PSYC 215 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Nonverbal Communication, Verbal Behavior, Display Rules
16 May 2018
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Lecture 8 Feb 1st
➢ Social Perception is defined as the study of how we form
impressions of other people and make inferences about them.
➢ An important source of information about other people is their
non verbal behaviour
➢ Nonverbal Communication:
• The way in which people communicate intentionally or
unintentionally without words.
• Nonverbal cues: Include facial expressions, tones of voice,
gestures, body position and movement, the use of touch and
eye gaze.
• Primary Uses of Nonverbal Behaviour:
▪ Expressing emotion
▪ Conveying attitudes
▪ Communicating personality
▪ Substitution for verbal messages
• Facial expressions are the most significant channel of
nonverbal communication.
• Charles Darwin believed that the primary emotions
conveyed by the face are universal. He believed they
provided some survival value to the members of a species.
• Cross cultural research by Ekman and his colleagues
support the universality of at least six facial expressions of
emotion:
▪ Anger, happiness, surprise, fear, disgust and
sadness.
▪ Contempt and others have since bee added to the
list.
▪ Happiness has the greatest consensus of being
recognized universally while fear has the least
consensus.
• Other researchers question the universal recognition of the
basic facial expressions of emotion (e.g. Russell et al., 1993)
• Culture affects how expressions are interpreted.
• Masuda and colleagues (2008)
▪ They studied how Japanese and American
participants interpreted the emotion of a target
figure using cartoon drawings of people in groups.
▪ The Japanese participants were more influenced by
the expressions of group members surrounding the
target figure than were the Americans.
• Facial expressions may sometimes be hard to interpret
accurately because:
▪ People may try to appear less emotional than they
are.
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