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Non-Verbal Communication

  
 
Shrug
01:16 / 10.05.06
I'm interested in non-verbal communication, generally and how individual barbeloids might employ it.
I'm wont to using one type of NVC overmuch* or to using a motion/flourish of the hand with accompanying facial expression to convey a feeling or opinion. Does NVC play a large part in your life? Adept at conversational high jumps yet kinetically inert? How much of your intent gets lost on Barbelith because of the absence of NVC? Does it matter? Also as I watched The Apprentice I was thinking about how NVC played into interview technique.

*Hence the fictionsuit title.

Anecdotes welcome.
 
 
lekvar
01:34 / 10.05.06
I try to pay a lot of attention to body language. I enjoy reading books about it, people watching, examining my own body reactions to others, and doing little non-verbal-communication experiments. I'd love to try to see how far I could take body communication as a single person, but I'm not so it's a moot point.

My favorite anecdote:
My boss and her husband* are both considerably shorter than I am. I found that I was butting heads with them both in what should have been some reasonable discussions, so I took a brief accounting of what my body was communicating: dominance, aggression, tightly closed. I was using my height as a weapon. Even though I wasn't relaxed I opened up my bodyspace, made my body say peace, collaboration, understanding. We had the issues wrapped up in about five minutes after that.

*they were born in Taiwan and Hong Kong, respectively, whereas I'm a country boy, so there's also been some fun with personal space.
 
 
Shrug
10:42 / 10.05.06
I agree Lekvar, it's very interesting on how a change of body language can influence conversation or a situation. I'm always aware of not folding my arms if uncomfortable and relaxing my body posture, in the end it nearly always works to my benefit.

What non verbal communication experiments have you done?
 
 
lekvar
19:19 / 10.05.06
Aside form the anecdote above I haven't had a lot of opportunities to do more than observe.

One situation does seem to keep arising though. I've found myself in a three-way conversation where one person is dominating and one is passive. Normally not a problem, but there have been a couple times when I'd really rather hear from the passive party for a while without shutting the dominant speaker out or telling them to shut the fuck up for a second.

The most obvious sign that you're paying attention is facing the speaker and making the appropriate noises, but a lot of showing receptivity is in the orientation of the torso, and, to a lesser extent, the extremities. So I kept my face pointed at the dominant speaker but oriented my chest and closest shoulder to the passive party, making my head lean in their direction slightly.

This got a slight response both times I tried it, with the quieter party speaking up a bit, but in both cases the assertive speaker has maintained control of the conversation.
 
 
ibis the being
20:04 / 10.05.06
I'm curious about people's opinions on making eye contact... I've heard several people say that they believed making direct eye contact was a strict taboo, and one should always let one's gaze flit around the facial area of one's conversational companion. I was startled to hear that since I've always believed that not making direct eye contact, at least for part of the conversation, when someone's talking to you is the height of rudeness. I know that this varies from country to country, but does it vary regionally as well within (say) the US?

My greatest experiment in non-verbal communication to date has been in trying to train a puppy. I know some people start yawning the moment they see/hear "dog," but I'm fascinated by canine communication and body language and have read a lot about it. Trying to communicate with a baby animal who knows not a whit of human verbal language, nor even the whole canine lexicon just yet, is challenging to say the least. A lot of what you do winds up being "shaping" rather than true communicating, but you do have to rely on body language often. And if you're doing it well, you have to adjust your body language to something dogs can understand. For instance, dogs don't point with their paws and don't understand the human pointing gesture - they point with their body position, head position, and gaze. A lot of human/primate body language runs in direct opposition to canine body language and there can be a steep learning curve. But I'll stop there lest I bore you all to death....
 
 
lekvar
21:33 / 10.05.06
Eye contact is definitely regional and situational. I don't know that all eye-contact is taboo (Japan seems to be the obvious exception to this - you're supposed to look at your superior's throat when he speaks to you), but over-long eye-contact is considered impolite. The exact definition of "over-long" is a bit tenuous though.

As near as I can tell it has an inverse relationship to body space. People born and raised in the city are less likely to look you in the eye for a prolonged period of time, but they're more likely to have a smaller area of "comfort zone," whereas people born and raised in the country are likely to require more space but not feel uncomfortable with a lingering gaze. This is of course a gross generalization.

Direct eye contact is often construed to be a dominance display among non-intimates, the longer it's held the more aggressive. Don't stare your boss in the eyes, don't stare the snarling Harley boy in the eyes, don't stare the policeman in the eyes. For that matter, I was always told not to look an aggressive dog in the eyes for exactly the same reason.

I've read the the most polite thing to do is to look at a point between and above the eyes of the person who's addressing you, but this feels weird to me and I've never been able to do it for long.
 
 
wembley can change in 28 days
07:30 / 11.05.06
Eye contact is what I love about Berlin - you're just allowed to make eye contact and it doesn't mean you want anything from the other person. For someone who comes from shyer cultures (Canada, now in Finland) it's kind of a trip.

I use and study non-verbal communciation a lot because I do silent work in theatre: mime and mask. Not the striped shirt and white face (at least not usually), but mime nonetheless. Usually non-verbal communication in mime has to do with presenting an object or a place using just the body. Mask is a bit different - you have to convey emotions and relationships without talking, which is lots of fun - conveying the difference between contempt and jealousy requires a lot of observation and fine-tuning, but it can be done. However, even my verbal theatre work uses an awful lot of body language, often stuff that many audience members might only take in subconsiously, but that contributes to their understanding of relationships and character.
 
 
lekvar
17:32 / 11.05.06
Wembly, are there any good web resources for mime and mask? I'd love to read more on that. Or, if you'd care to share a bit more...
 
 
Triplets
18:30 / 11.05.06
dogs don't point with their paws and don't understand the human pointing gesture - they point with their body position, head position, and gaze

...

But I'll stop there lest I bore you all to death....

Nooo. Bore me! I find that really interesting. What's been the biggest challenge, language-wise, raising Ol' Doggy B?
 
 
ibis the being
17:14 / 12.05.06
Bore me! I find that really interesting. What's been the biggest challenge, language-wise, raising Ol' Doggy B?

You asked for it! The biggest challenge language-wise in training was (not to be too obvious) the fact that the dog didn't understand a single word when he came to us as a puppy. Words are useless until you can correlate behaviors with them, but the you have to get the behavior before you can use any words, which is so counterintuitive and confusing at first.

If you're not careful in the way you build associations between words and behaviors, you can wind up with a really skewed vocabulary. One thing that makes it especially tough is that dogs (and many other animals) are hyperspecific, notice a lot more detail than we do, and are more visual than verbal. So you may think that "come" means come here, but from your dog's perspective, "human squats down and holds arms out" means come here.

As soon as I got him I read this great book called The Other End of the Leash by an animal behaviorist named Patricia McConnell. She goes over all the many ways that primate and canine body language differs, and it differs a lot. One big one is that primate greet face-to-face and use face-to-face (or ventral-to-ventral) positioning to communicate, engage each other, and express intimacy. Canines do not. For them face-to-face positioning usually indicates a direct confrontation and possible aggression. Friendly canine greetings happen side by side, circling around each other, not making direct eye contact. The way this can fuck up training is that people typically call a dog by facing him head-on and looking right at him, holding out an arm/s and calling him over. In that position your body is telling the dog to stop, and even turn away from you.

One of the amazing things about dogs is that in a lot of ways they adapt more to us and our communication styles than we do to them and theirs. In dogs, teeth-baring signals aggression or submission depending on how it's done, but dogs not only learn to accept human smiles & grins as expressions of joy, some dogs even learn to grin back. In another case, dogs put up with and some enjoy hugs from humans, despite how much this resembles a very strong gesture of dominance in dog body language - putting their head and/or paws over the shoulders of another dog.
 
 
lekvar
19:19 / 12.05.06
I'm not bored by this at all. Please keep going if you've got more.
 
  
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