The Social Psychology Of Nonverbal Communication

The Social Psychology of Nonverbal Communication gathers together leading nonverbal communication scholars from around the world to offer insight into a range of issues within the nonverbal literature with the aim to rethink current approaches to the subject.

The Social Psychology of Nonverbal Communication gathers together leading nonverbal communication scholars from around the world to offer insight into a range of issues within the nonverbal literature with the aim to rethink current approaches to the subject.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the latest developments in the social psychology of nonverbal communication. It explores topics including social skill, empathy, adaptive advantage, emotion-reading and emotion-hiding; and examines personal charisma, memory and communicating with robots. Together, the authors present diverse, cutting-edge research on nonverbal social intelligence as an adaptive strategy for survival and success. The collection provides an effective demonstration of the interdisciplinary nature of this topic, and it’s relevance to researchers across the social sciences and beyond.

The goal of this edited volume is to provide a much needed bridge between the research on nonverbal communication and the application of those findings. The book features contributions from some of the leading researchers in the field. These distinguished scholars apply their understanding of nonverbal communication processes to a variety of settings including hospitals and clinics, courtrooms and police stations, the workplace and government, the classroom, and everyday life. It explores nonverbal communication in public settings, in intimate relationships, and across cultures and general lessons such as the importance of context, individual differences, and how expectations affect interpretation. Applications of Nonverbal Communication appeals to a diverse group of practitioners, researchers, and students from a variety of disciplines including psychology, health care, law enforcement, political science, sociology, communication, business and management. It may also serve as a supplement in upper level courses on nonverbal communication.

The study of nonverbal behavior has substantially grown in importance in social psychology during the past twenty years. In addition, other disciplines are increas ingly bringing their unique perspectives to this research area. Investigators from a wide variety of fields such as developmental, clinical, and social psychology, as well as primatology, human ethology, sociology, anthropology, and biology have system atically examined nonverbal aspects of behavior. Nowhere in the nonverbal behavior literature has such multidisciplinary concern been more evident than in the study of the communication of power and dominance. Ethological insights that explored nonhuman-human parallels in nonverbal communication provided the impetus for the research of the early 19708. The sociobiological framework stimulated the search for analogous and homologous gestures, expressions, and behavior patterns among various species of primates, including humans. Other lines of research, in contrast to evolutionary-based models, have focused on the importance of human developmental and social contexts in determining behaviors associated with power and dominance. Unfortunately, there has been little in the way of cross-fertilization or integration among these fields. A genuine need has existed for a forum that exam ines not only where research on power, dominance, and nonverbal behavior has been, but also where it will likely lead. We thus have two major objectives in this book. One goal is to provide the reader with multidisciplinary, up-to-date literature reviews and research findings.

This important monograph systematically examines the ways in which mental illness may affect non-verbal interaction patterns.

This book is an up-to-date compendium of knowledge on the secret language of close relationships, namely nonverbal routes of communication. In close relationships, as everyone learns sooner or later, the usefulness of words can be somewhat limited, because people (a) mean different things by the same words, (b) mean the same thing by different words, (c) sometimes find it hard to express their feelings in words, and (d) lie. Nonverbal signals therefore often provide the best means of communication. The book points out how decoding (interpreting) nonverbal signals is a major key to success, because often what people say wholly belies how they feel—nonverbal signals reveal their true feelings rather than what they want other people to think their feelings are. This book helps decode those secret signals. The book is written by the leading worldwide experts in the field of nonverbal communication to ensure accuracy, comprehensiveness, and timeliness.

My interest in nonverbal behavior has remained constant for over 15 years. I think this has been the case because nonverbal behavior has proved a very fascinating and challenging topic. Others might suggest that I am just a slow learner. With enough time in any area, however, one begins to feel that he or she has some special insights to offer to others. About the time that I was struck with that thought, approximately two and a half years ago, I was developing the first version of my sequential functional model of nonverbal exchange. It seemed to me that the func tional model might provide a very useful framework for a book discussing and analyzing nonverbal behavior. I did not want (nor do I think I had the patience) to write a comprehensive review of research on nonverbal behavior. Other works, such as Siegman and Feldstein's (1978) edited Nonverbal Behavior and Commu nication, and Harper, Wiens, and Matarazzo's (1978) Nonverbal Communication: The State of the Art, have provided excellent reviews of the research on nonverbal behavior. Instead, what I have tried to do in this book is to use nonverbal behavior as a vehicle for discussing social behavior. In a very real sense, this analysis of nonverbal behavior is a means to an end, not an end in itself. A consequence of this approach is that this review is a selective one, unlike the comprehensive works mentioned earlier.

The most comprehensive, most readable compendium of research and theory on nonverbal communication available, NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION IN HUMAN INTERACTION (WITH INFOTRAC) uses the cross-disciplinary approaches of speech and social psychology to focus on how nonverbal communication research affects a wide variety of academic interests. Your purchase includes access to InfoTrac College Edition, an online university library of full length articles from academic journals, magazines and newspapers.