Skill In Nonverbal Communication

Question 0

Factors that influence nonverbal skill (6)

Answer 0

• personality
• mental health
• situation
• culture
• sex
• desire/motivation

Question 1

Intro

Answer 1

• the concept of nonverbal skill has been studied primarily in terms of the encoding and decoding of emotion in social interaction
• most ability to send and receive nonverbal comm comes from what knapp calls “on the job training” I.e. Daily living

Question 2

Personality

Answer 2

• nonverbal skills are expressive counterparts of personality traits
• extroverts: good sending/encoding skills
• high self monitors: good receiving skills/decoding

Question 3

Mental health problems associated with nonverbal skill deficits

Answer 3

Depression, social anxiety, schizophrenia, autism

Question 4

Depression

Answer 4

Minimal eye contact, monotone paralanguage, slow speech, sad facial expesssion
-*but better decoding skills (sadder but wiser)

Question 5

Social anxiety

Answer 5

Minimal eye contact, speech hesitancies, less talk, more silence, more body focused gestures

Question 6

Schizophrenia

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

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

• deficit for decoding facial recognitions for other species
• typically developing 2 year olds perform well on human face recognition and poorly on monkey face recognition
• autistic 2 year olds perform poor on BOTH

Question 9

other influences on nonverbal skills

Answer 9

• situation: different social contexts (e.g. police interrogation, a date) call for different skills
• culture: what is skilled in one culture (ie. close space, touch) might not be in another
• gender: women are better decoders of controllable intentional nonverbal behaviors; more emotionally expressive
• desire: skills are dependent upon motivation

Question 10

nonverbal sending ability

Answer 10

• express affect that can be accurately perceived by others
• senders view images
• receivers guess which image was viewed
• low correlations between actual and perceived encoding skill
• heart rate acceleration when discussing slides is negatively related to sending accuracy
• encoding skill positively associated with marital satisfaction

Question 11

receiving ability: development

Answer 11

• ability improves with age
• increases from kindergarten up to 20-30
• vocal decoding learned before visual cue discrimination

Question 12

receiving ability: IQ

Answer 12

no association between nonverbal receiving ability an IQ

Question 13

receiving ability: emotional intelligence

Answer 13

• emotional intelligence: the ability to (1) monitor one’s own and others’ feeling and emotion, (2) discriminate among them, and (3) reason with this information.
• “nonverbal dominance” (rely on verbal vs. nonverbal)
• people with high emotional intelligence show greater nonverbal dominance
• high EI>better decoding of emotion in the faces of other people.

Question 14

receiving ability: relationship outcomes

Answer 14

• physician skill>patient satisfaction

- receiving ability correlated with more satisfying relationships

Question 15

receiving ability: familiarity

Answer 15

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

Question 16

factors that might account for nonverbal receiving ability

Answer 16

• 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 17

teaching decoding skills

Answer 17

• decoding skill can be enhanced through training
• best conditions involve lecture and practice opportunities
• decoding skill can be taught but requires practice with feedback (ex: good job, bad job).