Personality and the structure of the nonverbal communication of emotion (original) (raw)
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Effect of individual differences in nonverbal expressiveness on transmission of emotion
Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 1981
This study tested the possibility that individual differences in nonverbal expressiveness may function as a mediating factor in the transmission of emotion through social comparison. In a quasiexperimental design, small groups consisting of one expressive person and two unexpressive people were created in which the participants sat facing each other without talking for two minutes. Self-report measures of mood indicated that tile feelings of the unexpressive people were influenced by the expressive people but the expressive people were relatively unlikely to be influenced by the unexpressive people. The findings have implications for the role of nonverbal communication in the emotional side of group interaction. Certain individuals such as tile "life" of tile party, tile charismatic politician, and tile terrified patient sitting next to you in the dentist's waiting room seem especially able to communicate their feelings to others. Tile presence of such an individual may, on tile one hand, arouse emotion in those nearby and may incite them to join in collective action such as a panic. On tile other hand, such an expressive person may, if calm, provide reassurance or induce relaxation. Feelings may, in part, be affected by tile moods of others through the process of social comparison (Schachter, 1959). In their pioneering work on emotion, Schachter and Singer (1962) started from Maranon's findings that people injected with
Nonverbal channel use in communication of emotion: How may depend on why
2011
This study investigated the hypothesis that different emotions are most effectively conveyed through specific, nonverbal channels of communication: body, face, and touch. Experiment 1 assessed the production of emotion displays. Participants generated nonverbal displays of 11 emotions, with and without channel restrictions. For both actual production and stated preferences, participants favored the body for embarrassment, guilt, pride, and shame; the face for anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness; and touch for love and sympathy. When restricted to a single channel, participants were most confident about their communication when production was limited to the emotion's preferred channel. Experiment 2 examined the reception or identification of emotion displays. Participants viewed videos of emotions communicated in unrestricted and restricted conditions and identified the communicated emotions. Emotion identification in restricted conditions was most accurate when participants viewed emotions displayed via the emotion's preferred channel. This study provides converging evidence that some emotions are communicated predominantly through different nonverbal channels. Further analysis of these channel-emotion correspondences suggests that the social function of an emotion predicts its primary channel: The body channel promotes social-status emotions, the face channel supports survival emotions, and touch supports intimate emotions.
Sex, personality, and physiological variables in the communication of affect via facial expression.
Journal of personality and social …, 1974
"Senders" viewed 25 emotionally loaded color slides. Their facial expressions were observed via a hidden television camera by "observers" who made judgments about the nature of each slide and the sender's reaction to it. A total of 64 undergraduates were arranged in eight pairings each of females sending to male observers, females sending to females, males sending to males, and males sending to females. Statistically significant communication was demonstrated, with females being more accurate senders than males. More accurate senders tended to show a smaller skin conductance and heart rate response to the slides and a more "personal" verbal report of their emotional reaction to the slides. Several personality measures were related to communication accuracy and physiological responding.
Non-verbal signs of personality: Communicative meanings of facial expressions
Non-verbal signs of personality: Communicative meanings of facial expressions, 2022
There is a lot of evidence that most people are capable of recognizing emotions by facial expressions. What information does a facial expression usually provide? Can emotions be shown without facial expressions? Can there be facial expressions without a corresponding emotional state? Are there individual facial expressions? The studies of various aspects of non-verbal communication show both similarities and differences in non-verbal behavior. It is argued that similarities are most evident at the individual level, when the focus is on the objective, formal features of behavior, while differences are more likely to be found when the analysis focuses on the relationship between individuals and interpersonal meanings of behavior. Despite the rapid expansion of research on non-verbal communication, most of it describes simple differences in the display of non-verbal signals. Although they differ in almost every other respect, most facial measurement methods focus on what is seen, on what the researcher can identify when seeing some facial movements. Most of the research methods applied are not sufficient for the study of this complex, multidimensional issue. Like all basic studies of communicative processes, proxemics is more about how than why, and more about structure than content. The article focuses on the question whether non-verbal behavior reflects cultural similarities or differences, and whether different levels of analysis allow to observe both cultural homogeneity and diversity inherent in most acts of non-verbal behavior. The authors consider the data of laboratory experiments on the relationship between emotions and adults’ facial expressions: some studies confirm the high consistency between fun and smiling, and from the low to moderate consistency between other positive emotions and smiling. The available evidence on surprise and disgust suggests that these emotions are accompanied by their ‘traditional’ facial expressions or even some components of such expressions only in a minority of cases. The American anthropologist, one of the founders of kinesics, Birdwhistell introduced this term for the complex study of facial expressions, poses, gait, and visible movements of arms and body. Birdwhistell argues that body language is determined by cultural environment rather than universal genetic programs. Birdwhistell defines kinesics as “the study of body-motion as related to the non-verbal aspects of interpersonal communication”. He argues that communication with body motion is systemic, socially learned and communicative unless proven otherwise. The article considers in detail the works and theories of Birdwhistell who often had to admit that some of his ideas were controversial. The authors conclude that Birdwhistell’s works have serious mistakes, and other researchers failed to develop his theory of kinesics. Thus, the authors consider the research in this field focusing on the so-called recognition of the communicative meanings of facial expressions.
1996
Nonverbal communicative behaviors are a primary channel for emotional expression. Emotions, in turn, and strongly influence nonverbal communication displays. Thus, the role of emotions should be a central consideration in nonverbal communication studies. This essay examined 34 articles, from the Journal of Honverbal Behavior (1976-1994), to determine how emotion is characterized and what role is attributed to socialization and culture in emotional expression. The review disclosed that emotions were usually considered simply as an abstract categorical term (e.g., fear), with little consideration for causal motivations. The impact of socialization and cultural variation was also ignored in a majority of the studies.
Intensity, Variety, and Accuracy in Nonverbal Cues and De-/Encoding: Two Experimental Investigations
2004
Nonverbal communication skill, decoding and encoding nonverbal cues effectively, is an important part of social competence. Merely experience in receiving and sending nonverbal cues, however, is not sufficient to improve nonverbal skill. Consequently, a training program was designed to develop nonverbal sensitivity of school administrators and pre-service teachers and to help them to effectively express themselves nonverbally. Two experimental investigations with school-principals and university students were to test the effectiveness of the program and to investigate psychosocial correlates of nonverbal skill. Results revealed significant improvements in nonverbal perceptiveness, expressiveness, and extraversion. Statistically significant ageand gender related differences and relationships between measures of decoding and encoding ability and psychosocial correlates were found. Recommendations are made for the pre-service and in-service curriculum.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2010
The authors address the decades-old mystery of the association between individual differences in the expression and perception of nonverbal cues of affect. Prior theories predicted positive, negative, and zero correlations in performance-given empirical results ranging from r = -.80 to r = +.64. A meta-analysis of 40 effects showed a positive correlation for nonverbal behaviors elicited as intentional communication displays but zero for spontaneous, naturalistic, or a combination of display types. There was greater variation in the results of studies having round robin designs and analyzed with statistics that do not account for the interdependence of data. The authors discuss implications for theorists to distinguish emotional skills in terms of what people are capable of doing versus what people actually do.
Unitization of spontaneous nonverbal behavior in the study of emotion communication.
Journal of Personality …, 1980
Videotapes of spontaneous facial and gestural reactions to affective slides were segmented by observers using a group adaptation of Newtson's unitization technique. In Experiment 1, 46 females and 35 males segmented the expressions of a variety of children and adults; in Experiment 2, 50 males segmented the expressions of high- versus low-expressive male and female senders. Results demonstrated that the unitization technique applied to emotion expression yields reliable patterns of segmentation that may be used to investigate the relationships of communication accuracy to both the nature of the sender's behavior and the attentional patterns of the receiver. In particular, differences in segmentation results for males and females suggest that the technique may allow the detailed examination of process-level gender differences in nonverbal sending accuracy and receiving ability.
Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 1994
The Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy (DANVA) was designed to measure individual differences in the accurate sending and receiving of nonverbal social information. The DANVA consists of four receptive and three expressive subtests that measure nonverbal processing accuracy in children from 6 to 10 years of age. Four propositions were offered to guide the gathering of construct validity data for the DANVA. In support of the propositions, researchers found that DANVA accuracy scores increased with age, were internally consistent and reliable over time, and showed significant relationships with indices of personal and social adjustment and academic achievement but were not related to IQ. Evidence for construct validity was stronger for receptive, as compared to expressive, subtests. Future research should include additional populations of subjects and study of the impact of intensity of emotion being sent or received.