What Is the Role of Nonverbal Communication?

Non-verbal communication includes all types of physical behavior that supports or replaces verbal communication. These behaviors include gestures, eye movement or eye contact, moans and grunts, touching, the moving toward or away of parts of the body from others, changes in facial expressions, physical proximity and more. The role of non-verbal communication is to inform verbal expressions of unstated attitude or emotional content.

Cues

Non-verbal communication often includes subtle cues that enhance or negate actual verbalizations, adding context or changing meaning. A word, spoken without any physical cues, such as on a radio, has to be interpreted absent of physical cues. The same word, seen with a motion picture may reflect an entirely different meaning based solely on how the person conveys meaning of the word with his body. Persons who are speaking a non-native second language or sign language, often use universal visual and non-verbal communication cues to expand on the limitations of their verbal knowledge to be more clearly understood.

Shared Human And Animal Cues

Frans de Waal in his 2002 book "Tree Of Origin," notes that "many non-verbal cues are continuous between human and non-human species." When a person feels threatened or challenged she will deepen her voice and expand her chest or spread her arms in some way to make herself look larger. This parallels the behavior of confronted animals, like the gorilla, who uses size as a means of communicating. Behaviors of submission are also common where a person or animal may cower or shrink down, pulling her shoulders in to look smaller as a way of communicating that she is non-threatening to a larger person or threat. Understanding the behavior of a fluffing bird or a bear that stands up to appear larger, helps to inform us of vital cues to the animal's thinking or emotional process and tell us when we are in danger.

Call To Action Cues

Humans also adopt baby-talk; high pitched and repetitious sounds, Waal continues, upward rising sounds to encourage a child to action, downward lowering sounds to calm a child down. Sharp, staccato sounds and gestures show emergency and rivet the attention. All of these signals are also used when humans interact with animals like horses and dogs, and the sound patterns along with the non-verbal gestures and movements convey complex information between species.

Facial Expression Cues

Dr. Paul Ekman, world famous psychologist and expert on non-verbal communication, developed a research tool called FACS (Facial Action Coding System) which allowed him to code every minute movement of human facial muscles to decode the emotions being displayed. According to a 2003 "New York Times" article by Judy Forman, Ekman states that there are "seven human emotions that have clear facial signals: anger, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust, contempt and happiness."

Significance

Ekman notes that some facial expressions cannot be faked, and that trained observers, like Secret Service personnel, are able to read emotional expressions with an accuracy of up to 80 percent. They do this by reading the micro-expressions (flicker of involuntary facial movements) that last less than a quarter of a second. Forman comments about one of the most intriguing findings in Ekman's research, "if a person merely arranges his face into a certain expression, he will actually feel the corresponding emotion."

References

• Tree of Origin; Frans de Waal; 2002
• The New York Times - Forman