Explorations in Nonverbal and Vocal Behavior

George F. Mahl, G. Mahl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317767329
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Experimental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First published in 1987. This book is a collection of selected papers about nonverbal and vocal behavior during clinical and investigative, psychological interviews. They are some of the studies conducted by students, colleagues, and the author over the past 35 years. More than half of the papers have never been published, although most of them were presented at scientific meetings. The previously published papers have appeared in widely scattered places, often as chapters in books. This volume makes available for the first time a fairly complete presentation of a coherent body of work.

I

EXPLORATIONS IN NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR

1	Introduction

This chapter contains some general considerations about nonverbal behavior that orient the reader in this field of research and thereby provide a background for the reports of specific studies that follow. Our general considerations concern varieties of nonverbal behavior and a distinction often made between social and personal behavior.

THE MANY VARIETIES OF NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR

People display a wide range of nonverbal behaviors and signs of them. To illustrate this diversity, we cite the following:

1. Familiar gestures, such as winking, finger pointing, nodding or shaking of the head, etc.

2. Idiosyncratic acts, some familiar, others not, such as scratching, licking one’s lips, touching various parts of the body, handling nearby objects, etc.

3. Postures, such as sitting expansively with legs outstretched and arms spread, or sitting compactedly with legs and arms drawn close to the trunk.

4. Spatial behavior (the proxemics of Hall, 1955, 1966), such as choosing to sit in the farthest or the closest chair.

5. Choice of clothing, such as between formal or informal attire, between unisex clothing and that which clearly marks one’s gender, even at a distance. (See, for example, Bouska & Beatty, 1978; Fortenberry, MacLean, Morris, & O’Connell, 1978; Harris, James, Chavez, Fuller, Kent, Massanari, Moore, & Walsh, 1983; Lurie, 1981; Mathes & Kempher, 1976; Rosenfeld & Plax, 1977; Solomon & Schopler, 1982.)

6. Visible signs of normally covert activity. These may include evidence of tension in skeletal muscles, such as a furrowed or bulging brow. They might include visible signs of autonomic activity, such as tearing, foot throbs caused by intense pulse strokes, changes in skin color, the appearance of sweat beads on the forehead or sweat marks in the armpits.

7. Other sensory signs of covert, usually autonomic, activity. These might be various body scents. (See Doty’s 1981 review of relevant research.) Or these might be audible signs such as various breathing noises, the various sounds of intestinal action, the smacking of lips. Under certain conditions these might include tactile cues. A greeting or parting handshake may reveal moisture, body temperature, muscular tone, and aspects of handling body contact.

Mindful of this range of behaviors and their signs, I realize that our research involves only a few categories of behavior, and mainly those visible to the therapist or observer, or—in a few instances—those felt by the client and reported to the therapist.

SOCIAL AND PERSONAL BEHAVIOR

Most investigators find it useful to distinguish between actions with primarily a communicative, social function and actions with primarily a personal, “expressive” function. Nodding and shaking of the head to indicate “Yes” and “No” are examples of primarily communicative actions. The person here intends to communicate a message, “Yes” or “No” and uses actions that have a meaning shared by sender and receiver of the message. This meaning is culturally determined. In another culture, nodding the head may signify “No,” rather than “Yes.” Intentionality and culturally patterned, shared meanings are characteristic of communicative actions. Such actions are often called emblems. Further discussions of them and their cultural variations and distributions are presented in Ekman, Friesen, and Bear (1984), LaBarre (1964), and Morris, Collett, Marsh, and O’Shaughnessy (1979). Scratching or stroking oneself in a manner unrelated to the concurrent verbalization are examples of primarily personal, expressive actions. The person here does not intend to communicate a message, and the acts do not have culturally patterned, shared meanings.

Although not communicative, personal-expressive actions are not exempt from, or devoid of, social influence. In the first place, they may be culturally patterned, albeit not part of a culturally patterned code. A given society, for example, might prohibit public self-scratching as ours taboos public nose picking. In the second place, these actions might be informative to the other person, although not communicative. They might suggest, for example, that something—one can’t be sure what—was operative in the speaker that he was not talking about and did not intend to talk about. Or they might inform a very knowledgeable individual of the nature of that unspoken matter: that the speaker who scratched himself was harboring some inhibited annoyance somehow related to the verbal interaction, or that the person stroked herself because of some unspoken, to-be-secret sensuous current aroused in the interaction. Such knowledge would not be based on a shared code, but on such things as intimate knowledge of the regularities of the nonverbal behavior of the individual concerned or of regularities in the nonverbal behavior of most people in a given culture.

In the third place, personal-expressive actions may have unacknowledged social consequences. The self-scratching and stroking might arouse the same affects in the other as we have attributed to the speaker. And the other might engage in the same or contrary action. Thus, the self-stroking by one person, might arouse a sensuous current in the other, who then unintentionally starts to stroke him or herself. Or the other might become privately annoyed and unintentionally scratch himself. Thus, a “conversation of gestures” might accompany an unrelated verbal “conversation of symbols” (to use phrases of George Herbert Mead, 1934). Two people talking about the weather, might end up stroking themselves.

Just as personal-expressive actions are not exempt from social influence, so communicative actions are subject to personal influence, at least in our culture. This is because our rules of communication allow great latitude to the use of symbolic acts. It is not obligatory to use them at all. And, if used, considerable stylistic variation is permissible. Thus, we may or may not signal “Yes” or “No” with our head. And if we do so, we may nod or shake our heads with varying speeds, amplitudes, etc. One of the observations in the next chapter provides a very clear example of the personal determination of the use of a communicative gesture, the finger. In chapter 7, we illustrate how the type of clothing may reflect psychic states as well as signal the gender of the wearer.

Many clinicians, including myself, tend to concentrate on personal-expressive actions, rather than permissible variations in communicative acts, when we focus on the nonverbal manifestations of personal psychodynamics. This is more habitual, than logically necessary. I believe this emphasis is due to a combination of factors: (a) the greater degree to which such actions capture our attention (e.g., self-scratching is more noticeable than a slight change in the vigor of a communicative gesture), (b) the frequency with which they are unrelated to the concurrent manifest verbalizations, and (c) the degree to which we are interested in what is not being said, especially in what is unconscious.

The distinction between personal-expressive and communicative actions and the role of personal determinants in the latter are very important issues, in my opinion.¹ Thus, they are discussed further in later parts of this book, especially in the latter parts of the next chapter. (There we use Krout’s (1935) term autistic instead of personal-expressive.) Related discussions appear in Part II of this book, for analogous issues arise in the area of vocal behavior. (See chapter 19, for example.)

¹ Our classification of nonverbal behavior into personal-expressive and communicative actions has had heuristic value for us, as well as highlighting what we believe is a very important distinction for investigators in this field to keep in mind. But we do not claim it to be the only useful classification. Others have found different classifications useful or significant. Thus Freedman (1972); and Freedman and Hoffman, (1967) have found the distinction between body and object focused movements to be useful. The most widely cited classification is the five-fold one of Ekman and Friesen (1969): emblems, communicative substitutes for words; illustrators, accompaniments of speech that variously illustrate it; affect displays, primarily facial expressions of emotions; regulators, actions regulating the reciprocal interaction between speaker and listener; and adaptors, largely unintended manifestations of needs and emotions. Ekman and Friesen present their categories in the context of the most thorough and penetrating discussion known to us of issues of usage, origin, and coding processes of nonverbal behavior. Our personal-expressive category includes their adaptors and overlaps with unintended affect displays. Our communicative actions include their emblems, illustrators, regulators, and intended affect displays. We would still use our categories for the type of research of interest to us, adding theirs, when indicated, as subcategories of ours. Researchers with different interests might well find theirs more useful. Readers interested in a variety of ways to categorize and study nonverbal behavior will find the handbook edited by Scherer and Ekman (1982) very informative.

2	Gestures and Body Movements in Interviews^1

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

—S. Freud (1905/1953b, pp. 77–78)

Psychotherapy research [largely] neglects the study of gestures and body movements during interviews…

This situation is indeed remarkable when viewed from the standpoint of clinical experience and lore, and in historical context. Clinical lore has it that some of the most significant interaction between patients and therapists transpires by means of a nonverbal channel, and that experienced, skillful clinicians are preconsciously, if not consciously, guided by the bodily behavior of their patient. They have a sensitive “third eye,” as it were. Such clinical precepts rest on a very respectable historical foundation. From Darwin’s The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872/1955) down to the present, keen observers and investigators of human behavior have contributed to the laying of that foundation. Their work has provided very suggestive evidence that the gestures and body activity of interview participants are functionally related to variables of central concern to both psychotherapists and investigators of psychotherapy.

Very brief mention of some of the highlights of this historical background is worthwhile in itself and useful as part of the introduction to my own work in this area. Darwin’s work remains the most monumental one, in my opinion. The scope of his data was extremely broad. It included observations of animals as well as man, cross-cultural material, developmental data, and observations of human behavior in various clinical conditions—for example, in health, in psychosis, and in blindness and deafness. The breadth of his thinking matched that of his data. Although he presented his work in a broad biological context, he introduced concepts (or emphasized those of others) that anticipated the ideas of disciplines as widely divergent as psychoanalysis and modern structural linguistics. The ideas of Darwin that are most relevant for our purposes can be summarized as follows:

1. He concluded that distinctive nonverbal behavior patterns are characteristic of many distinct emotional states. He thought these patterns often consisted of very slight movements that have developed from larger movements and more extensive patterns present in childhood. (He suggested the clenched fist of an angry man, for example, is a remnant of a more extensive attack pattern. The downturned mouth of sadness and the frown of displeasure, he proposed, were remnants of screaming in childhood.) [See chapter 7 for further discussion of these ideas of Darwin.]

2. He emphasized that these remnants of emotional patterns become involuntary.

3. They may occur transiently or chronically.

4. When an individual attempts to repress overt emotional expression, movements of some kind are very likely to occur. These might be expressive remnants that have become involuntary, or they might be random, “purposeless” acts—like the tail switching of an annoyed cat. The latter are a result of the sheer quantity of excitation of the nervous system.

5. Many expressive movements may also have a signaling or communicative function. He articulated the principle of contrasting pairs in this connection, which has become a fundamental concept of modern linguistics. Darwin noted, for example, that an angry cat crouches with a depressed back whereas a friendly cat arches his back and that these contrasting patterns might very well have a signaling function. The same might be true, he speculated, of the depressed mouth of the sad person and the upturned mouth of the happy one.

6. Although Darwin emphasized the universality of expressive behavior patterns among the cultures of man, he also noted that cultural patterning might occur. [Modern research has confirmed the pan-cultural existence of facial expressions of some basic emotions in literate and preliterate cultures (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1970, pp. 408–431; especially Ekman, Sorenson, & Friesen, 1969; Ekman & Friesen, 1971; Izard, 1969).]

Freud’s main contribution to our topic was his proposal that conflicted, repressed-unconscious impulses, wishful thoughts, emotions, and memories were often manifested in action instead of in thought. The action might consist of innate responses or of responses that had occ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• PART I: EXPLORATIONS IN NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR
• PART II: EXPLORATIONS IN VOCAL BEHAVIOR
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index