Skill in Nonverbal Communication

Question 1

How has the concept of nonverbal skill been studied?

Answer 1

Primarily in terms of the encoding and decoding of emotion in social interaction

Question 2

“On the job training”

Answer 2

What Knapp calls how we develop the ability to send and receive nonverbal communication from daily living

Question 3

Personality influencing nonverbal skill

Answer 3

• Nonverbal skills are the expressive counterparts of personality traits
• Extraverts: good sending/encoding skills
• High self-monitors: good receiving/decoding skills

Question 4

How does depression affect nonverbal skills?

Answer 4

• Minimal eye contact
• Monotone paralanguage
• Slow speech rate
• Sad facial expression
• *Better decoding skills

Question 5

Social anxiety affecting nonverbal skills

Answer 5

• Minimal eye contact
• Speech hesitancies
• Less tak
• More silence
• More body-focused gestures

Question 6

Schizophrenia affecting nonverbal skills

Answer 6

• Poverty of speech
• Minimal eye contact
• Less facial animation
• Few/strange gestures
• Major decoding errors
• Biggest deficit is in nonverbal sending skills

Question 7

Autism affecting nonverbal skills

Answer 7

• Low levels of eye contact and joint attention
• Low use of referential gestures
• Poor face recognition

Question 8

“The Other Species” effect in face recognition

Answer 8

• Human faces and monkey faces shows to 2 year old with and without autism
• Kids needed to choose the picture that they saw before between 2 pictures
• Kids with autism struggled in both categories
• Kids without autism struggles in only monkey category

Question 9

How does the situation affect nonverbal skills?

Answer 9

Different social contexts (police interrogation vs. a date) call for different skills

Question 10

How does culture affect nonverbal skills?

Answer 10

What is skilled in one culture (close space, touch) might not be in another

Question 11

How does gender affect nonverbal skills?

Answer 11

Women are better decoders of controllable intentional nonverbal behaviors; more emotionally expressive

Question 12

How does desire affect nonverbal skills?

Answer 12

Skill is dependent on motivation

Question 13

Nonverbal sending ability

Answer 13

• Most people really don’t know what their nonverbal sending ability is like
• But if their encoding skill is good and other people can accurately tell what they are feeling, it is positively correlated with marital satisfaction

Question 14

Development of nonverbal receiving ability

Answer 14

• Ability improves with age
• Increases form kindergarten up to 20-30
• Vocal decoding learned before visual cue discrimination

Question 15

Receiving ability: IQ

Answer 15

No association between nonverbal receiving ability and IQ

Question 16

Emotional Intelligence

Answer 16

• EI is the ability to:
  1. Monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions
  2. Discriminate among them
  3. Reason with this information
• “Nonverbal dominance” (rely on nonverbal vs. verbal behavior)
• People with high EI show greater nonverbal dominance
• High EI -> better decoding of emotion in the faces of other people

Question 17

Receiving ability: Relationship outcomes

Answer 17

• Physician skill -> patient satisfaction

- Receiving ability correlated with more satisfying relationships

Question 18

Receiving ability: Familiarity

Answer 18

• People often decode the expressions of persons who are knows to them more accurately than they decode unknown person
• Spouses were more accurate at decoding their spouses’ expressions than strangers’ expressions

Question 19

Factors that influence receiving ability

Answer 19

• Experience in decoding nonverbal behavior
• Attention to specific patterns of nonverbal behavior in others
• Experience decoding the nonverbal behavior of a specific person
• The nonverbal expressiveness of the sender

Question 20

Teaching decoding skills

Answer 20

• Decoding skill can be enhanced through training
• Best conditions involved lecture and practice opportunities
• Decoding skill can be taught but requires practice with feedback