PSYS 324 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Appeasement

• School: Ball State University
• Department: Psychological Science
• Course: PSYS 324
• Professor: Katie Lawson

Document Summary

Effectively encoding and decoding nonverbal behaviors are important for all social interactions. Women convey nonverbal messages and cues more accurately than men convey them. Men tend to suppress nonverbal expressions more around their adolescence, whereas women amplify their expressions. Women also decode and read other individual"s nonverbal cues more accurately than men. This gender difference is seen in childhood, even though it is seen more in adulthood. These gender difference patterns of encoding and decoding say that both genders aren"t different because of inherent differences, but because of pressures they face to fit in their differing gender roles. More specifically, female roles entail women to be more communal and establish or keep social relationships, which need more sensitivity to interpersonal things. When looking at smiling around the world, men tend to smile less than women do. In infancy and childhood, this difference doesn"t exist, but the differences swell during adolescence. During middle and older adulthood, this gap declines again.