions
• Paralinguistics (such as loudness or tone of voice)
• Body language
• Proxemics or personal space
• Eye gaze, haptics (touch)
• Artifacts (objects and images)

Facial Expressions

Facial expressions are responsible for a huge proportion of nonverbal communication. Consider how much information can be conveyed with a smile or a frown. The look on a person's face is often the first thing we see, even before we hear what they have to say.

While nonverbal communication and behavior can vary dramatically between cultures, the facial expressions for happiness, sadness, anger, and fear are similar throughout the world.

Deliberate movements and signals are an important way to communicate meaning without words. Common gestures include waving, pointing, and giving a "thumbs up" sign. Other gestures are arbitrary and related to culture.

For example, in the U.S., putting the index and middle finger in the shape of a "V" with your palm facing out is often considered to be a sign of peace or victory. Yet, in Britain, Australia, and other parts of the world, this gesture can be considered an insult.

Nonverbal communication via gestures is so powerful and influential that some judges place limits on which ones are allowed in the courtroom, where they can sway juror opinions. An attorney might glance at their watch to suggest that the opposing lawyer's argument is tedious, for instance. Or they may roll their eyes during a witness's testimony in an attempt to undermine that person's credibility.

Paralinguistics

Paralinguistics refers to vocal communication that is separate from actual language. This form of nonverbal communication includes factors such as tone of voice, loudness, inflection, and pitch.

For example, consider the powerful effect that tone of voice can have on the meaning of a sentence. When said in a strong tone of voice, listeners might interpret a statement as approval and enthusiasm. The same words said in a hesitant tone can convey disapproval and a lack of interest.

Body Language and Posture

Posture and movement can also provide a great deal of information. Research on body language has grown significantly since the 1970s, with popular media focusing on the over-interpretation of defensive postures such as arm-crossing and leg-crossing, especially after the publication of Julius Fast's book Body Language .

While these nonverbal communications can indicate feelings and attitudes , body language is often subtle and less definitive than previously believed.

People often refer to their need for "personal space." This is known as proxemics and is another important type of nonverbal communication.

The amount of distance we need and the amount of space we perceive as belonging to us are influenced by several factors. Among them are social norms , cultural expectations, situational factors, personality characteristics, and level of familiarity.

The amount of personal space needed when having a casual conversation with another person can vary between 18 inches and four feet. The personal distance needed when speaking to a crowd of people is usually around 10 to 12 feet.

The eyes play a role in nonverbal communication, with such things as looking, staring, and blinking being important cues. For example, when you encounter people or things that you like, your rate of blinking increases and your pupils dilate.

People's eyes can indicate a range of emotions , including hostility, interest, and attraction. People also often utilize eye gaze cues to gauge a person's honesty. Normal, steady eye contact is often taken as a sign that a person is telling the truth and is trustworthy. Shifty eyes and an inability to maintain eye contact, on the other hand, is frequently seen as an indicator that someone is lying or being deceptive.

However, some research suggests that eye gaze does not accurately predict lying behavior.

Communicating through touch is another important nonverbal communication behavior. Touch can be used to communicate affection, familiarity, sympathy, and other emotions .

In her book Interpersonal Communication: Everyday Encounters , author Julia Wood writes that touch is also often used to communicate both status and power. High-status individuals tend to invade other people's personal space with greater frequency and intensity than lower-status individuals.

Sex differences also play a role in how people utilize touch to communicate meaning. Women tend to use touch to convey care, concern, and nurturance. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to use touch to assert power or control over others.

There has been a substantial amount of research on the importance of touch in infancy and early childhood. Harry Harlow's classic monkey study , for example, demonstrated how being deprived of touch impedes development. In the experiments, baby monkeys raised by wire mothers experienced permanent deficits in behavior and social interaction.

Our choice of clothing, hairstyle, and other appearance factors are also considered a means of nonverbal communication. Research on color psychology has demonstrated that different colors can evoke different moods. Appearance can also alter physiological reactions, judgments, and interpretations.

Just think of all the subtle judgments you quickly make about someone based on their appearance. These first impressions are important, which is why experts suggest that job seekers dress appropriately for interviews with potential employers.

Researchers have found that appearance can even play a role in how much people earn. Attractive people tend to earn more and receive other fringe benefits, including higher-quality jobs.

Culture is an important influence on how appearances are judged. While thinness tends to be valued in Western cultures, some African cultures relate full-figured bodies to better health, wealth, and social status.

Objects and images are also tools that can be used to communicate nonverbally. On an online forum, for example, you might select an avatar to represent your identity and to communicate information about who you are and the things you like.

People often spend a great deal of time developing a particular image and surrounding themselves with objects designed to convey information about the things that are important to them. Uniforms, for example, can be used to transmit a tremendous amount of information about a person.

A soldier will don fatigues, a police officer will wear a specific uniform, and a doctor will wear a white lab coat. At a mere glance, these outfits tell others what that person does for a living. That makes them a powerful form of nonverbal communication.

Nonverbal Communication Examples

Think of all the ways you communicate nonverbally in your own life. You can find examples of nonverbal communication at home, at work, and in other situations.

Nonverbal Communication at Home

Consider all the ways that tone of voice might change the meaning of a sentence when talking with a family member. One example is when you ask your partner how they are doing and they respond with, "I'm fine." How they say these words reveals a tremendous amount about how they are truly feeling.

A bright, happy tone of voice would suggest that they are doing quite well. A cold tone of voice might suggest that they are not fine but don't wish to discuss it. A somber, downcast tone might indicate that they are the opposite of fine but may want to talk about why.

Other examples of nonverbal communication at home include:

• Going to your partner swiftly when they call for you (as opposed to taking your time or not responding at all)
• Greeting your child with a smile when they walk into the room to show that you're happy to see them
• Leaning in when your loved one speaks to show that you are listening and that you are interested in what they're saying
• Shoving your fist into the air when you're upset that something isn't working

Nonverbal Communication in the Workplace

You can also find nonverbal communication in the workplace. Examples of this include:

• Looking co-workers in the eye when speaking with them to be fully engaged in the interaction
• Throwing your hands in the air when you are frustrated with a project
• Using excitement in your voice when leading work meetings to project your passion for a specific topic
• Walking down the hall with your head held high to convey confidence in your abilities

Nonverbal Communication in Other Situations

Here are a few additional examples of nonverbal communication that say a lot without you having to say anything at all:

• Greeting an old friend at a restaurant with a hug, handshake, or fist bump
• Placing your hand on someone's arm when they are talking to you at a party to convey friendliness or concern
• Rolling your eyes at someone who is chatting excessively with a store clerk as a line begins to form
• Scowling at someone who has cut you off in traffic, or "flipping them the bird"

Nonverbal communication serves an important role in conveying meaning. Some benefits it provides include:

• Strengthening relationships : Nonverbal communication fosters closeness and intimacy in interpersonal relationships.
• Substituting for spoken words : Signaling information that a person might not be able to say aloud. This can be helpful in situations where a person might not be heard (such as a noisy workplace) or in therapy situations where a mental health professional can look at nonverbal behaviors to learn more about how a client might be feeling.
• Reinforcing meaning : Matching nonverbal communication to spoken words can help add clarity and reinforce important points.
• Regulating conversation : Nonverbal signals can also help regulate the flow of conversation and indicate both the start and end of a message or topic.

Nonverbal communication is important because it can provide valuable information, reinforce the meaning of spoken words, help convey trust, and add clarity to your message.

How to Improve Your Nonverbal Communication Skills

If you want to develop more confident body language or improve your ability to read other people's nonverbal communication behaviors, these tips can help:

• Pay attention to your own behaviors : Notice the gestures you use when you're happy versus when you're upset. Think about how you change the tone of your voice depending on the emotions you are feeling. Being aware of your own nonverbal communication tendencies is the first step to changing the ones you want to change. It can also give you insight into how you're feeling if you're having trouble putting it into words.
• Become a student of others : It can also be helpful to consider how others around you communicate nonverbally. What do their facial expressions say? What type of gestures do they use? Becoming familiar with their nonverbal communication patterns helps you recognize when they might be feeling a certain way quicker because you're actively watching for these cues. It can also help you recognize nonverbal behaviors you may want to adopt yourself (such as standing tall when talking to others to display self-confidence ).
• Look for incongruent nonverbal cues : Do you say that you're fine, then slam cupboard doors to show that you're upset? This can give those around you mixed messages. Or maybe when someone is speaking with you, they are saying yes while shaking their head no. This is another example of incongruent behavior. Both can be signs of feeling a certain way but not yet being ready to admit or discuss it.
• Think before you act : If your middle finger seems to automatically fly up when a car cuts you off—even if your young child is in the back seat, causing you to regret it as soon as it happens—you can work to stop this reaction. Train yourself to stop and think before you act. This can help you eliminate or replace nonverbal behaviors that you've been wanting to change.
• Ask before you assume : Certain types of nonverbal communication can mean different things in different cultures. They can also vary based on someone's personality . Before assuming that a person's body language or tone means something definitively, ask. "I notice that you won't look me in the eye when we speak. Are you upset with me?" Give them the opportunity to explain how they are feeling so you know for sure.

A Word From Verywell

Nonverbal communication plays an important role in how we convey meaning and information to others, as well as how we interpret the actions of those around us.

The important thing to remember when looking at nonverbal behaviors is to consider the actions in groups. Consider what a person says verbally, combined with their expressions, appearance, and tone of voice and it can tell you a great deal about what that person is really trying to say.

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Bambaeeroo F, Shokrpour N. The impact of the teachers' non-verbal communication on success in teaching .  J Adv Med Educ Prof . 2017;5(2):51-59.

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By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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4.3 Nonverbal Communication Competence

Learning objectives.

• Identify and employ strategies for improving competence with sending nonverbal messages.
• Identify and employ strategies for improving competence with interpreting nonverbal messages.

As we age, we internalize social and cultural norms related to sending (encoding) and interpreting (decoding) nonverbal communication. In terms of sending, the tendency of children to send unmonitored nonverbal signals reduces as we get older and begin to monitor and perhaps censor or mask them (Andersen, 1999). Likewise, as we become more experienced communicators we tend to think that we become better at interpreting nonverbal messages. In this section we will discuss some strategies for effectively encoding and decoding nonverbal messages. As we’ve already learned, we receive little, if any, official instruction in nonverbal communication, but you can think of this chapter as a training manual to help improve your own nonverbal communication competence. As with all aspects of communication, improving your nonverbal communication takes commitment and continued effort. However, research shows that education and training in nonverbal communication can lead to quick gains in knowledge and skill (Riggio, 1992). Additionally, once the initial effort is put into improving your nonverbal encoding and decoding skills and those new skills are put into practice, people are encouraged by the positive reactions from others. Remember that people enjoy interacting with others who are skilled at nonverbal encoding and decoding, which will be evident in their reactions, providing further motivation and encouragement to hone your skills.

Guidelines for Sending Nonverbal Messages

As is stressed in Chapter 2 “Communication and Perception” , first impressions matter. Nonverbal cues account for much of the content from which we form initial impressions, so it’s important to know that people make judgments about our identities and skills after only brief exposure. Our competence regarding and awareness of nonverbal communication can help determine how an interaction will proceed and, in fact, whether it will take place at all. People who are skilled at encoding nonverbal messages are more favorably evaluated after initial encounters. This is likely due to the fact that people who are more nonverbally expressive are also more attention getting and engaging and make people feel more welcome and warm due to increased immediacy behaviors, all of which enhance perceptions of charisma.

People who are more nonverbally expressive typically form more positive initial impressions, because expressivity in the form of immediacy behaviors is attention getting and welcoming.

Wikimedia Commons – CC BY 2.0.

Understand That Nonverbal Communication Is Multichannel

Be aware of the multichannel nature of nonverbal communication. We rarely send a nonverbal message in isolation. For example, a posture may be combined with a touch or eye behavior to create what is called a nonverbal cluster (Pease & Pease, 2004). Nonverbal congruence refers to consistency among different nonverbal expressions within a cluster. Congruent nonverbal communication is more credible and effective than ambiguous or conflicting nonverbal cues. Even though you may intend for your nonverbal messages to be congruent, they could still be decoded in a way that doesn’t match up with your intent, especially since nonverbal expressions vary in terms of their degree of conscious encoding. In this sense, the multichannel nature of nonverbal communication creates the potential of both increased credibility and increased ambiguity.

When we become more aware of the messages we are sending, we can monitor for nonverbal signals that are incongruent with other messages or may be perceived as such. If a student is talking to his professor about his performance in the class and concerns about his grade, the professor may lean forward and nod, encoding a combination of a body orientation and a head movement that conveys attention. If the professor, however, regularly breaks off eye contact and looks anxiously at her office door, then she is sending a message that could be perceived as disinterest, which is incongruent with the overall message of care and concern she probably wants to encode. Increasing our awareness of the multiple channels through which we send nonverbal cues can help us make our signals more congruent in the moment.

Understand That Nonverbal Communication Affects Our Interactions

Nonverbal communication affects our own and others’ behaviors and communication. Changing our nonverbal signals can affect our thoughts and emotions. Knowing this allows us to have more control over the trajectory of our communication, possibly allowing us to intervene in a negative cycle. For example, if you are waiting in line to get your driver’s license renewed and the agents in front of you are moving slower than you’d like and the man in front of you doesn’t have his materials organized and is asking unnecessary questions, you might start to exhibit nonverbal clusters that signal frustration. You might cross your arms, a closing-off gesture, and combine that with wrapping your fingers tightly around one bicep and occasionally squeezing, which is a self-touch adaptor that results from anxiety and stress. The longer you stand like that, the more frustrated and defensive you will become, because that nonverbal cluster reinforces and heightens your feelings. Increased awareness about these cycles can help you make conscious moves to change your nonverbal communication and, subsequently, your cognitive and emotional states (McKay, Davis, & Fanning, 1995).

As your nonverbal encoding competence increases, you can strategically manipulate your behaviors. During my years as a restaurant server I got pretty good at knowing what tables to engage with and “schmooze” a little more to get a better tip. Restaurant servers, bartenders, car salespeople, realtors, exotic dancers, and many others who work in a service or sales capacity know that part of “sealing the deal” is making people feel liked, valued, and important. The strategic use of nonverbal communication to convey these messages is largely accepted and expected in our society, and as customers or patrons, we often play along because it feels good in the moment to think that the other person actually cares about us. Using nonverbals that are intentionally deceptive and misleading can have negative consequences and cross the line into unethical communication.

As you get better at monitoring and controlling your nonverbal behaviors and understanding how nonverbal cues affect our interaction, you may show more competence in multiple types of communication. For example, people who are more skilled at monitoring and controlling nonverbal displays of emotion report that they are more comfortable public speakers (Riggio, 1992). Since speakers become more nervous when they think that audience members are able to detect their nervousness based on outwardly visible, mostly nonverbal cues, it is logical that confidence in one’s ability to control those outwardly visible cues would result in a lessening of that common fear.

Understand How Nonverbal Communication Creates Rapport

Humans have evolved an innate urge to mirror each other’s nonverbal behavior, and although we aren’t often aware of it, this urge influences our behavior daily (Pease & Pease, 2004). Think, for example, about how people “fall into formation” when waiting in a line. Our nonverbal communication works to create an unspoken and subconscious cooperation, as people move and behave in similar ways. When one person leans to the left the next person in line may also lean to the left, and this shift in posture may continue all the way down the line to the end, until someone else makes another movement and the whole line shifts again. This phenomenon is known as mirroring , which refers to the often subconscious practice of using nonverbal cues in a way that match those of others around us. Mirroring sends implicit messages to others that say, “Look! I’m just like you.” Mirroring evolved as an important social function in that it allowed early humans to more easily fit in with larger groups. Logically, early humans who were more successful at mirroring were more likely to secure food, shelter, and security and therefore passed that genetic disposition on down the line to us.

Last summer, during a backyard game of “corn hole” with my family, my mom and sister were standing at the other board and kept whispering to each other and laughing at my dad and me. Corn hole, which is also called “bags,” involves throwing a cloth sack filled with corn toward another team’s board with the goal of getting it in the hole or on the board to score points. They later told us that they were amazed at how we stood, threw our bags, and shifted position between rounds in unison. Although my dad and I didn’t realize we were doing it, our subconscious mirroring was obviously noticeable to others. Mirroring is largely innate and subconscious, but we can more consciously use it and a variety of other nonverbal signals, like the immediacy behaviors we discussed earlier, to help create social bonds and mutual liking.

Understand How Nonverbal Communication Regulates Conversations

The ability to encode appropriate turn-taking signals can help ensure that we can hold the floor when needed in a conversation or work our way into a conversation smoothly, without inappropriately interrupting someone or otherwise being seen as rude. People with nonverbal encoding competence are typically more “in control” of conversations. This regulating function can be useful in initial encounters when we are trying to learn more about another person and in situations where status differentials are present or compliance gaining or dominance are goals. Although close friends, family, and relational partners can sometimes be an exception, interrupting is generally considered rude and should be avoided. Even though verbal communication is most often used to interrupt another person, interruptions are still studied as a part of chronemics because it interferes with another person’s talk time. Instead of interrupting, you can use nonverbal signals like leaning in, increasing your eye contact, or using a brief gesture like subtly raising one hand or the index finger to signal to another person that you’d like to soon take the floor.

Understand How Nonverbal Communication Relates to Listening

Part of being a good listener involves nonverbal-encoding competence, as nonverbal feedback in the form of head nods, eye contact, and posture can signal that a listener is paying attention and the speaker’s message is received and understood. Active listening, for example, combines good cognitive listening practices with outwardly visible cues that signal to others that we are listening. We will learn more about active listening in Chapter 5 “Listening” , but we all know from experience which nonverbal signals convey attentiveness and which convey a lack of attentiveness. Listeners are expected to make more eye contact with the speaker than the speaker makes with them, so it’s important to “listen with your eyes” by maintaining eye contact, which signals attentiveness. Listeners should also avoid distracting movements in the form of self, other, and object adaptors. Being a higher self-monitor can help you catch nonverbal signals that might signal that you aren’t listening, at which point you could consciously switch to more active listening signals.

Understand How Nonverbal Communication Relates to Impression Management

The nonverbal messages we encode also help us express our identities and play into impression management, which as we learned in Chapter 1 “Introduction to Communication Studies” is a key part of communicating to achieve identity goals. Being able to control nonverbal expressions and competently encode them allows us to better manage our persona and project a desired self to others—for example, a self that is perceived as competent, socially attractive, and engaging. Being nonverbally expressive during initial interactions usually leads to more favorable impressions. So smiling, keeping an attentive posture, and offering a solid handshake help communicate confidence and enthusiasm that can be useful on a first date, during a job interview, when visiting family for the holidays, or when running into an acquaintance at the grocery store. Nonverbal communication can also impact the impressions you make as a student. Research has also found that students who are more nonverbally expressive are liked more by their teachers and are more likely to have their requests met by their teachers (Mottet et al., 2004).

Increase Competence in Specific Channels of Nonverbal Communication

While it is important to recognize that we send nonverbal signals through multiple channels simultaneously, we can also increase our nonverbal communication competence by becoming more aware of how it operates in specific channels. Although no one can truly offer you a rulebook on how to effectively send every type of nonverbal signal, there are several nonverbal guidebooks that are written from more anecdotal and less academic perspectives. While these books vary tremendously in terms of their credibility and quality, some, like Allan Pease and Barbara Pease’s The Definitive Book of Body Language , are informative and interesting to read.

The following guidelines may help you more effectively encode nonverbal messages sent using your hands, arms, body, and face.

• Illustrators make our verbal communication more engaging. I recommend that people doing phone interviews or speaking on the radio make an effort to gesture as they speak, even though people can’t see the gestures, because it will make their words sound more engaging.
• Remember that adaptors can hurt your credibility in more formal or serious interactions. Figure out what your common adaptors are and monitor them so you can avoid creating unfavorable impressions.
• Gestures send messages about your emotional state. Since many gestures are spontaneous or subconscious, it is important to raise your awareness of them and monitor them. Be aware that clenched hands may signal aggression or anger, nail biting or fidgeting may signal nervousness, and finger tapping may signal boredom.

Eye Contact

• Eye contact is useful for initiating and regulating conversations. To make sure someone is available for interaction and to avoid being perceived as rude, it is usually a good idea to “catch their eye” before you start talking to them.
• Avoiding eye contact or shifting your eye contact from place to place can lead others to think you are being deceptive or inattentive. Minimize distractions by moving a clock, closing a door, or closing window blinds to help minimize distractions that may lure your eye contact away.
• Although avoiding eye contact can be perceived as sign of disinterest, low confidence, or negative emotionality, eye contact avoidance can be used positively as a face-saving strategy. The notion of civil inattention refers to a social norm that leads us to avoid making eye contact with people in situations that deviate from expected social norms, such as witnessing someone fall or being in close proximity to a stranger expressing negative emotions (like crying). We also use civil inattention when we avoid making eye contact with others in crowded spaces (Goffman, 2010).

Facial Expressions

• You can use facial expressions to manage your expressions of emotions to intensify what you’re feeling, to diminish what you’re feeling, to cover up what you’re feeling, to express a different emotion than you’re feeling, or to simulate an emotion that you’re not feeling (Metts & Planlap, 2002).
• Be aware of the power of emotional contagion, or the spread of emotion from one person to another. Since facial expressions are key for emotional communication, you may be able to strategically use your facial expressions to cheer someone up, lighten a mood, or create a more serious and somber tone.
• Smiles are especially powerful as an immediacy behavior and a rapport-building tool. Smiles can also help to disarm a potentially hostile person or deescalate conflict. When I have a problem or complain in a customer service situation, I always make sure to smile at the clerk, manager, or other person before I begin talking to help minimize my own annoyance and set a more positive tone for the interaction.

The following guidelines may help you more effectively encode nonverbal signals using touch:

• Remember that culture, status, gender, age, and setting influence how we send and interpret touch messages.
• In professional and social settings, it is generally OK to touch others on the arm or shoulder. Although we touch others on the arm or shoulder with our hand, it is often too intimate to touch your hand to another person’s hand in a professional or social/casual setting.

These are types of touch to avoid (Andersen, 1999):

• Avoid touching strangers unless being introduced or offering assistance.
• Avoid hurtful touches and apologize if they occur, even if accidentally.
• Avoid startling/surprising another person with your touch.
• Avoid interrupting touches such as hugging someone while they are talking to someone else.
• Avoid moving people out of the way with only touch—pair your touch with a verbal message like “excuse me.”
• Avoid overly aggressive touch, especially when disguised as playful touch (e.g., horseplay taken too far).
• Avoid combining touch with negative criticism; a hand on the shoulder during a critical statement can increase a person’s defensiveness and seem condescending or aggressive.

The following guidelines may help you more effectively encode nonverbal signals using paralanguage.

• Verbal fillers are often used subconsciously and can negatively affect your credibility and reduce the clarity of your message when speaking in more formal situations. In fact, verbal fluency is one of the strongest predictors of persuasiveness (Hargie, 2011). Becoming a higher self-monitor can help you notice your use of verbal fillers and begin to eliminate them. Beginner speakers can often reduce their use of verbal fillers noticeably over just a short period of time.
• Vocal variety increases listener and speaker engagement, understanding, information recall, and motivation. So having a more expressive voice that varies appropriately in terms of rate, pitch, and volume can help you achieve communication goals related to maintaining attention, effectively conveying information, and getting others to act in a particular way.

The following may help you more effectively encode nonverbal signals related to interpersonal distances.

• When breaches of personal space occur, it is a social norm to make nonverbal adjustments such as lowering our level of immediacy, changing our body orientations, and using objects to separate ourselves from others. To reduce immediacy, we engage in civil inattention and reduce the amount of eye contact we make with others. We also shift the front of our body away from others since it has most of our sensory inputs and also allows access to body parts that are considered vulnerable, such as the stomach, face, and genitals (Andersen, 1999). When we can’t shift our bodies, we often use coats, bags, books, or our hands to physically separate or block off the front of our bodies from others.
• Although pets and children are often granted more leeway to breach other people’s space, since they are still learning social norms and rules, as a pet owner, parent, or temporary caretaker, be aware of this possibility and try to prevent such breaches or correct them when they occur.

The following guideline may help you more effectively encode nonverbal signals related to time.

• In terms of talk time and turn taking, research shows that people who take a little longer with their turn, holding the floor slightly longer than normal, are actually seen as more credible than people who talk too much or too little (Andersen, 1999).
• Our lateness or promptness can send messages about our professionalism, dependability, or other personality traits. Formal time usually applies to professional situations in which we are expected to be on time or even a few minutes early. You generally wouldn’t want to be late for work, a job interview, a medical appointment, and so on. Informal time applies to casual and interpersonal situations in which there is much more variation in terms of expectations for promptness. For example, when I lived in a large city, people often arrived to dinner parties or other social gatherings about thirty minutes after the announced time, given the possibility of interference by heavy traffic or people’s hectic schedules. Now that I live in a smaller town in the Midwest, I’ve learned that people are expected to arrive at or close to the announced time. For most social meetings with one other person or a small group, you can be five minutes late without having to offer much of an apology or explanation. For larger social gatherings you can usually be fifteen minutes late as long as your late arrival doesn’t interfere with the host’s plans or preparations.
• Quality time is an important part of interpersonal relationships, and sometimes time has to be budgeted so that it can be saved and spent with certain people or on certain occasions—like date nights for couples or family time for parents and children or other relatives.

Personal Presentation and Environment

The following guidelines may help you more effectively encode nonverbal signals related to personal presentation and environment.

• Recognize that personal presentation carries much weight in terms of initial impressions, so meeting the expectations and social norms for dress, grooming, and other artifactual communication is especially important for impression management.
• Recognize that some environments facilitate communication and some do not. A traditional front-facing business or educational setup is designed for one person to communicate with a larger audience. People in the audience cannot as easily interact with each other because they can’t see each other face-to-face without turning. A horseshoe or circular arrangement allows everyone to make eye contact and facilitates interaction. Even close proximity doesn’t necessarily facilitate interaction. For example, a comfortable sofa may bring four people together, but eye contact among all four is nearly impossible if they’re all facing the same direction.
• Where you choose to sit can also impact perceived characteristics and leadership decisions. People who sit at the head or center of a table are often chosen to be leaders by others because of their nonverbal accessibility—a decision which may have more to do with where the person chose to sit than the person’s perceived or actual leadership abilities. Research has found that juries often select their foreperson based on where he or she happens to sit (Andersen, 1999). Keep this in mind the next time you take your seat at a meeting.

Guidelines for Interpreting Nonverbal Messages

We learn to decode or interpret nonverbal messages through practice and by internalizing social norms. Following the suggestions to become a better encoder of nonverbal communication will lead to better decoding competence through increased awareness. Since nonverbal communication is more ambiguous than verbal communication, we have to learn to interpret these cues as clusters within contexts. My favorite way to increase my knowledge about nonverbal communication is to engage in people watching. Just by consciously taking in the variety of nonverbal signals around us, we can build our awareness and occasionally be entertained. Skilled decoders of nonverbal messages are said to have nonverbal sensitivity, which, very similarly to skilled encoders, leads them to have larger social networks, be more popular, and exhibit less social anxiety (Riggio, 1992).

There Is No Nonverbal Dictionary

The first guideline for decoding nonverbal communication is to realize that there is no nonverbal dictionary. Some nonverbal scholars and many nonverbal skill trainers have tried to catalog nonverbal communication like we do verbal communication to create dictionary-like guides that people can use to interpret nonverbal signals. Although those guides may contain many valid “rules” of nonverbal communication, those rules are always relative to the individual, social, and cultural contexts in which an interaction takes place. In short, you can’t read people’s nonverbal communication like a book, and there are no A -to- Z guides that capture the complexity of nonverbal communication (DePaulo, 1992). Rather than using a list of specific rules , I suggest people develop more general tools that will be useful in and adaptable to a variety of contexts.

Recognize That Certain Nonverbal Signals Are Related

The second guideline for decoding nonverbal signals is to recognize that certain nonverbal signals are related. Nonverbal rulebooks aren’t effective because they typically view a nonverbal signal in isolation, similar to how dictionaries separately list denotative definitions of words. To get a more nuanced understanding of the meaning behind nonverbal cues, we can look at them as progressive or layered. For example, people engaging in negative critical evaluation of a speaker may cross their legs, cross one arm over their stomach, and put the other arm up so the index finger is resting close to the eye while the chin rests on the thumb (Pease & Pease, 2004). A person wouldn’t likely perform all those signals simultaneously. Instead, he or she would likely start with one and then layer more cues on as the feelings intensified. If we notice that a person is starting to build related signals like the ones above onto one another, we might be able to intervene in the negative reaction that is building. Of course, as nonverbal cues are layered on, they may contradict other signals, in which case we can turn to context clues to aid our interpretation.

Although cultural patterns exist, people also exhibit idiosyncratic nonverbal behavior, meaning they don’t always follow the norms of the group.

Jed Scattergood – School – CC BY-ND 2.0.

Read Nonverbal Cues in Context

We will learn more specifics about nonverbal communication in relational, professional, and cultural contexts in Section 4.1 “Principles and Functions of Nonverbal Communication” , but we can also gain insight into how to interpret nonverbal cues through personal contexts. People have idiosyncratic nonverbal behaviors, which create an individual context that varies with each person. Even though we generally fit into certain social and cultural patterns, some people deviate from those norms. For example, some cultures tend toward less touching and greater interpersonal distances during interactions. The United States falls into this general category, but there are people who were socialized into these norms who as individuals deviate from them and touch more and stand closer to others while conversing. As the idiosyncratic communicator inches toward his or her conversational partner, the partner may inch back to reestablish the interpersonal distance norm. Such deviations may lead people to misinterpret sexual or romantic interest or feel uncomfortable. While these actions could indicate such interest, they could also be idiosyncratic. As this example shows, these individual differences can increase the ambiguity of nonverbal communication, but when observed over a period of time, they can actually help us generate meaning. Try to compare observed nonverbal cues to a person’s typical or baseline nonverbal behavior to help avoid misinterpretation. In some instances it is impossible to know what sorts of individual nonverbal behaviors or idiosyncrasies people have because there isn’t a relational history. In such cases, we have to turn to our knowledge about specific types of nonverbal communication or draw from more general contextual knowledge.

Interpreting Cues within Specific Channels

When nonverbal cues are ambiguous or contextual clues aren’t useful in interpreting nonverbal clusters, we may have to look at nonverbal behaviors within specific channels. Keep in mind that the following tips aren’t hard and fast rules and are usually more meaningful when adapted according to a specific person or context. In addition, many of the suggestions in the section on encoding competence can be adapted usefully to decoding.

Gestures (Pease & Pease, 2004)

• While it doesn’t always mean a person is being honest, displaying palms is largely unconsciously encoded and decoded as a sign of openness and truthfulness. Conversely, crossing your arms in front of your chest is decoded almost everywhere as a negative gesture that conveys defensiveness.
• We typically decode people putting their hands in their pocket as a gesture that indicates shyness or discomfort. Men often subconsciously put their hands in their pockets when they don’t want to participate in a conversation. But displaying the thumb or thumbs while the rest of the hand is in the pocket is a signal of a dominant or authoritative attitude.
• Nervous communicators may have distracting mannerisms in the form of adaptors that you will likely need to tune out in order to focus more on other verbal and nonverbal cues.

Head Movements and Posture

• The head leaning over and being supported by a hand can typically be decoded as a sign of boredom, the thumb supporting the chin and the index finger touching the head close to the temple or eye as a sign of negative evaluative thoughts, and the chin stroke as a sign that a person is going through a decision-making process (Pease & Pease, 2004).
• In terms of seated posture, leaning back is usually decoded as a sign of informality and indifference, straddling a chair as a sign of dominance (but also some insecurity because the person is protecting the vulnerable front part of his or her body), and leaning forward as a signal of interest and attentiveness.
• When someone is avoiding eye contact, don’t immediately assume they are not listening or are hiding something, especially if you are conveying complex or surprising information. Since looking away also signals cognitive activity, they may be processing information, and you may need to pause and ask if they need a second to think or if they need you to repeat or explain anything more.
• A “sideways glance,” which entails keeping the head and face pointed straight ahead while focusing the eyes to the left or right, has multiple contradictory meanings ranging from interest, to uncertainty, to hostility. When the sideways glance is paired with a slightly raised eyebrow or smile, it is sign of interest. When combined with a furrowed brow it generally conveys uncertainty. But add a frown to that mix and it can signal hostility (Pease & Pease, 2004).
• Be aware of discrepancies between facial expressions and other nonverbal gestures and verbal communication. Since facial expressions are often subconscious, they may be an indicator of incongruency within a speaker’s message, and you may need to follow up with questions or consider contextual clues to increase your understanding.
• Consider the status and power dynamics involved in a touch. In general, people who have or feel they have more social power in a situation typically engage in more touching behaviors with those with less social power. So you may decode a touch from a supervisor differently from the touch of an acquaintance.
• People often decode personality traits from a person’s vocal quality. In general, a person’s vocal signature is a result of the physiology of his or her neck, head, and mouth. Therefore a nasal voice or a deep voice may not have any relevant meaning within an interaction. Try not to focus on something you find unpleasant or pleasant about someone’s voice; focus on the content rather than the vocal quality.
• The size of a person’s “territory” often speaks to that person’s status. At universities, deans may have suites, department chairs may have large offices with multiple sitting areas, lower-ranked professors may have “cozier” offices stuffed with books and file cabinets, and adjunct instructors may have a shared office or desk or no office space at all.
• Since infringements on others’ territory can arouse angry reactions and even lead to violence (think of the countless stories of neighbors fighting over a fence or tree), be sensitive to territorial markers. In secondary and public territories, look for informal markers such as drinks, books, or jackets and be respectful of them when possible.
• Be aware of the physical attractiveness bias, which leads people to sometimes mistakenly equate attractiveness with goodness (Hargie, 2011). A person’s attractive or unattractive physical presentation can lead to irrelevant decoding that is distracting from other more meaningful nonverbal cues.

Detecting Deception

Although people rely on nonverbal communication more than verbal to determine whether or not a person is being deceptive, there is no set profile of deceptive behaviors that you can use to create your own nonverbally based lie detector. Research finds that people generally perceive themselves as good detectors of deception, but when tested people only accurately detect deception at levels a little higher than what we would by random chance. Given that deception is so widespread and common, it is estimated that we actually only detect about half the lies that we are told, meaning we all operate on false information without even being aware of it. Although this may be disappointing to those of you reading who like to think of yourselves as human lie detectors, there are some forces working against our deception detecting abilities. One such force is the truth bias , which leads us to believe that a person is telling the truth, especially if we know and like that person. Conversely, people who have interpersonal trust issues and people in occupations like law enforcement may also have a lie bias, meaning they assume people are lying to them more often than not (Andersen, 1999).

It is believed that deceptive nonverbal behaviors result from nonverbal leakage , which refers to nonverbal behaviors that occur as we try to control the cognitive and physical changes that happen during states of cognitive and physical arousal (Hargie, 2011). Anxiety is a form of arousal that leads to bodily reactions like those we experience when we perceive danger or become excited for some other reason. Some of these reactions are visible, such as increased movements, and some are audible, such as changes in voice pitch, volume, or rate. Other reactions, such as changes in the electrical conductivity of the skin, increased breathing, and increased heart rate, are not always detectable. Polygraph machines, or lie detectors, work on the principle that the presence of signs of arousal is a reliable indicator of deception in situations where other factors that would also evoke such signals are absent.

So the nonverbal behaviors that we associate with deception don’t actually stem from the deception but the attempts to control the leakage that results from the cognitive and physiological changes. These signals appear and increase because we are conflicted about the act of deception, since we are conditioned to believe that being honest is better than lying, we are afraid of getting caught and punished, and we are motivated to succeed with the act of deception—in essence, to get away with it. Leakage also occurs because of the increased cognitive demands associated with deception. Our cognitive activity increases when we have to decide whether to engage in deception or not, which often involves some internal debate. If we decide to engage in deception, we then have to compose a fabrication or execute some other manipulation strategy that we think is believable. To make things more complicated, we usually tailor our manipulation strategy to the person to whom we are speaking. In short, lying isn’t easy, as it requires us to go against social norms and deviate from our comfortable and familiar communication scripts that we rely on for so much of our interaction. Of course, skilled and experienced deceivers develop new scripts that can also become familiar and comfortable and allow them to engage in deception without arousing as much anxiety or triggering the physical reactions to it (Andersen, 1999).

There is no one “tell” that gives away when someone is lying.

Kevin Trotman – You Lie! – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

There are certain nonverbal cues that have been associated with deception, but the problem is that these cues are also associated with other behaviors, which could lead you to assume someone is being deceptive when they are actually nervous, guilty, or excited. In general, people who are more expressive are better deceivers and people who are typically anxious are not good liars. Also, people who are better self-monitors are better deceivers, because they are aware of verbal and nonverbal signals that may “give them away” and may be better able to control or account for them. Research also shows that people get better at lying as they get older, because they learn more about the intricacies of communication signals and they also get more time to practice (Andersen, 1999). Studies have found that actors, politicians, lawyers, and salespeople are also better liars, because they are generally higher self-monitors and have learned how to suppress internal feelings and monitor their external behaviors.

“Getting Competent”

Deception and Communication Competence

The research on deception and nonverbal communication indicates that heightened arousal and increased cognitive demands contribute to the presence of nonverbal behaviors that can be associated with deception. Remember, however, that these nonverbal behaviors are not solely related to deception and also manifest as a result of other emotional or cognitive states. Additionally, when people are falsely accused of deception, the signs that they exhibit as a result of the stress of being falsely accused are very similar to the signals exhibited by people who are actually engaging in deception.

There are common misconceptions about what behaviors are associated with deception. Behaviors mistakenly linked to deception include longer response times, slower speech rates, decreased eye contact, increased body movements, excessive swallowing, and less smiling. None of these have consistently been associated with deception (Andersen, 1999). As we’ve learned, people also tend to give more weight to nonverbal than verbal cues when evaluating the truthfulness of a person or her or his message. This predisposition can lead us to focus on nonverbal cues while overlooking verbal signals of deception. A large study found that people were better able to detect deception by sound alone than they were when exposed to both auditory and visual cues (Andersen, 1999). Aside from nonverbal cues, also listen for inconsistencies in or contradictions between statements, which can also be used to tell when others are being deceptive. The following are some nonverbal signals that have been associated with deception in research studies, but be cautious about viewing these as absolutes since individual and contextual differences should also be considered.

Gestures. One of the most powerful associations between nonverbal behaviors and deception is the presence of adaptors. Self-touches like wringing hands and object-adaptors like playing with a pencil or messing with clothing have been shown to correlate to deception. Some highly experienced deceivers, however, can control the presence of adaptors (Andersen, 1999).

Eye contact. Deceivers tend to use more eye contact when lying to friends, perhaps to try to increase feelings of immediacy or warmth, and less eye contact when lying to strangers. A review of many studies of deception indicates that increased eye blinking is associated with deception, probably because of heightened arousal and cognitive activity (Andersen, 1999).

Facial expressions. People can intentionally use facial expressions to try to deceive, and there are five primary ways that this may occur. People may show feelings that they do not actually have, show a higher intensity of feelings than they actually have, try to show no feelings, try to show less feeling than they actually have, or mask one feeling with another.

Vocalics. One of the most common nonverbal signs of deception is speech errors. As you’ll recall, verbal fillers and other speech disfluencies are studied as part of vocalics; examples include false starts, stutters, and fillers. Studies also show that an increase in verbal pitch is associated with deception and is likely caused by heightened arousal and tension.

Chronemics. Speech turns are often thought to correspond to deception, but there is no consensus among researchers as to the exact relationship. Most studies reveal that deceivers talk less, especially in response to direct questions (Andersen, 1999).

• Studies show that people engage in deception much more than they care to admit. Do you consider yourself a good deceiver? Why or why not? Which, if any, of the nonverbal cues discussed do you think help you deceive others or give you away?
• For each of the following scenarios, note (1) what behaviors may indicate deception, (2) alternative explanations for the behaviors (aside from deception), and (3) questions you could ask to get more information before making a judgment.

Scenario 1. A politician is questioned by a reporter about allegations that she used taxpayer money to fund personal vacations. She looks straight at the reporter, crosses one leg over the other, and says, “I’ve worked for the people of this community for ten years and no one has ever questioned my ethics until now.” As she speaks, she points her index finger at the politician and uses a stern and clear tone of voice.

Scenario 2. You ask your roommate if you can borrow his car to go pick up a friend from the train station about ten miles away. He says, “Um, well…I had already made plans to go to dinner with Cal and he drove last time so it’s kind of my turn to drive this time. I mean, is there someone else you could ask or someone else who could get her? You know I don’t mind sharing things with you, and I would totally let you, you know, if I didn’t have this thing to do. Sorry.” As he says, “Sorry,” he raises both of his hands, with his palms facing toward you, and shrugs.

Scenario 3. A professor asks a student to explain why he didn’t cite sources for several passages in his paper that came from various websites. The student scratches his head and says, “What do you mean? Those were my ideas. I did look at several websites, but I didn’t directly quote anything so I didn’t think I needed to put the citations in parentheses.” As he says this, he rubs the back of his neck and then scratches his face and only makes minimal eye contact with the professor.

Key Takeaways

• To improve your competence encoding nonverbal messages, increase your awareness of the messages you are sending and receiving and the contexts in which your communication is taking place. Since nonverbal communication is multichannel, it is important to be aware that nonverbal cues can complement, enhance, or contradict each other. Also realize that the norms and expectations for sending nonverbal messages, especially touch and personal space, vary widely between relational and professional contexts.
• To improve your competence decoding nonverbal messages, look for multiple nonverbal cues, avoid putting too much weight on any one cue, and evaluate nonverbal messages in relation to the context and your previous experiences with the other person. Although we put more weight on nonverbal communication than verbal when trying to detect deception, there is no set guide that can allow us to tell whether or not another person is being deceptive.
• Getting integrated: As was indicated earlier, research shows that instruction in nonverbal communication can lead people to make gains in their nonverbal communication competence. List some nonverbal skills that you think are important in each of the following contexts: academic, professional, personal, and civic.
• Using concepts from this section, analyze your own nonverbal encoding competence. What are your strengths and weaknesses? Do the same for your nonverbal decoding competence
• To understand how chronemics relates to nonverbal communication norms, answer the following questions: In what situations is it important to be early? In what situations can you arrive late? How long would you wait on someone you were meeting for a group project for a class? A date? A job interview?

Andersen, P. A., Nonverbal Communication: Forms and Functions (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1999), 125.

DePaulo, P. J., “Applications of Nonverbal Behavior Research in Marketing and Management,” Applications of Nonverbal Behavior Theories and Research , ed. Robert S. Feldman (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1992), 64.

Goffman, E., Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2010), 322–31.

Hargie, O., Skilled Interpersonal Interaction: Research, Theory, and Practice , 5th ed. (London: Routledge, 2011), 81.

McKay, M., Martha Davis, and Patrick Fanning, Messages: Communication Skills Book , 2nd ed. (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, 1995), 54.

Metts, S. and Sally Planlap, “Emotional Communication,” in Handbook of Interpersonal Communication, 3rd ed., eds. Mark L. Knapp and Kerry J. Daly (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002): 339–73.

Mottet, T. P., Steven A. Beebe, Paul C. Raffeld, and Michelle L. Paulsel, “The Effects of Student Verbal and Nonverbal Responsiveness on Teachers’ Liking of Students and Willingness to Comply with Student Requests,” Communication Quarterly 52, no. 1 (2004): 27–38.

Pease, A. and Barbara Pease, The Definitive Book of Body Language (New York, NY: Bantam, 2004), 21.

Riggio, R. E., “Social Interaction Skills and Nonverbal Behavior,” in Applications of Nonverbal Behavior Theories and Research , ed. Robert S. Feldman (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1992), 23.

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