non-verbal communicatin

Question 1

what does non-verbal communication consist of

Answer 1

• Body language
• Gestures
• Physical distance
• Facial expressions
• Touch and smell

Question 2

body language

Answer 2

How you position your body can portray a message
Encompasses gestures, facial expression, stance, posture
Handshaking: How you handshake can tell a lot
- Loose
- Tight
- Aggressive
Muslim cultures – men will not shake women’s hand
Japan - bowin

Question 3

facial expressions of emotion

Answer 3

six major emotional expressions are universal:
anger, happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, and sadness.
All humans encode or express these emotions in the same way, and all humans can decode or interpret them with equal accuracy.

Question 4

why can it be difficult to decode

Answer 4

• Affect blends occur when one part of the face registers one emotion and another part, a different emotion.
• At times people try to appear less emotional than they are so that no one will know how they really feel.
• A third reason why decoding facial expressions can be
  inaccurate has to do with culture.

Question 5

display rules - Ekman and Friesen 1975

Answer 5

Learn to control expression of many emotions that are
appropriate to culture or subculture

Question 6

examples of display rules in Japan

Answer 6

Examples of display rule differences:
American cultural norms discourage emotional displays in
men, such as grief or crying, but allow the facial display of
such emotions in women.
Japanese women will often hide a wide smile behind their
hands, whereas Western women are allowed—indeed,
encouraged—to smile broadly and often.
Japanese norms lead people to cover up negative facial
expressions with smiles and laughter and to display fewer
facial expressions in general than is true in the West.

Question 7

gestures

Answer 7

Hand movements, etc. that help to portray the message
- Are very cultural
- Western cultures – sign of affection
- South- East and East Asian – sign of disrespect
We even use gestures when we are not face-to-face with
people, some use these more than others
- Can be distracting to the message
Is learned behaviour
Girls are rewarded for using these from birth; more likely
to use gestures when older (Halberstadt, 1991).

Question 8

emblems

Answer 8

Emblems
Nonverbal gestures that have well-understood definitions
within a given culture; they usually have direct verbal
translations, like the “OK” sign.
The important point about emblems is that they are not
universal.
Each culture has devised its own emblems, and these need not be understandable to people from other cultures.
President George H. W. Bush once used the “V for victory” sign, but he did it backward—the palm of his hand was facing him instead of the audience. Unfortunately, he flashed this gesture to a large crowd in Australia—and in Australia, this emblem is the equivalent of “flipping the bird”

Question 9

gender and non-verbal communication

Answer 9

In general, women are better at encoding and decoding
nonverbal cues.
One exception is that women are less accurate at detecting deception - Social role theory of sex differences suggests that this is because women have learned different skills, and one is to be polite and overlook lying

Question 10

touch and smell

Answer 10

Smell is more important in lesser animals for communication but humans still use it
- Linked to emotion, memories and danger
- Pheromones
Touch also communicates messages
- Heslin’s (1974) categories of touch
- Functional/professional – expresses task-orientation
- Social/polite – expresses ritual interaction
- Friendship/warmth – expresses idiosyncratic
relationship
- Love/intimacy – expresses emotional attachment
- Sexual/arousal – expresses sexual intent
- Are not always exclusive – one can evolve to another