Benefits of Studying Nonverbal Communication

The following is an edited version of a discussion that will appear in The Nonverbal Communication Book to be published soon (Kendall Hunt).

 

But, I thought it might be of interest more generally--to anyone teaching or taking or contemplating taking a course in nonverbal communication. The exercise at the end should prove useful for stimulating class discussion.

 

The Benefits of Studying Nonverbal Communication

 
The ability to use nonverbal communication effectively can yield a variety of both general and specific benefits in your social and your workplace lives. First, let’s identify some general benefits and then some more specific benefits.

Some General Benefits

The general benefits span the entire range of your communication life whether online or face-to-face, whether personal or workplace.

First, it will improve your accuracy in understanding others, those who are from your own or similar culture as well as those who are from cultures very different from your own. Increased accuracy in understanding others will yield obvious benefits in social and workplace situations—from understanding a coy smile from a date to the meaning of a supervisor’s gestures.

Second, an increased knowledge of nonverbal communication will improve your own ability to communicate information and to persuade others. In many instances, it will help you reinforce your verbal messages. The greater your nonverbal skills, the more successful you’re likely to be at informing as well as influencing others.

Third, it will increase your own perceived attractiveness; the greater your ability to send and receive nonverbal signals, the higher your popularity and psychosocial well-being are likely to be (Burgoon, Guerrero, & Floyd, Nonverbal Communication, Allyn & Bacon, 2010).  

Fourth, it will enable you to make a more effective self-presentation. Consider, for example, that when you meet someone for the first time—at least in face-to-face meetings—you form impressions of the person largely on the basis of his or her nonverbal messages. Being able to more effectively understand and manage your nonverbal messages will enable you to present yourself in the way you want to be perceived. Each of these benefits and skills can be used to help or support another, or, unfortunately, they can be used for less noble purposes. For example, a person adept at nonverbal communication will be more effective in persuading others to buy cars or sign a mortgage they can’t afford or present themselves as competent when they aren’t or increase their attractiveness before hitting you up for a loan.

Some Specific Benefits

In addition these general benefits, here are some specific benefits of studying and mastering the art of nonverbal communication. Of course, learning about an important area of human behavior—what it is, how it works, what influences it, and a variety of other dimensions—is a benefit in itself. Increased knowledge is a benefit, pure and simple. But, there are additional, more immediately pragmatic, specific benefits that you can gain as a result for reading the text and completing the exercises. Here are just 25:

1. Use nonverbal messages to interact with your verbal messages thus creating meaningful packages of messages.
2. Use nonverbal messages to manage the impressions you give to others.
3. Use nonverbal messages to help form and maintain productive and meaningful interpersonal and work relationships.
4. Use nonverbal messages to help regulate conversations and to make them more effective and satisfying.
5. Use nonverbal messages to persuade—to influence the attitudes or behaviors of others.
6. Use nonverbal messages to help express and communicate your emotions.
7. Use nonverbal messages with sensitivity to cultural and gender differences and expectations.
8. Use hand and body gestures to communicate varied meanings.
9. Use body posture to reinforce your intended messages.
10. Manage your facial expressions to communicate the meanings you want to share.
11. Vary your facial styles to communicate a wide variety of messages.
12. Communicate different meanings with eye movements and with eye avoidance.
13. Use color, clothing, and other artifacts to communicate the meanings you wish.
14. Use spatial messages to reinforce your verbal messages and in ways appropriate to the purpose of the interaction.
15. Use territorial markers and respond to the markers of others appropriately.
16. Use touch appropriate to the relationship stage and avoid touch that may be considered overly intimate or intrusive.
17. Use paralanguage to signal conversational turns, your desire to speak or to continue listening, for example.
18. Use silence to communicate a wide variety of meanings.
19. Respond to the rules of interpersonal time that are maintained in the particular context, for example, the workplace or the classroom.
20. Manage your time effectively and efficiently; avoid wasting time.
21. Increase your own attractiveness in a variety of ways.
22. Increase your ability to detect lying (but with important limitations).
23. Increase your immediacy or closeness to others when you wish.
24. Increase your perceived power with nonverbal cues.
25. Use nonverbal cues in a civil and polite manner to further your purposes.

 Explaining the Values of Nonverbal Communication Study

Continue personalizing the areas of nonverbal communication by examining the specific benefits you can derive from the study and mastery of nonverbal communication. In Column 1 are listed the areas of nonverbal communication. For 1, 2, 3, or all of the areas, record in Column 2 any potential values or benefits you might derive in your personal or business life from greater effectiveness in using each of the channels or codes. In Column 3 indicate how you specifically might go about achieving this benefit or value.

 

Nonverbal Channel	Personal/Business Value	Achieving the Value
Body messages	Make a good first impression.	Avoid fidgeting and playing with my hair.
Facial messages
Eye messages
Artifactual messages
Spatial messages
Touch messages
Paralanguage and Silence messages
Time messages

 

 

Social Comparisons: For Class Discussion

Here is a brief update on the topic of self-concept/comparison with othersthat I included in the new editions of my Interpersonal Messages and Essentials of Human Communication. For those using a previous edition or any book for that matter, I thought this might prove a useful addition.  Even though written just a few months ago, there is much that has happened in the meantime. And so I thought this might make a useful class discussion in the interpersonal or hybrid courses—simply asking:  In what other ways do social media encourage/make easy/facilitate our comparing ourselves to others? And, more important, what is the impact of this on self-concept, self-esteem, and so many of the other concepts were cover in these basic courses?

Comparisons with Others Another way you develop your self-concept is by comparing yourself with others. When you want to gain insight into whom you are and how effective or competent you are, you probably look to your peers. For example, after an examination you probably want to know how you performed relative to the other students in your class. If you play on a baseball team, it’s important to know your batting average in comparison with others on the team. You gain an additional perspective when you see your score in comparison with the scores of your peers. And, if you want to feel good about yourself, you might compare yourself to those you know are less effective than you (it’s called downward social comparison), though there are values in comparing yourself to those you think are better than you (upward social comparison). If you want a more accurate and objective assessment, you’d compare yourself with your peers, with others who are similar to you.

      Social networking sites and social media generally have provided us with the tools  (all very easy to use) to compare ourselves to others to perhaps estimate our individual worth or perhaps make us feel superior. Here are just a half-dozen ways social media enables you to find out how you stand.

·         Search engine reports. Type in your name on Google, Bing, or Yahoo, for example, and you’ll see the number of websites on which your name (and similarly named others) appears. Type in a colleague’s name and you get his or her score which, you’re hoping, is lower than yours.

·         Network spread.  Your number of friends on Facebook or your contacts on LinkedIn or Plaxo is in some ways a measure of your potential influence. Look at a friend’s profile and you have your comparison. Not surprisingly, there are websites that will surf the net to help you contact more social network friends.

·         Online influence. Network sites such as Klout and PeerIndex provide you with a score (from 0-100) of your online influence. Your Klout score, for example, is a combination of your “true reach”—the number of people you influence, “amplification”—the degree to which you influence them, and “network”—the influence of your network. Postrank Analytics, on the other hand, provides you with a measure of engagement—the degree to which people interact with, pay attention to, read, or comment on what you write.

·         Twitter activities. The number of times you tweet might be one point of comparison but, more important, is the number of times you are tweeted about or your tweets are repeated (retweets). Twitalyzer will provide you with a three-part score: an impact score, a Klout score, and a Peer Index score and will also enable you to search the “twitter elite” for the world as well as for any specific area (you can search by zip code). Assuming your Twitter score is what you’d like it to be, a single click will enable you to post this score on your own Twitter page.

·         Blog presence.Your blog presence is readily available from your “stats” tab where you can see how many people visited your blog since inception or over the past year, month, week, or day. And you’ll also see a map of the world indicating where people who are visiting your blog come from.

·         References to written works. Google Scholar, for example, will enable you to see how many other writers have cited your works (and how many cited the works of the person you’re comparing) and the works in which you were cited. And, of course, Amazon and other online book dealers provide rankings of your books along with a star system based on reviewers’ comments.

 

25 Interpersonal Skills

 

Here is a list of 25 skills of interpersonal communication--25 things a competent interpersonal communicator should know how to do--that I used on the inside cover of my Interpersonal Messages book. But, I thought such a list might be useful more generally as a starting point for discussing what students can expect to learn to do or learn to do better than they now do it from a course in interpersonal communication. Needless to say the list is incomplete.

 

1.      Communicate with an awareness of how the interpersonal process really works.

2.      Communicate in intracultural and intercultural situations with cultural awareness and sensitivity.

3.      Increase self-awareness and self-esteem.

4.      Increase your accuracy in forming impressions of others and in managing the impressions you give to others.

5.      Regulate your listening between empathic-objective, nonjudgmental-critical, surface-depth, polite-impolite, and active-inactive modes.

6.      Use language in its full range—both denotative and connotative, with varied levels of abstraction, and appropriate directness and assertiveness.

7.      Communicate without sexism, heterosexism, ageism, or racism and with sensitivity to preferred cultural names.

8.      Use verbal messages logically and without common distortions.

9.      Use nonverbal communication signals to send and receive a wide variety of messages—through the body, face and eyes, space and territory, artifacts, touch, para-language, silence, time, and smell.

10.  Express your own feelings clearly and appropriately.

11.  Respond supportively to the emotional expressions of others.

12.  Engage in satisfying conversations; open, maintain, and close conversations comfortably and effectively.

13.  Self disclose appropriately, facilitate the disclosures of others, and resist unfair pressure to disclose.

14.  Engage in small talk comfortably.

15.  Use excuses and apologies to lessen the impact of negative messages and behaviors.

16.  Compliment others appropriately and receive compliments without discomfort.

17.  Give and respond to the advice of others in ways that maximize benefits and minimize dangers.

18.  Travel effectively through the relationship stages, communicating in ways appropriate to each stage.

19.  Be sensitive to the dark side of interpersonal relationships, guarding against unproductive jealousy and relationship abuse and violence.

20.  Establish and maintain productive relationships with friends, romantic partners, family, and workplace colleagues.

21.  Increase your own interpersonal attractiveness.

22.  Engage in effective and productive conflict management.

23.  Argue effectively and persuasively for a position or point of view, without verbal aggressiveness.

24.  Communicate with an awareness of the ethical issues involved in all forms of interpersonal interaction.

25.  Think critically about all aspects of interpersonal communication; critically evaluate a wide variety of interpersonal messages.