Commentary: Overgeneralization Effects in Perceiving Nonverbal Behavior: Evolutionary and Ecological Origins

The three papers in this special issue provide novel applications of an evolutionary approach to nonverbal behavior. While each analysis of reactions to nonverbal cues has merit, it also is valuable to place these separate phenomena within a broader framework than can encompass them all. The ecological approach to social perception provides such a framework. It conceptualizes all of the reactions as overgeneralizations of responses that are adaptive in their original context, and it suggests proximal mechanisms that can predict ecological variations in these reactions.