Nonverbal Communication by Mehrabian

Nonverbal Communication by Mehrabian

by Alfred Mehrabian Transaction Publishers, 1972 Reece and Whitman (1962) studied the effect of an investigator's warmt and coldness upon a subject's verbal output while the subject free-associated. Warmth of the experimenter was defined as more frequent smiling, the absence of finger tapping movements, more eye contact with the subject, and a greater degree of forward bodily lean toward the subject. -21 

 A subject produced more words when the experimenter nonverbally indicated a more positive attitude toward him. -21 

 Higher-status members in a social situation are more relaxed than are lower-status members. Relaxation is also related to liking. We tend to be moderately relaxed with those we like and to assume very relaxed postures with those we dislike or do not respect. -30 

 For instance, parents referring to their son's fiancee might say, "our daughter-to-be," "our son's fiancee," "his fiancee," "his lady friend," "his friend," "she," "the person," or "that thing." These examples show decreasing degrees of denotative specificity and are interpreted as expressing decreasing degrees of liking. -35 

 Some additional examples may be helpful. A speaker describing an event in which he participated can say: "I danced," "We danced," "The gang danced," or "There was dancing," with decreasing degrees of inclusion and, therefore, decreasing denotative specificity in denoting I. -35 

 Some actions ordinarily associated through habit with certain states of mind may be partially repressed through the will, and in such cases the muscles which are least under the separate control of the will are the most liable still to act, causing movements which we recognize as expressive. In certain other cases the checking of one habitual movement requires other slight movements; and these are likewise expressive. (Darwin, 1965, p.28) -quoted on 84 

 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. (Freud, 1959, p.94) -quoted on 84 

 Ekman and Friesen's hypothesis was that the areas of the body with lower channel capacity are more informative about deception. Specifically, then, when a person is deceitful his feet/legs should be the most informative about the affect he conceals, then his hands, and finally his face. -85 Specifically, when being deceitful communicators nodded and gestured less, exhibited less frequent leg and foot movements, assumed less immediate positions relative to their addressees, talked less, talked slower, had more speech errors, and smiled more. -103 

 In general, it was found that, when there was inconsistency among components, the implicit cues dominated the verbal cues in determining the total impact. Further, when the various components were consistent with one another, the intensity of the attitude inferred from the total message was enhanced. -131 

 The first, and probably more important of these traditions is restraint in the expression of feelings, particularly negative ones, outside the sphere of intimate relationships. The second is the absence of explicit instruction on the subject of implicit messages within the framework of formal education. The continued emphasis on language skills both at home and in school is a sharp contrast to the neglect of implicit communication. -178 

 When two persons are together, the one of higher status is more relaxed. His limbs and trunk tend to be asymmetrically positioned (legs crossed, leaning sideways, or reclining). -181 

 In contrast to the earlier approaches, which sought discrete nonverbal behaviors and explored their specific referents or conversely identified the discrete behaviors associated with certain feelings, our approach relied on a multidimensional characterization of the referents of implicit communication as variations in liking, potency, and responsiveness. -184-85 

 For example, the therapist verbally asserts an unwillingness to be directive, because being directive would imply his higher status in the situation and might be resented by the client. But both informal observations and recent experimental findings have shown that even those who completely deny a directive therapeutic role nevertheless use nonverbal cues to shake their clients' behaviors (Truax, 1966). -188 

 It would seem that when the verbal component includes a denial of manipulative intent, but the nonverbal cues nevertheless systematically communicate liking or respect, more effective shaping of another person's behavior will result, particularly when that person is openly resistant to influence or manipulation by a peer. -189 

 General Notes about Mehrabian -His chapter titled "language within language" is a GREAT treatment of verbal immediacy behaviors. Namely, comparing all possible ways of saying the same thing can provide a great deal of insight into the speaker's attitude toward the subjects being spoken of. (there is more to this...) - He lists a number of personality measures related to affective communication. These include a measure of affiliative tendency and a measure of sensitivity to rejection on pages 200-201

Freud in the Writing Center: The Psychodynamics of Tutoring Well

Freud in the Writing Center: The Psychodynamics of Tutoring Well

Christiana Murphy, Marshall University Christiana Murphy explores the quality and importance of the interpersonal relationships that tutors build with students by comparing such relationships to those psychoanalysts develop with their clients. "a good psychoanalyst and a good tutor both function to awaken individuals to their potentials and to channel their creative energies toward self-enhancing ends." -abstract, 95 Truax and Carkhuff, in Toward Effective Counseling and Psychotherapy, would contend, however, that fundamental and profound similarities exist amongst all interventive processes, from therapy, to education, to the managerial interactions of employer and employee. They state "the person (whether a counselor, therapist, or teacher) who is better able to communicate warmth, genuineness, and accurate empathy is more effective in interpersonal relationships no matter what the goal of the interaction" (116-117). -97 For psychotherapy to be successful, (1) two persons are in contact; (2) one person, the client, generally is in a state of incongruence, being vulnerable or anxious; (3) the other person, the therapis, is congruent in the relationship; (4) the therapist experiences unconditional positive regard toward the client; (5) the therapist experiences an empathetic understanding of the client's internal frame of reference. -98 As a result of the process of psychotherapy, (1) the client is more congruent, more open to his or her experiences, less defenseive; (2) as a result, the client is more realistic, objective, extensional in his or her perceptions; (3) the client is consequently more effective in problem-solving; (4) as a result of the increased congruence of self and experience, his or her vulnerability to threat is reduced; (5) as a result of the lowering of his or her vulnerability to threat or defeat, the client has an increased degree of self-regard; and (6) as a result of all of the above factors, the client's behavior is more creative, more uniquely adaptive, and more fully expressive of his or her own values (Patterson 486-87). If we substitute tutor and student here for therapist and client, the model holds true for the learning strategies and experiential awarenesses that ho on in a writing center environment. -98

Really Useful Knowledge: A Cultural Studies Agenda for Writing Centers

Really Useful Knowledge: A Cultural Studies Agenda for Writing Centers

In this article, Marilyn Cooper discusses tutors' roles in helping students understand the cultural constraints that affect their writing. -53 She suggests that a writing center rooted in a cultural studies approach can help to empower student writers by teaching them to find within professors' restrictive writing assignments autonomous spaces from which to address their own experiences and beliefs. -54 . . . students come for help in making their document perfect (for very good reasons, like getting into law school, getting their dissertation proposal approved, passing the course and getting their degree) and are confronted with tutors who have their own primary concern, a concern with the process of writing. In this situation, I think that tutors must not only make clear what their concern in tutoring sessions is but also explain why they think this concern should be primary for students as well, and they must negotiate a common goal in their sessions, one that does not simply ignore the students' concerns. -57 Agency in writing is not a mater of simply taking up the subject positions offered by assignments but of actively constructing subject positions that negotiate between institutional demands and individual needs. -59 When a social group becomes well established and dominant, its intellectuals often come to see what they do as valuable in and of itself and see themselves as somehow specially qualified for intellectual activities: they lose sight of how their activities function primarily to further the goals of their particular social group. -61 Rather than "always focusing on the paper at hand (Brooks 2), tutors build personal relationships with their students and come to understand how their students' lives and experiences shape their writing practices. Rather than insisting that students are the only ones responsible for their texts, tutors help students understand how their words and their texts are inhabited by multiple and often alien voices that they must learn to deal with. Rather than "supporting the teacher's position completely" (North 441), tutors celebrate students' ability to develop new "templates" for texts. Rather than learning to sit across from the student and not write on their papers, tutors learn to critique the social and institutional setting of writing pedagogy and to reflect on their practices in light of theories of writing and language. -65-66

Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center

Andrea Lunsford, Stanford University.

(A chapter in The St Martins Sourcebook)

Her essay, which originally appeared in 1991 in The Writing Center Journal, is especially helpful for tutors in providing an overview of social constructionism and its impact on writing center philosophies. In essence, the essay establishes a theoretical context for the work tutors do by contrasting the collaborative writing center with earlier writing center models, shaped by expressivism and current traditional rhetoric. Ab+stract, 47




The shift involves a move from viewing knowledge and reality as things exterior to or outside of us, as immediately accessibly, individually knowable, measurable, and shareable--to viewing knowledge and reality as mediated by or constructed through language in social use, as socially constructed, contextualized, as, in short, the product of collaboration. -48

[The above theory threatens the following...]
This idea of a writing center, what I'll call "The Center as Storehouse," holds to the earlier view of knowledge just described--knowledge just described--knowledge as exterior to us and as directly accessible. -48

[She calls another type Garret centers]
Garret Centers are informed by a deep-seated belief in individual "genius," in the Romantic sense of the term. (I need hardly point out that this belief also informs much of the humanities, and, in particular, English studies.) -48

[Garret Centers] see knowledge and interior, as inside the student, and the writing center's job as helping students get in touch with this knowledge, as a way to find their unique voices, their individual and unique powers. This idea has been articulated by many, including Ken Macrorie, Peter Elbow, and Don Murray. . . -49