Accuracy of nonverbal communication as determinant of interpersonal expectancy effects

The person perception paradigm was used to address the effects of experimenters' ability to encode nonverbal cues and subjects' ability to decode nonverbal cues on magnitude of expectancy effects. Greater expectancy effects were obtained when experimenters were better encoders and subjects were better decoders of nonverbal cues and the separate contributions of experimenter's and subject's nonverbal skills were of similar magnitudes.The authors wish to express their thanks to Rena Baskin for her help.Preparation of this article and the research described was facilitated by a grant [GS-3942] from the Division of Social Sciences of the National Science Foundation to Robert Rosenthal.     

Sensitivity to bodily nonverbal communication as a factor in practitioner-patient rapport

The relationship between physicians' nonverbal sensitivity and the satisfaction of their patients was tested in two field studies. In the first study, 40 physicians were given a film test of nonverbal sensitivity (the PONS test) and were evaluated by their patients. The second study was a replication using 31 additional physicians. Most noteworthy for research in therapeutic interaction, the present studies contained three methodological advances: (1) the use of actual patients' ratings of satisfaction with treatment, (2) the extension of research from psychological to medical settings, and (3) the use of a standardized test of nonverbal decoding skill. Physicians' skill at reading the emotion conveyed through the nonverbal channel of body movement was found to be significantly correlated with their interpersonal success with patients in the clinical setting.The authors would like to thank Donald Dickson, M.D., Mary Ann Spadaro, M.D., Louise M. Prince, John L. Helmuth, Jr., Helene M. Murphy, and the physicians and patients who participated in the research. Study I was supported by a Peter B. Livingston Fellowship from the Massachusetts Mental Health Center and Study II by a W. K. Kellogg Fellowship from the Hospital Research and Educational Trust, both to the senior author.     

Family expressiveness styles and nonverbal communication skills

The relationship between family norms and practices of emotional expression and nonverbal communication skill was investigated in two studies and a meta-analysis. Based on the general socialization hypothesis presented in the literature, specific predictions were for (a) better non-verbal judging skill in individuals whose families inhibit expressiveness, relative to individuals whose families value expressiveness, and (b) better nonverbal sending skill in individuals whose families value expressiveness, relative to individuals whose families inhibit expressiveness. In the two studies, family expressiveness styles, measured by college students' retrospective self-reports, was related to the skills of sending and judging emotional communications via voice tone and judging emotional communications via facial expression.This research was conducted while the author was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship at the John Hopkins University. Portions of this paper were presented at the meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Baltimore, MD 1982. Many thanks are due to Judith A. Hall, Cynthia Rand, Marylee Taylor, and Miron Zuckerman, who shared their unpublished data. Additionally, the helpful suggestions of Judith Hall and the reviewers are gratefully acknowledged.     

Individual differences in the nonverbal communication of affect: The diagnostic analysis of nonverbal accuracy scale

The Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy (DANVA) was designed to measure individual differences in the accurate sending and receiving of nonverbal social information. The DANVA consists of four receptive and three expressive subtests that measure nonverbal processing accuracy in children from 6 to 10 years of age. Four propositions were offered to guide the gathering of construct validity data for the DANVA. In support of the propositions, researchers found that DANVA accuracy scores increased with age, were internally consistent and reliable over time, and snowed significant relationships with indices of personal and social adjustment and academic achievement but were not related to IQ. Evidence for construct validity was stronger for receptive, as compared to expressive, subtests. Future research should include additional populations of subjects and study of the impact of intensity of emotion being sent or received.     

Effects of alcohol on the nonverbal communication of anxiety: The impact of beliefs on nonverbal behavior

Three male and three female raters were shown videotapes of 29 male subjects who were speaking to a silent female confederate. Raters were asked to make 10 judgments about the subjects' behavior. The subjects had been assigned to one of two expectancy conditions in which they were led to believe the drink they consumed prior to meeting the confederate contained alcohol and tonic or tonic only. Actually, half of the subjects in each expectancy condition received alcohol and half received tonic only. Judgments of the female raters viewing the videotapes were congruent with physiological measures of the subjects' anxiety. Those subjects who believed they received alcohol were perceived by female raters as more relaxed, less anxious, less inhibited, and more dominant than subjects who believed they received tonic. The actual content of the drink had no significant effects on the raters' judgements of the subjects' behavior. Male raters were unable to discriminate among the experimental conditions. Implications for possible gender of rater effects in behavioral assessment procedures as well as for the impact of beliefs on nonverbal communication are discussed.     

Video ethology: Television as a data base for cross-cultural studies in nonverbal displays

This demonstration study attempts to indicate how live television programming might provide an economical and easily-accessed source of material for cross-cultural investigation. This study compared the nonverbal displays of emotion for American and Canadian television game show contestants. Results suggested that although Americans and Canadians did not differ significantly in the types of emotions displayed, Americans were rated as being significantly more expressive in their emotional display. In addition, Americans differed from Canadians in their forms of nonverbal display. American females were seen as using their hands more than the Canadian females. American males were seen to smile more than their Canadian counterparts. Discussion explored how methodology introduced in this study could be conveniently expanded to more conclusively explore culturally determined display rules. Consideration of current video cassette technology facilitating this form of investigation was discussed.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under grant number 410-84-0640.     

The development of nonverbal communication of emotion: A functionalist perspective

A functionalist perspective on the development of nonverbal communication of emotion is presented. This perspective is distinguished from other current conceptualizations by the following features: (a) Emphasis is placed on the functional implications of emotion-relevant movements for social regulation (communication), intrapersonal (internal) regulation, and behavior regulation. (b) Emotions are viewed as “members of families of emotions.” Emotion families are composed of emotion processes with similar functional relationships to the environment, which also differ in particular communicative features as a function of contextual demands, socialization history, and developmental abilities of the organism. (c) Facial movements are treated as only one of many forms of communication of emotion, rather than as having special status as “the” clearcut indicators of emotion. (d) Communication of emotion always is embedded in a context: There are no movements that can be considered clearcut, context-free expressions of emotion, at any period of development. (e) The role of socialization in the development of emotion and emotion communication is emphasized. (f) The multiple influences on communicative behavior, and the implications of such multicausality for clearcut communication, are acknowledged.     

Posthypnotic suggestion: A method for the study of nonverbal communication

A method for studying emotional expression using posthypnotic suggestion to induce emotional states is presented. Subjects were videotaped while roleplaying happiness, sadness or anger or after hypnotic induction of one of these three emotions. Judges then rated these videotapes for emotional tone. Results indicated a main effect for emotion expressed, with happiness and sadness more easily identified by judges than anger. Accuracy was also greater for happiness and sadness in the hypnotically induced condition. However, role-played anger was more easily identified than hypnotically induced anger. An interaction of channel (body/face) and emotion indicated that identification of sadness and anger was easier for judges when the body alone was shown. Findings are discussed in terms of display rules for the expression of emotion.We gratefully acknowledge Irving Kirsch, Ross Buck, and Paul Ekman for their helpful comments on a draft of this article. Special thanks to Reuben Baron, without whose support neither this article nor our careers in psychology would have been possible.A preliminary report of this study was presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association in Toronto, August 1984.     

Verbal and nonverbal cues as mediators of deception ability

In an extension of previous research on individual differences in deception ability, 35 undergraduate subjects were administered standardized measures of social skills and public self-consciousness and their attitudes on a variety of sociopolitical attitudes were measured. Later, subjects were videotaped while giving pro-attitudinal (truthful) and counter-attitudinal (deceptive) presentations to a videocamera. Videotaped presentations were content analyzed for various verbal and nonverbal cues, and were shown to untrained judges who rated each on a scale of truthfulness/believability. Results of structural modeling analyses indicated that socially skilled subjects were judged as believable regardless of whether they were truth-telling or deceiving. Individuals high in public self-consciousness were less successful deceivers. Most importantly, these relationships were mediated by certain behavioral cues, particularly cues of verbal fluency, which were consistently associated with judgments of truthfulness. These results have both theoretical and methodological implications for future deception research.This research was supported by intramural grants from California State University, Fullerton (CSUF) Foundation to the first author. The authors would like to thank Barbara Throckmorton, Maria Hale, Barbara Choco, Scott Johnson, Lee Salinas, and Monica Turner for assistance in data collection and coding. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: Ronald E. Riggio, Department of Psychology, California State University, Fullerton, CA 92634.Ronald E. Riggio, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Psychology at California State University, Fullerton. His research interests include the study of individual differences in communication skills and research on deception. Requests for reprints should be sent to Dr. Riggio at: Department of Psychology, Calif. State University, Fullerton, CA 92634. Joan Tucker, M.A. received her Masters degree at California State University, Fullerton. She is currently a graduate student at the University of California, Riverside, conducting research on nonverbal communication. Keith F. Widaman, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside and has contributed to research on the development of human abilities and on a range of quantitative topics.     

The relative equivalence of senders in studies of nonverbal encoding and decoding

As an aid to researchers who study encoding and decoding of nonverbal cues, we compared the relative equivalence of encoders sending a single scene with the relative equivalence of scenes when one encoder sent many scenes. Length-corrected internal consistency was identical in both cases, indicating that no necessary gain in generality results from employing more senders each of whom sends fewer scenes rather than one sender who sends more scenes.Preparation of this paper was supported by a grant from the Milton Fund of Harvard University to the first author and by a grant to the second author (BRSG Grant 5 So 7 RR07041-11) awarded by the Biomedical Research Support Grant Program, Division of Research Resources, National Institutes of Health.     

Verbal and nonverbal communication of warmth to children,foreigners, and retarded adults

The verbal and nonverbal communication of warmth was examined in a study in which undergraduate women taught a block design task to a listener who was either a six-year-old child, a retarded adult, a peer who spoke English as a second language (foreigner), or a peer who was a native speaker of English. The degree of warmth conveyed by the speakers differed only minimally across different categories of listeners. However, these communications did vary systematically within each category, in accord with the levels of cognitive and linguistic sophistication of each particular listener. Speakers tended to fine-tune communications by conveying more warmth to the more sophisticated children and foreigners than to the less sophisticated members of these categories. To the more sophisticated retarded persons, however, they conveyed—nonverbally—less warmth than to the less sophisticated retarded persons. The relevance of these findings to the communication of expectancy effects and to the social psychology of stigma is discussed.This paper was written while the first author was visiting at the University of Florida. We thank John Neil Bohannon, Linda Caporael, Margaret Clark, William Cooper, Monica Harris, Harry Levin, and Carol Sigelman for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. For their help in conducting this research, we thank Ann Ashworth, Pamela Brown, Linda Douglas, Susan Finkelstein, Tamara Harper, Robin Johnson, Susan Kirdendol, Sheila Larkin, Sue Limber, Jose Macaranas, Ashook Nimgade, Maria Papetti, Maurice Perry, Lester Pretlow, Carissa Smith, Laura Taswell, Tina Tedeschi, Charles Valadez, and all of our listener-subjects. We also thank the students, faculty, and administration of Dunmore High School, Dunmore, Pennslyvania, for their participation and cooperation. Support from NSF, NIMH, the National Academy of Education, and a Rackham Faculty Grant was invaluable. Most importantly, we thank Roger Brown and Robert Rosenthal for their wisdom and inspiration.     

Sensitivity to nonverbal cues as a function of social competence

The hypothesis that sensitivity to nonverbal messages is an important component of social compentence was tested employing 24 female subjects. It was predicted that subjects low in social competence would experience a high level of anxiety in a social interaction and that this would interfere with their ability to attend to the nonverbal behaviors of others. Subjects were given the task of interviewing a confederate. They were instructed to change the interview topic if the questioning appeared to produce discomfort in their partner. The confederate displayed a series of nonverbal cues indicating mounting tension while responding to certain questions. Two measures of sensitivity to the cues were obtained: (1) how quickly the subject changed the interview topic in response to the cues and (2) how many nonverbal cues the subject reported observing. The findings indicated that low-competence subjects reported having observed as many of the nonverbal messages as the high-competence subjects but failed to respond to them. An explanation for this is offered based on information gathered during a postexperimental interview. No difference was found between groups for level of anxiety experienced during the interaction. This is discussed in terms of the experimental design employed, which may have served to reduce anxiety in the subjects.This study was conducted by the first author as part of the requirements for the master's degree at the University of Connecticut. The authors wish to express their appreciation to Suzanne Weiss, who served as the confederate and assisted in the analysis of the data.     

Interpersonal deception: III. Effects of deceit on perceived communication and nonverbal behavior dynamics

Much past research on deception has examined it individually and noninteractively. Here we argue for broadening our understanding of deception by examining it as a dyadic and interactive event. Assumptions of an interpersonal perspective, articulated in Interpersonal Deception Theory, are advanced. These include recognizing the agency of both parties to interpersonal exchanges, examining such exchanges at multiple levels, incorporating measures of communicationrelated perceptions and interpretations as well as behaviors, recognizing that behaviors may be strategic as well as nonstrategic, and viewing such behavior as dynamic rather than static. An experiment reflecting this orientation is presented in which pairs of participants, half friends and half strangers, conducted interviews during which interviewees (EEs) either lied or told the truth to interviewers (ERs) who were induced to be highly, moderately, or not suspicious. Dependent measures included participant (EE and ER) perceptions, interpretations, and evaluations of EE behaviors and trained coders' ratings of actual nonverbal behaviors. Consistent with the theory, deceivers were more uncertain and vague, more nonimmediate and reticent, showed more negative affect, displayed more arousal and non-composure, and generally made a poorer impression than truthtellers. Their behaviors also connoted greater formality and submissiveness. Also consistent with the theory's premise that deceptive interactions are dynamic, deceivers' kinesic relaxation and pleasantness changed over time, in line with a behavior and image management interpretation, and degree of reciprocity between EE and ER nonverbal behaviors was affected by the presence of deception and suspicion.Portions of this paper were presented to the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, San Francisco, May 1989. This project was funded by the U.S. Army Research Institute (Contract #MDA903-90-K-0113). The views, opinions, and/or findings in this report are those of the authors and should not be construed as an official Department of the Army position, policy, or decision.     

Religion as communication

From the perspective of social system theory, religion is a label by which it is possible to study the relation between the individual expressions of the sacred, on one hand, and the organized system of meanings to be referred to the sacred, on the other, developing a relatively free chain of communication. Therefore, coherently to this approach, the author suggests to assume the notion of religion as communication: a system of belief challenges the complexity of the world, trying to reduce that, transforming the external differentiation into a internal one. This theoretical approach supports three research strategies: (a) overcoming the disputing question secularization/de-secularization, focusing on the dynamics of the relation between a system of belief and the social change occurring in a social context; (b) going beyond the polarization between tradition and modernity, confuting the assumption that modernity means necessarily the decline of religion; (c) reconsidering religion in the light of the social theory.