Microsoft Word Chapter 1 done doc

Culture and the Channels of Nonverbal Communication 
Paul Ekman and his colleagues have studied the influence of 
culture on the facial display of emotions. They have concluded that 
display rules are particular to each culture and dictate what kinds of 
emotional expressions people are supposed to show. Eye contact 
and gaze are also powerful nonverbal cues. The use of personal 
space is a nonverbal behavior with wide cultural variations. 
Emblems are nonverbal gestures of the hands and arms that have 
well-understood definitions within a given culture.  
Multichannel Nonverbal Communication : 
In everyday life, we usually receive information from multiple 
channels simultaneously. The Social Interpretation Task (SIT), 
which uses videotaped naturally occurring interactions as stimuli, 
reveals that people are able to interpret such cues fairly accurately 
by making use of multiple cues. Research with the SIT indicates 
that extroverts may be better decoders than introverts.
Gender and Nonverbal Communication : 
Women are better than men at both decoding and encoding 
nonverbal behavior, with respect to whether people are telling the 

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truth. Men, however, are better at detecting lies. This finding can be 
explained by social-role theory, which claims that sex differences 
in social behavior are due to society’s division of labor between the 
sexes. Supportive evidence for this interpretation is provided by 
Hall (1979), who found that women’s “nonverbal politeness” or 
attending to nonverbal cues that convey what people want others to 
see and ignoring nonverbal cues that leak people’s true feelings. It 
has also been found that decoding is correlated with the degree of 
oppression of women in the culture.
Thus, it is seen that nonverbal behavior is used to express 
emotion, convey attitudes, communicate personality traits, and 
facilitate or modify verbal communication. Among the various 
channels of nonverbal communication much research has been 
done on facial expressions. In the following section we will discuss 
Darwin;s theory of universal facial expressions of emotion.