Indian Journal of Business Management & Technology, ISSN 2319-5797, Volume 8, Number 1/2 (2021): 1 - 8
© Arya PG College (College with Potential for Excellence Status by UGC) & Business Press India Publication, Delhi
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Nonverbal Communication: An Approach Towards Behavior and Style

RS Vohra and Sahin Singh
Assistant Professor, Department of Commerce
Assistant Professor, Department of Social Work
Guru Nanak Khalsa College, Yamunanagar (Haryana), India
⃰ Email: rajtarman21312@gmail.com

Abstract

In 18th and 19th centuries, scholars believed that emotional expression and gestures, so-called "natural language", undoubtedly provide basis for most refined and artificial verbal symbolic communication. Although the analogy of "non-verbal behaviour as communication" has historical precedent in this field, two additional analogies can identify: non-verbal behavior as personal language and as a skill. Each port introduces an important difference between the instrumental aspect of action and the performance aspect, the latter being a personalized and stylized way of performing life tasks. One of the major problems in focusing on the interpretation of non-verbal behaviour is to treat it as a separate, independent, and absolute form of communication. Both the physical and social aspects of the environment are the contributing factors to non-verbal behaviour as meaningful communication.

Keywords: Communication, Nonverbal Behavior, Researchers.

Introduction

In 18th and 19th centuries, scholars believed that emotional expression and gestures, so-called "natural language", undoubtedly provide basis for most refined and artificial verbal symbolic communication. The established limitations of specific changes in the analogy of act as communication are vague, and the clear categories of metaphors used by specific researchers are difficult to fully clarify. Although the analogy of "non-verbal behaviour as communication" has historical precedent in this field, two additional analogies can identify: non-verbal behavior as personal language and as a skill. Each port introduces an important difference between the instrumental aspect of action and the performance aspect, the latter being a personalized and stylized way of performing life tasks. Provided comparison with person’s signature, voice, or fingerprint, such view emphasizes integrity, continuity, and uniqueness of configuration, while downplaying complexity, skill, and authenticity. A demonstration of the application of analogy has been provided, but the richness of metaphor has not yet been fully utilized. Perhaps the most attractive metaphor for non-verbal behavior is the emphasis on technical performance. For some time, the result of the analogy of acquired skills has been regarded as a way of thinking about non-verbal behaviour. However, its expansion of non-verbal behavior has only recently appeared.
Scientific Study of Nonverbal Behaviour
Literature dealing with non-verbal behaviour as communication has increased dramatically in volume and complexity, particularly during the last several decades.
The results of the search listed over 700 entries that had the descriptor term ‘non-verbal behaviour’ or ‘non- verbal communication’. Over 500 of these entries were journal articles, the vast majority of which were empirically based. The topic is usually presented with two different emphases: (1) a theoretical-research orientation and (2) an application-demonstration orientation. Because of its relation to the subtle and interpretative aspects of communication, there is a tendency on the part of popular lay texts to emphasise application without a balanced presentation of the theory and research which examines the validity and reliability aspects necessary for proper understanding of non-verbal behaviour as one form of communication. Indeed, an interesting piece in this vein appeared on the internet recently, providing an extended discourse on the psychological meaning of the handshake.
Behavioral Dimensions in Nonverbal Communication
The first category is kinesics, commonly referred to as ‘body language’, and includes movements of the hand, arm, head, foot, and leg, postural shifts, gestures, eye movements, and facial expressions. A second category is paralanguage and is defined as content-free vocalisations and patterns associated with speech such as voice pitch, volume, frequency, stuttering, filled pauses (for example, ‘ah’), silent pauses, interruptions, and measures of speech rate and number of words spoken in a given unit of time. A third category involves physical contact in the form of touching. Another category is proxemics, which involves interpersonal spacing and norms of territoriality.
A fifth category concerns the physical characteristics of people such as skin colour, body shape, body odour, and attractiveness. Related to physical characteristics is the category of artifacts or adornments such as perfume, clothes, jewellery, and wigs. Environmental factors make up the last category and deal with the influences of the physical setting in which the behaviour occurs: a classroom, an office, a hallway, or a street corner. Knapp’s (1984) seven dimensions help depict the breadth of non-verbal communication. It is interesting to note that the physical characteristic, adornment, and environmental factor categories do not involve an assessment of overt non-verbal expressions, but rather information about the actor that is communicated non-verbally.
Setting and Role Influences on Nonverbal Behaviour
One of the major problems in focusing on the interpretation of non-verbal behaviour is to treat it as a separate, independent, and absolute form of communication. Both the physical and social aspects of the environment are the contributing factors to non-verbal behaviour as meaningful communication. For example, the furniture arrangement in an office can be a major factor influencing the nonverbal behaviour exhibited therein. Body movements differ depending upon whether the person is sitting behind a desk or openly in a chair. The proximity and angle of seating arrangements have been shown to serve different functions during interaction and to affect such behaviour as eye contact, gazing, and head rotation. Non-verbal behaviour may have very different meanings when exhibited on the street rather than, say, in a classroom. Background noise level in a work setting may produce exaggerated non-verbal communication patterns that would have very different meaning in a more quiet setting such as a library. The influence of ecological factors on behaviour has become an increasingly important focus in the study of human behaviour. Most research in nonverbal communication dealing with physical-environmental factors focused on interpersonal spacing, proxemics, and cultural differences in interaction patterns.
The social climate of the environment is also an important factor in the consideration of non-verbal behaviour. Research has demonstrated that different behaviour is produced in stressful versus unstressful situations. The formality of a setting will determine the degree to which nonverbal behaviour is suppressed or performed. Competitive versus cooperative interaction settings will also produce different types, levels, and frequencies of nonverbal behaviour.
Communicative behaviour to be explicitly goal-directed, with an immediate adjustment on the part of the encoder depending upon the decoder’s response, limits the number of behaviour that can be considered communicative. In typical conversations, many nonverbal behaviour become automatic responses and are performed at low levels of awareness or involve no awareness at all. What was once a specifically defined, goal- directed behaviour becomes habitual and is no longer a product of conscious intention. The degree to which nonverbal behaviour involves varying levels of awareness, then becomes difficult to determine. Another consideration for the understanding of non-verbal communication is whether or not the encoder and decoder share a common, socially defined signal system.
Approaches to Nonverbal Behaviour as Communication
Perhaps the most useful model of non-verbal communication that encompasses these issues (but does not resolve them) is one which is originally presented. They began by distinguishing between three characteristics of non-verbal behaviour: (1) usage, (2) origin, and (3) coding. Usage refers to the circumstances that exist at the time of the non-verbal act. It includes consideration of the external condition that affects the act, such as the physical setting, role relationship, and emotional tone of the interaction. For example, the encoder and decoder may be communicating in an office, a home, a car, or a street. The role relationship may involve that of interviewer– interviewee, therapist–client, supervisor–employee, husband–wife, or teacher–student. The emotional tone may be formal or informal, stressful or relaxed, friendly or hostile, warm or cold, and competitive or cooperative. Usage also involves the relationship between verbal and non-verbal behaviour. For instance, non-verbal acts may serve to accent, duplicate, support, or substitute for – or they may be unrelated to – verbal behaviour.
In addition, usage involves external feedback, which is defined as the receiver’s verbal or non-verbal reactions to the encoder’s nonverbal behaviour as interpreted by the encoder. This does not involve the receiver’s actual interpretations of the sender’s behaviour, but is only information to the sender that his or her non-verbal behaviour have been received and evaluated. Finally, usage also refers to the type of information conveyed in terms of being informative, communicative, or interactive. Informative and communicative acts have been discussed. Interactive acts are those that detectably influence or modify the behaviour of the other participants in an interaction. Thus, these three information types involve the degree to which nonverbal messages are understood, provide information, and influence the behaviour of other people. Some nonverbal behaviour is rooted in the nervous system, such as reflex actions; other nonverbal behaviour is commonly learned and used in dealing with the environment: for example, human beings use their feet for transportation in one form or another. A third source of nonverbal behaviour refers to culture, family, or any other instrumental or socially distinguishable form of behaviour. Thus, we adopt idiosyncratic behaviour when driving a car; we eat in a certain manner and groom ourselves in various ways. Social customs dictate nonverbal patterns of greeting one another, expressing approval or disapproval, and apportioning appropriate distances from one another depending upon the type of interaction involved.
The third characteristic of nonverbal behaviour is coding, that is, the meaning attached to a non-verbal act. The primary distinction is between extrinsic and intrinsic codes. Extrinsically coded acts signify something else and may be either arbitrarily or iconically coded. Arbitrarily coded acts bear no visual resemblance to what they represent. A thumbs-up sign to signal that everything is OK would be an arbitrarily coded act since it conveys no meaning ‘by itself’. An iconically coded act tends to resemble what it signifies, as in the example of a throat-cutting movement with a finger. Intrinsically coded movements are what they signify. Playfully hitting a person, say on the upper arm, is an intrinsically coded act in that it is actually a form of aggression.
Emblems in Nonverbal Communication
These are non-verbal acts that have direct verbal translation and can substitute for words, the meaning of which is well understood by a particular group, class, or culture. Emblems originate through learning, most of which is culture-specific, and may be shown in any area of the body. Examples include waving the hands in a greeting or frowning to indicate disapproval.
The culture-specific nature of emblems can come into sharp focus when unintentional communication occurs as a function of an encoder and decoder having learned different meanings for identical emblematic displays.
Illustrators in Nonverbal Communication
These are movements that are tied directly to speech and serve to illustrate what is verbalised. Illustrators are socially learned, usually through imitation by a child of a person he or she wishes to resemble. An example of an illustrator is holding the hands a certain distance apart to indicate the length of an object.
Regulators in Nonverbal Communication
These non-verbal acts serve to regulate conversation flow between people. Regulators are often culture-specific and may be subtle indicators to direct verbal interaction such as head nods, body position shifts, and eye contact. Because of their subtle nature, regulators are often involved in miscommunication and inappropriate responses among people of different cultures or ethnic backgrounds.
Adaptors in Nonverbal Communication
These are object or self-manipulations. The specific behaviour is first learned as efforts to satisfy bodily needs, usually during childhood. In adult expression, only a fragment of the original adaptive behaviour is exhibited. Adaptors are behavioural habits and are triggered by some feature of the setting that relates to the original need.
There are three types of adaptors: (1) self-adaptors such as scratching the head or clasping the hands; (2) alter- adaptors, which may include protective hand movements and arm-folding intended to protect oneself from attack or to represent intimacy, withdrawal, or flight; and (3) object adaptors, which are originally learned to perform instrumental tasks and may include tapping a pencil on the table or smoking behaviour.
Affect Displays in Nonverbal Communication
These consist primarily of facial expressions of emotions. There is evidence that people from different cultures agree on their judgments of expressions for the primary emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, disgust, and interest) but disagree on their ratings of the intensity of these expressions ). However, these expressions are usually modified and often hidden by cultural display rules learned as ‘appropriate’ behaviour. Thus, affect displays may be masked in social settings in order to show socially acceptable behaviour. Recent findings related to this issue have led to the development of an interactionist perspective that integrates findings supportive of both cultural specificity and universality.
Extended use of the system has focused on a number of significant topic areas, among which could be cited many investigations into the relationships between genuine and recalled emotion and facial expression and the utility of the system in distinguishing honest and authentic expressions from the deceptive and dissembling.
Communication Specificity and Channel Capability of Message Transmission
Another way of organizing nonverbal acts in terms of their communicative nature is by focusing on the ‘communication specificity’ and channel capability of message transmission. These concepts have been presented by Dittmann as part of a larger model of the communication of emotions and are an important aspect of using non- verbal behaviour as a communication skill. Dittmann (1978) focused primarily on four major channels of communication:
(1) language, (2) facial expression, (3) vocalization, and (4) body movements. These four channels can be discussed in terms of their ‘capacity’, defined as the amount of information each may transmit at any given moment. Channel capacity can be described along two dimensions: (1) communication specificity (communicative-expressive) and (2) information value (discrete-continuous).
The closer a channel is to the communicative end of the continuum, the more discrete its information value will be in terms of containing distinguishable units with identifiable meanings (for instance, words). The more discrete a communication is, the greater the communication specificity it will usually have. These channels have the greatest capacity for conveying the largest number of messages with a wide variety of emotional meaning. Channels at the other end of the capacity dimension are described as being relatively more expressive and continuous. For example, foot movements or changes in posture are more continuous behaviour than are spoken words, and are more expressive than specifically communicative in their emotional content. These channels have a lower capacity for conveying information regarding how a person is feeling.
Facial expressions and vocalization (paralanguage) may vary in their capacity to convey emotional expression depending on their delivery, the role the person is playing, the setting of the behaviour, and whether the decoders are family, friends, or strangers.
Nonverbal Communication in Context
Nonverbal behaviour, as a communication skill, is most usefully understood when discussed in role setting and defined contexts. With the possible exception of facial expressions subject to display rules, non-verbal communication cannot be discussed adequately by presenting principles that have universal application. Perhaps a useful way of presenting research results as applied to communication skills is to provide a sampling of findings in selected contexts.
In the review, the relevance of non-verbal behaviour to communication in general and suggested several assumptions from which the research can be viewed. Among these are that human communication consists primarily of combinations of channel signals such as spatial, facial, and vocal signals operating together. Another assumption is that communication is composed of ‘multilevel signals’ and deals with broader interpretations of interactions such as general labeling (for example, a social or professional encounter) and inferences about longer-term relationships among the interactants.
Setting and Role Applications
A major limitation of much non-verbal behaviour research is that it is conducted in a laboratory setting devoid of many of the contextually relevant environmental and social features present in real-life interactions. This is a serious problem in attempts to generalise techniques of impression management and processes of impression formation to specific role-defined settings, health professional–patient interactions, the employment interview, and police–citizen encounters. Professionals in these areas have a special interest in non-verbal behaviour. Accurate and effective communication is crucial to accomplishing the purposes of the interaction.
Dispositional causes of observed behaviour are contrasted with situational causes such as attributing one’s behaviour to momentary discomfort or confusion, crowding, response to another’s actions, or other events in the immediate environment.
Some Research Implications
Building on the idea of cultural display rules, investigations designed to discover the situations which produce guilt for members of different cultural groups would be helpful. Situations that produce guilt are likely to vary with an individual’s cultural background and experience.
When identified, these situations could then be used as settings for enacting scripts that involve either deception or truth telling by subjects from those cultures. The enactments should reveal the nonverbal behaviour that distinguish deceivers and truth tellers within the cultural groups. These behaviour would be culturally specific ‘leaked’ cues.
Following this approach, such studies could be implemented in stages. First, interviews would be conducted to learn about a culture’s ‘folk psychology’ of deception. Respondents would be asked about the kinds of lies and lying situations that are permissible and those that are taboo within their culture. Experimental deception vignettes would be presented for respondents’ reactions in terms of feelings of guilt, shame, and stress. The vignettes could be designed to vary in terms of such dimensions as whether the person represents a group or her/ himself, the presence of an audience during the interview, and the extent to which he or she prepared for the questions being asked.
Themes for Analysis
Moving pictures shown on video or film are panoramas of quickly changing actions, sounds, and expressions. Just where to focus one’s attention is a basic analytic problem. Patterned movements are an important part of the total situation. By anchoring the movements to feelings and intentions, one can get an idea of their meaning. But there are other sources of explanation for what is observed. These sources may be referred to as context. Included as context are the semi-fixed objects in the setting (for instance, furniture), the other people with whom the subject interacts, and the nature of the discourse that transpires. The proposition that context greatly influences social interaction/behaviour. Highlighted here is a structure for interpreting material on the tapes. It is obvious that the particular intention–interpretation relationships of interest vary with particular circumstances. Several issues are particularly salient within the area of international politics. Of interest might be questions such as: What is the state of health of the leader? To what degree are statements honestly expressive of true beliefs? How committed is the person to the position expressed? How fully consolidated and secure is the person’s political position?
Knowing where to focus attention is a first step in assessment. A particular theme is emphasised in each of the political issues mentioned above. Signs of failing health are suggested by incongruities or inconsistencies in verbal and non-verbal behaviours, as well as between different non-verbal channels. Deception is suggested by excessive body activity, as well as deviations from baseline data.
Strong commitment to policy is revealed in increased intensity of behaviours expressed in a variety of channels. The careful recording of proxemic activity or spatial relationships provides clues to political status. Biographical profiles summarise co-varying clusters of facial expressions and body movements. Each of these themes serves to direct an analyst’s attention to relationships (for health indicators and profiles), to particular non-verbal channels (for deception and status indicators), or to amount (as in the case of commitment). Knowing specifically what to look at is the second step in assessment.
Systematic Comparisons
The strategy of systematic comparison is designed to increase an analyst’s understanding of his ‘subject’. This is done by tracking the displays exhibited by selected individuals across situations and in conjunction with verbal statements. Comparisons would be made in several ways: (1) examine deviations from baseline data established for each person (for instance, speech errors); (2) compare nonverbal displays for the same person in different situations (for example, within or outside home country; formal or informal settings); and (3) compare displays for different types of verbal statements (for example, defence of position, policy commitment). These analyses highlight consistencies and inconsistencies at several levels between situations, between verbal and non- verbal channels, and within different non-verbal channels. They also alert the analyst to changes in nonverbal activity:
Being aware of changes from a baseline period would give one a better understanding of relatively unique expressive behaviour. Further analysis consists of comparing different persons in similar situations or dealing with similar subject matter. The value of these comparisons is that they contribute to the development of a system of movement representation similar to the notation and animation systems. Extracted from the data are sets of coordinated movements which may change over time and situations. The coordinated movements can be represented in animated graphic displays. Illuminated by such displays are ‘postural’ differences within actors across time and between actors. When associated with events and context, the observations turn on the issue of how the feelings and intentions which are evoked by different situations are represented in body movement. When compared to displays by actors in other cultural settings, the observations are relevant to the question.
Conclusion
It can be concluded that both the physical and social aspects of the environment are the contributing factors to non-verbal behaviour as meaningful communication. Accurate and effective communication is crucial to accomplishing the purposes of the interaction. Being aware of changes from a baseline period would give one a better understanding of relatively unique expressive behaviour.
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