Compositions in Black and White: Determinants of interaction in interracial dyads.

Examined the initial, unstructured interactions of 40 interracial (Black–White) dyads in which 3 factors were systematically varied. These factors were the disposition of the White dyad members to either seek out or shun interaction with Blacks, the race (Black vs White) of the experimenter, and the gender composition (male–male vs female–female) of the dyads. Results show that within dyads, White dyad members displayed more interactional involvement than their Black partners but experienced the interactions as more stressful and uncomfortable. Whites predisposed to avoid interaction with Blacks looked and smiled at their partners less than those predisposed to initiate interaction. Both Black and White members of these avoidance dyads reported heightened feelings of anxiety and concern about their interactions, but the moderating influences of the Whites' approach–avoidance dispositions on interaction behavior were essentially limited to conditions in which the experimenter was Black and the White S was a "solo minority." It is suggested that Black–White partner effects are attributable to differing amounts of cross-race contact typically experienced by Blacks and Whites. Black–White experimenter effects are interpreted in terms of S. E. Taylor's (1981) hypothesis that stereotypes and related dispositions are activated in social contexts in which group membership is made salient. (38 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Nonverbal communication and counseling outcome.

Nonverbal abilities and behaviors and verbal–nonverbal (VB–NVB) congruence of both counselor and client were studied in relation to judgments by counselors and clients of counseling outcome. 40 university students were clients; 20 counseling or clinical psychology graduate students were counselors. 40 counseling dyads were videotaped during 30-min counseling sessions. NVB abilities were assessed by the Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity and an encoding task. Raters judged the presence of 7 NVB behaviors for each 5-sec segment of the videotaped session. Congruence was measured through postsession recall by counselor and client of consistency of feelings expressed through VB and NVB channels of communication. Only VB–NVB congruence was significantly related to outcome, suggesting that the NVB dimension is important primarily as it interacts with the VB dimension. Recommendations are made for use of new methodologies in future research to examine the complex interactions involving NVB communication. (41 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Nonverbal communication in the context of dissociative processes.

Nonverbal communication, at both conscious and unconscious levels, can be portrayed as a type of "body language," a communication between the psychic bodies of patient and therapist. In this article, the author provides several examples of this communication process in the context of a psychoanalytic treatment with a patient who has a history of trauma resulting in frequent dissociative states. Motoric actions (drawing), somatosensory symptoms, and intense affect states represent the media through which she "informs" the analyst of her painful experiences. The analyst's surrender to countertransference states, such as deadness, constitutes the beginning of attunement to the patient's body communications. In one particularly unusual symptom of dissociation, the patient exhibits physical abilities that she is incapable of in more integrated states. An attempt is made to understand this event from a phenomenological and neurobiological perspective. Using an information-processing model, the author illustrates one instance of how the patient's subsymbolic information may be converted to the verbal symbolic via the analyst's use of evoked images. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Nonverbal disclosure of teacher deception and interpersonal affect.

Explored the effect of verbal dissembling on nonverbal behavior. Stimulus teachers were 32 female undergraduates who were led to be verbally truthful or deceptive to a student confederate. The teachers' underlying affective state and the publicness of the interaction between teacher and student were also varied experimentally. Videotaped samples of teachers' nonverbal behavior were shown to 37 naive judges (female undergraduates) who rated how pleased the teachers appeared. Results show that nonverbal behavior tends to reflect whether a teacher is dissembling or truthful. In addition, when being truthful, teachers revealed their underlying affective states; but when lying, there was no difference in nonverbal behavior according to affective state. Teachers' nonverbal behavior also tended to occur differentially according to the publicness of the interaction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Nonverbal communication deficits and response to performance feedback in depression.

Evaluated aspects of recent behavioral and cognitive theories of depression. Social-skill concepts were conceived as involving 2 component processes, termed receptive and expressive communication, and the ability of depressed Ss to engage in these behaviors was studied within a nonverbal communication paradigm. Three groups of 10 females—depressed, psychiatric control, and normal control—had their facial expressions videotaped while exposed to a differential classical conditioning procedure, with pictorial stimuli following 1 CS, auditory stimuli following a 2nd CS, and a neutral event following a 3rd CS. In a 2nd session, the Ss observed the videotapes of other Ss, one from each diagnostic group, and judged which type of conditioning trial the observed S was undergoing, in addition to predicting their anticipated performance prior to each set of judgments. Results indicate that the depressed Ss were the most difficult to judge correctly; this deficit did not seem to be attributable to idiosyncratic response predispositions on the part of the depressives. This finding is interpreted as consistent with P. M. Lewinsohn's (see PA, Vol 53:7587) theory. Predictions of performance did not differ significantly between groups, failing to support one aspect of A. T. Beck's (1967) theory. For all groups, changes in Ss' ratings of their anticipated performance were highly correlated with the discrepancy between predicted and actual performance on previous trials. This finding is contrary to a prediction derived from M. E. Seligman's (see record 1973-06430-001) model of depression. (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Nonverbal communication accuracy in married couples: Relationship with marital complaints.

48 recently married couples (aged 20–31 yrs) individually viewed and described their reactions to slides in 5 categories (e.g., sexual, scenic, and unpleasant); videotapes of their facial expressions were then shown to their spouses, who were asked to match the expressions to the appropriate picture categories. Ss also completed the Communication of Affect Receiving Ability Test. Based on social penetration theory, it was predicted that (1) couples cohabiting longer would be better at decoding their partners' nonverbal expressions than couples cohabiting a shorter time, (2) Ss married to accurate nonverbal communicators would evidence fewer marital complaints, and (3) Ss with fewer marital complaints would be better nonverbal communicators. Data suggest that nonverbal decoding abilities do not covary with relationship length, although spouses were better at decoding their partners' expression than were a panel of judges. Nonverbal sensitivity to one's spouse did not covary with marital complaints, although an internal analysis suggested that wives' ability to decode husbands' poorly encoded messages covaried negatively with both his and her complaints. Husbands married to wives who were good encoders had fewer complaints, whereas the reverse was true for the relationship between husbands' encoding abilities and wives' complaints. (28 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Nonverbal technique for measuring affect using facial expression photographs as stimuli.

50 depressed inpatient and 50 normal females matched on age (M = 39 yr.), education, and socioeconomic status were each given a deck of facial expression photographs and asked to choose 1 that "best looks like you feel right now." Affective values of the pictures were based on normative tabulation of adjectives most frequently applied to individual pictures, and on judges' ratings of them on an elation-depression scale. Findings indicate not only that different pictures were picked by the normal and depressive groups but also that the technique discriminated appropriately within the depressive group. The more depressed the patient's affect, based on interview ratings, the more depressive was the picture chosen. The method appeared to be independent of education and social-class effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Nonverbal channel use in communication of emotion: How may depend on why.

This study investigated the hypothesis that different emotions are most effectively conveyed through specific, nonverbal channels of communication: body, face, and touch. Experiment 1 assessed the production of emotion displays. Participants generated nonverbal displays of 11 emotions, with and without channel restrictions. For both actual production and stated preferences, participants favored the body for embarrassment, guilt, pride, and shame; the face for anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness; and touch for love and sympathy. When restricted to a single channel, participants were most confident about their communication when production was limited to the emotion's preferred channel. Experiment 2 examined the reception or identification of emotion displays. Participants viewed videos of emotions communicated in unrestricted and restricted conditions and identified the communicated emotions. Emotion identification in restricted conditions was most accurate when participants viewed emotions displayed via the emotion's preferred channel. This study provides converging evidence that some emotions are communicated predominantly through different nonverbal channels. Further analysis of these channel-emotion correspondences suggests that the social function of an emotion predicts its primary channel: The body channel promotes social-status emotions, the face channel supports survival emotions, and touch supports intimate emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Nonverbal communication and physician–patient rapport: An empirical study.

Studied 71 medical residents and approximately 400 patients to examine the relationship between patients' satisfaction with the medical care they received from their physicians and the nonverbal skills of those physicians. Various aspects of the physicians' personalities were assessed with the Personality Research Form, and their nonverbal decoding skills were measured with the Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity scale. Patients rated their physicians on caring and sensitivity, indicated the extent to which the physicians listened to what they had to say and cared about them as people, and indicated whether they felt they could call the doctor if necessary. Results support the hypothesis that the socioemotional dimension of the physician–patient relationship depends, to a moderate degree at least, on the physician's ability to understand the patient's nonverbal cues of affect and on the physician's ability to intentionally communicate affect through nonverbal channels. (26 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Nonverbal communication: A cross-cultural comparison of American and Japanese counseling students.

Examined the nonverbal acuity of mental health professionals from 2 countries in a cross-cultural study. A nonverbal picture test that measures recognition of affective states was administered to 47 American and 36 Japanese counseling students. The 120-item instrument, devised for a previous study, consisted of posed pictures of American-born graduate students representing 15 specific emotions. The pictures and cuts of pictures contained 4 sections of the body—face, arms, silhouette of body posture (with the facial expression obscured), and whole body. Emotional state labels selected by Ss in this study were compared with the answers previously designated by a panel of American judges of nonverbal information. Thus, the score attained by an S was the number of correct matches with the American judges. Results from the total nonverbal test score show that (a) females were more accurate in judging nonverbal cues than males and (b) American Ss had a higher accuracy rate than Japanese Ss. Results on the 30-item subtest of facial expressions are examined. The ranking of emotional states for each group by number of correct responses yields a fairly similar list. The resulting recognition of emotions from facial pictures is compared to findings from a previous cross-cultural study. Implications regarding cross-cultural communication and cross-cultural counseling interactions are discussed, as are suggestions for further research. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Nonverbal affect responses to male and female leaders: Implications for leadership evaluations.

It was hypothesized that female leaders would elicit more negative nonverbal affect responses from other group members than male leaders offering the same initiatives. Male and female subjects participated in 4-person discussions in which male or female confederates assumed leadership. During the discussion subjects' nonverbal affect responses to the confederates were coded from behind one-way mirrors. Female leaders received more negative affect responses and fewer positive responses than men offering the same suggestions and arguments. Female leaders received more negative than positive responses, in contrast to men, who received at least as many positive as negative responses. The data demonstrate a concrete social mechanism known to cause devaluation of leadership, and thus support a more social interpretation of female leadership evaluations, in contrast to previous interpretations based on private perceptual bias. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Verbal interaction in mother-child dyads.

Examined the verbal interaction of mothers and their children in mother-child dyads. Ss were 24 children (12 2-yr-olds and 12 3-yr-olds) and their mothers. Each child was selected on the basis of age and pretest results indicating nondelayed receptive and expressive language function. The mother and her child were given an assortment of toys, and the mother was asked to play with her child. Tape recordings were made of each session. Analysis of the mother-child dyadic data revealed that the verbalizations of 2 groups of mothers differed significantly. Mothers of the older group of children used more complex expatiations and modeled interrogations. The occurrence of expansions and direct imitations was not a function of age of the child. The verbal interactions of 2- and 3-yr-olds was significantly different in that 2-yr-olds produced a greater percentage of imitations with reduction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interpersonal communication in parent-adolescent dyads: A brief report on the effects of a social skills training program.

Hypothesized that social skills training could improve communications between adolescents and parents while enhancing improvement in perceived communication and problem-solving behaviors. 25 parent–adolescent dyads (all members of the Church of the Latter Day Saints) participated in a pre- and posttest experimental and control group design. The 18 experimental dyads completed a social skills program. Analyses revealed significant training effects on all social skills in the program, but perceived improvement was slightly higher for parents than for adolescents. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Nonverbal behavior and self-presentation.

Because of special characteristics of nonverbal behaviors (e.g., they can be difficult to suppress, they are more accessible to the people who observe them than to the people who produce them), the intention to produce a particular nonverbal expression for self-presentational purposes cannot always be successfully translated into the actual production of that expression. The literatures on people's skills at using their nonverbal behaviors to feign internal states and to deceive are reviewed as they pertain to the question of whether people can overcome the many constraints on the translation of their intentions into expressions. The issue of whether people's deliberate attempts to regulate their nonverbal behaviors can be detected by others is also considered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of social behavior on interracial acceptance.

To test children's use of race and social behavior as cues in social acceptance, 128 Black and White male kindergartners and 1st graders rated 6 unknown videotaped target children for likability. Targets varied factorially on race (Black or White) and exhibited either positive, negative, or neutral classroom social behavior. Across age, socioeconomic status, and race, Ss used behavior as a cue, accounting for 50% of likability variance. Positive targets were liked equivalently, but Black neutral and negative targets were liked less than White counterparts. Racial but not socioeconomic status differences in the use of behaviors as social cues were found. Negative targets were liked more by Blacks than Whites and neutral targets were liked more by Whites than Blacks. (9 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Help-seeking and attractiveness in cross-sex dyads.

Attempted to extend A. Nadler's (see record 1981-25817-001) finding that female Ss asked for significantly less help from a fictitiously paired attractive (vs unattractive) female co-worker by investigating whether the same relationship between physical attractiveness and unwillingness to ask for help would occur in cross-sex dyads. 24 male and 24 female undergraduates trying to solve a very difficult task could request help from a fictitiously paired attractive vs unattractive co-worker of the opposite sex. Findings indicate that, as predicted, both males and females asked for significantly less help from their cross-sex attractive partner than from the unattractive one. Results suggest that one's same-sex interactions, as in the Nadler study, or opposite-sex interactions may be modified as a function of one's concerns with impression management. (French abstract) (8 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Implicit and explicit prejudice and interracial interaction.

The present research examined how implicit racial associations and explicit racial attitudes of Whites relate to behaviors and impressions in interracial interactions. Specifically, the authors examined how response latency and self-report measures predicted bias and perceptions of bias in verbal and nonverbal behavior exhibited by Whites while they interacted with a Black partner. As predicted, Whites' self-reported racial attitudes significantly predicted bias in their verbal behavior to Black relative to White confederates. Furthermore, these explicit attitudes predicted how much friendlier Whites felt that they behaved toward White than Black partners. In contrast, the response latency measure significantly predicted Whites' nonverbal friendliness and the extent to which the confederates and observers perceived bias in the participants' friendliness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)