The APA Handbook of Nonverbal Communication (2015) is a comprehensive, research-backed guide exploring the empirical findings, research methods, and applications of nonverbal behavior.

SUMMARY

About the Author:
Various authors with different experts curated different chapters. The editors-in-chief are:
David Matsumoto, PhD specializes in culture, emotion, and nonverbal behavior. He is a professor at San Francisco State University and director of the Culture and Emotion Research Laboratory
Hyisung C. Hwang, PhD with research interests in emotion, nonverbal behaviors, and facial expressions. She is an adjunct professor at San Francisco State University
Mark G. Frank, PhD, focusing on facial expressions, emotion, and deception. He is a professor at the University at Buffalo, SUNY

What’s nonverbal communication

The definition for the APA Handbook is:

Nonverbal Communication (NVC) is the transfer and exchange of messages in any and all modalities that do not involve words.

As such, NVC encompasses almost all of human communication except the spoken or written word.

Channels of nonverbal communication

1. Physical Environment: How surroundings influence nonverbal interactions.
2. Appearance and Physiognomy: The impact of physical appearance on communication.
3. Facial Expressions: Insights into how facial cues convey emotions and intentions.
4. Olfactics and Odor: The role of scent in conveying messages.
5. Voice (Paralanguage): The significance of tone, pitch, and other vocal elements.
6. Gesture: The meanings and functions of hand and body movements.
7. Eye Behavior and Gaze: The communicative value of eye contact and movement.
8. Posture, Gait, Proxemics, and Haptics: How body orientation, movement, personal space, and touch influence interactions.

Signs she likes you

Women’s romantic interest signals can be gauged with nonverbal cues, including:

• Early nonverbal signaling to invite an approach (Grammer, Kruck, Juette, & Fink, 2000) attracting attention by displaying openness to interaction via:
  • laughing
  • head tossing
  • grooming behaviors
  • self-touching or caressing objects
  • keeping time to music (Guéguen, 2008; Scheflen, 1965)

• Leaning toward

• Self-touch during the initial stages of flirting, and before contact is initiated (Moore, 1995; Scheflen, 1965)

• Shoulders parallel to him

• Facial redness: a woman signals interest in a romantic partner with her face through increased blood flow to the face resulting in cheeks blushing

• Being closer

• Swelling of the lips which makeup mimics, (McKinney & Sprecher, 1991), and

• Brief touch, particularly on the knee

• Pupil dilation—which studies show makes a woman look more attractive (Hess, 1965)

Read more here:

• Signs she likes you

Status and dominance cues

Gaze, eye contact & visual dominance

Visual dominance is defined as the ratio of looking while speaking to looking while listening (Exline, Ellyson, & Long, 1975).

• High-status subjects spend equal time looking while speaking and listening: they had ratios close to 1 (equal time spent looking while speaking and while listening)

• Low-status subjects looked more while listening and less while speaking (Ellyson, Dovidio, Corson, and Vinicur, 1980)

• Dominant men behaved similarly to high-status men: subjects who scored high on a trait measure of dominance gazed similarly to high-status subjects. This suggests that stable trait dominance and more fluid role-based dominance both influence eye gaze behaviors.

• High expertise and high reward power had the same effects, including for women: Both men and women in lower status conditions looked more while listening than while speaking, producing a relatively low visual dominance ratio (Dovidio, Ellyson, Keating, Heltman, Brown, 1988)

• Dominant individuals look less at subordinates while listening to them speak (Exline, Ellyson, & Long, 1975)

• Dominant men can use intense eye contact as a tool for compliance: dominant group members can use eye contact as a tool to encourage subordinates to behave appropriately
  • Students in a classroom behave more when reprimanded with direct gaze (Van Houten, Nau, MacKenzie-Keating, Sameoto, & Colavecchia, 1982)
  • Direct gaze more directly sub-communicates power: individuals (particularly men) who engage in more direct gaze are rated as more dominant (Hillabrant, 1974; Thayer, 1969) or powerful (Dovidio & Ellyson, 1982).

• People look more at high-status men: participants look toward high-status males more than low-status males or females (Maner, DeWall, & Gailliot, 2008)

• Subordinates avert eye contact when looked at by dominant members (Ellsworth, Carlsmith, & Henson, 1972).

• Dominant individuals judge others as less dominant: men who score higher on the Dominance subscale of the International Personality Item Pool (Goldberg, 1999) are less likely to perceive masculinized men’s faces as more dominant (Watkins et al., 2010). Similar results have been shown for women with high dominance scores viewing masculinized women’s faces (Watkins et al., 2012).

• Men and especially high power men look at their interaction partner more while talking than listening compared to most other people (Dovidio et al., 1988).
  Women tend to do the opposite

High-power men talk more

• High power men are more talkative. Research initially showed that men tend to be more talkative than women (Leaper & Ayres, 2007), but recent findings suggest tendency is moderated by men’s situational sense of power (Brescoll, 2011). In other words, high power men are more talkative, but:
  • Low-power men talk less: men’s tendency to surpass women in talking time (i.e., volubility) tends to disappear when men are experimentally induced into a low-power mindset.

See later for ‘intrusive interruptions’ 🔜

Dominant Men Touch Others More

More dominant men will touch others more, and will invade personal space more, than less dominant men (Knapp & Hall, 2010).

Dominant posture is expansive

Posture is often described along these dimensions:

• Compact VS expansive
• Relaxed VS fidgety/anxious
• Positive VS negative

Compact/expansive and relaxed/anxious have generally been associated with social confidence and social power.

The authors say:

Body openness in adults is positively related to dominance (J. A. Hall, Coats, & LeBeau, 2005), and research on children reveals that one of the key differences between dominant and submissive individuals is body expansiveness (Weisfeld & Beresford, 1982)

People have a personal space they ‘protect’

Violations of culturally appropriate social boundaries make others uncomfortable (Sussman & Rosenfeld, 1978), including feelings of loss of personal control, and privacy (Greenberg, Strube, & Myers, 1980).

People will also change their body orientation away from you, or even deploy buffers (such as books or briefcases) to demarcate territory (Hayduk, 1983).

Cultural VS universal nonverbal behavior

The authors claim that cultures create overall and context-specific norms to facilitate social coordination and avoid social chaos in socially complex environments.

All cultures suppress or play up some expressions in some contexts:

all cultures reported that they suppress their expressions in some contexts, exaggerate their expressions in others, and express their feelings as is in others. Individuals of all cultures had a display rule norm for greater expressivity toward ingroups than toward outgroups.

But when and how to suppress or exaggerate expressions changes.
And we can find some broader demarcation lines with collectivistic VS individualistic cultures:

Collectivistic cultures were associated with less expressivity overall than individualistic cultures, suggesting that overall expression management for all emotions is central to the preservation of social order in these cultures

Individualists express emotions to their ingroup members while collectivist ones suppress them even with ingroup members.
With the outgroup, individualists show less negative and more positive emotions, while collectivists do the opposite.

There are also some differences in the use of context VS body language when the messages were discordant:

American judgments were more influenced by faces, whereas Japanese and South Korean judgments were more influenced by context.

However, when facial expressions and context were congruent, everyone agreed.

Women’s pitch change with changing culture

Cultural and social factors influence voices, and women in the West lowered their pitches in the last decades:

Women in the West (e.g., Europe, United States) started to speak with lower pitches over the last 40 years or so: This has been suggested to follow the increased profile of women in the workplace, often in shared environments with men (Karpf, 2007).

But elsewhere, like women in Japan, didn’t lower their pitch (Loveday, 1981; van Bezooijen, 1995).

Power and status displays vary by culture

Cultures differ according to whether they encourage or discourage power and status differences in a hierarchy, with hierarchical cultures affording power to status, but egalitarian cultures not (Hofstede, 2001; Schwartz & Bardi, 2001).

But I’d bet that higher-status and higher-power individuals still fare much better than lower ones.

And we may be ‘universalizing’ body language

And, the authors suggest, we may see a growing convergence of nonverbal communication signaling and reading:

These results are likely being driven by the strong influence of mass media around the world (…) where people can view the behaviors of others of different cultures and learn how to decode behaviors. These technologies may be helping to homogenize gestures into a worldwide emblem dictionary, and if so, it may be only a matter of time that a homogenized, universal set of emblematic gestures replaces culture-specific ones.

Also read:

• Is intercultural communication a waste of time?

Spacial proxemics: same ‘categories’, but different cultural ‘sizes’

Hall’s (1966, 1973) classic work specified four levels of interpersonal space use depending on social relationship type:

1. Intimate
2. Personal
3. Social
4. Public

The size of each differs among cultures, but people of all cultures appear to use space according to these four distinctions.

Equally interesting, non-native English speakers spoke in English, they adopted the American conversational distance compared.
Thus, it seems that people ‘naturally adapt’.

The 7 basic facial expressions

Strong evidence supports the universal recognition of seven facial expressions of emotion:

1. anger
2. disgust
3. fear
4. happiness
5. sadness
6. surprise
7. contempt

All rights to David Matsumoto

And the interpretation of intensity is also universal:

Not only are the seven universal facial expressions panculturally recognized (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002; Matsumoto, 2001) but there is pancultural similarity in judgments of relative intensity among faces; that is, when comparing expressions, people of different countries agree on which is more strongly expressed (Ekman et al., 1987; Matsumoto & Ekman, 1989).

Subsequent studies also add potential new expressions, like pain (LeResche, 1982; Prkachin & Craig, 1995), anxiety (Perkins, Inchley-Mort, Pickering, Corr, & Burgess, 2012), and sexual excitement (FernandezDols, Carrera, & Crivelli, 2011).

And recent studies provided evidence the similar body movement can signal different emotions.
For example, smiling can signal embarrassment, amusement, shyness, sensory pleasure, elation, contentment, and relief (Ambadar et al., 2009; Campos, Shiota, Keltner, Gonzaga, & Goetz, 2013; Keltner, 1995: Keltner & Buswell, 1997; Krumhuber & Scherer, 2011; Ricci-Bitti, Caterina, & Garotti, 1996).
But also pride (Tracy & Robins, 2004) and triumph (Hwang & Matsumoto, 2014a, 2014b; Matsumoto & Hwang, 2012).

How people interpret facial expressions

People differ in nonverbal sensitivity & skills

Nonverbal sensitivity is conceptualized as an individual difference variable (Rosenthal, 1979).

The most important interpersonal cues include:

• cues of emotion;
• cues of dominance or status
• cues about attitudes, intentions, and interpersonal orientation (likes and dislikes, desire to terminate an interaction, etc.)

And reading these cues is important for social skills, including empathy and emotional intelligence:

It is assumed that nonverbal sensitivity is an important contributor to the concept of empathy, with ability to read others’ emotions critical for empathic understanding (Riggio, Tucker, & Coffaro, 1989), and nonverbal sensitivity is seen as one of the building blocks of good interpersonal relationships.

For example, doctors scoring higher on the Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity (PONS) had more satisfied patients (DiMatteo, Friedman, & Taranta, 1979).

Women in general tend to score higher on measures of nonverbal sensitivity.

Environmental effects on socialization

• Good smell makes people more sociable favorable environmental smells enhance sociability in nonverbal exchanges, negative smells frequently interfere with prosocial intentions (but see Bonini et al., 2011)
  • Pleasant ambient odors also encouraged spontaneous helping behaviors (Guéguen, 2012b) as well as social approach behaviors defined as providing a phone number to a potential suitor (Guéguen, 2012a).

• Noise enhances aggression, especially in angered individuals (e.g., Donnerstein & Wilson, 1976; Konecni, 1975)
  • Introverted individuals seem more easily affected by environmental noise than extroverts (Davies & Hockey, 1966; Elliott, 1971).

Dim your lights for dating – at the right time

But only do it if there is already a good vibe!

While dimmer lighting can foster an atmosphere of intimacy (Carr & Dabbs, 1974; Lecomte, Bernstein, & Dumont, 1981), and loosen social inhibition (Hirsh, Galinsky, & Zhong, 2011; Page & Moss, 1976), the timing must be right or it backfires.

When people feel it’s inappropriate they maintain a greater physical distance (L. Adams & Zuckerman, 1991) and/or reduce the amount of mutual eye gaze (Carr & Dabbs, 1974).

Also see:

• How to create a seductive environment

Gender and nonverbal behavior

Gender is an important line of demarcation when it comes to nonverbal behavior, but it’s only one in many variables to consider:

• Both men and women strive to “do gender” well so as to avoid being perceived as gender deviant (e.g., West & Zimmerman, 1987)

• Gender-normative behavior is situational, increasing with:
  • Number of people present
  • Sex composition, increasing with more opposite-sex individuals

• Women smile more BUT,
  • Larger difference with observers present (M. LaFrance, Hecht, & Paluck, 2003)
  • Older women smile as much as men gender differences are absent among young children, largest among adolescents, smaller in adults, and all but disappearing after late middle
  • Larger difference with social tension: when observed by others, when instructed to get acquainted, when self-disclosing, and when experiencing embarrassment (M. LaFrance et al., 2003).
  • Larger differences with Caucasians compared to black: Ethnicity also plays a role in U.S. samples, with Caucasians exhibiting larger differences (r = .22) than African Americans (r = .13; M. LaFrance et al., 2003)
  • Testosterone mediates smiling and men with high testosterone smile less than those with low testosterone (Dabbs, 1997).

• Men interrupt more, but less so in two-person encounters (Anderson & Leaper, 1998) and with larger differences in
  • Mixed groups- rather than same-gender groups or dyads.

• Women are more accurate in producing and conveying nonverbal cues, potentially because women are more expressive in general while men suppress overt displays of emotion

• Self-identification may matter more than gender ie.: the degree to which a person self-identifies as feminine, appears predict decoding accuracy more than biological sex—but little research has seriously tested this idea
  • Self-identification predicts encoding accuracy ie.: the degree to which a person identifies as feminine appears to predict encoding accuracy in both men and women

• Androgynous males are more emotionally expressive than “masculine” men (Narus and Fischer, 1982)

• High-power men engage in more ‘high-visual dominance’: men gaze more at their interaction partners while speaking than while listening and especially when in high-power positions. Women do the opposite, gazing at their partners more when listening than when speaking (Dovidio et all., 1988)
  • Power mediates the difference: both sexes sometimes show visual dominance when they are in high-power roles (Ellyson, Dovidio, & Brown, 1992)

• Pride expression includes an expanded posture with head tilted back, arms akimbo, and a low intensity smile on the face. It has been reliably recognized in adults across cultures and in children as young as 4 (Tracy & Robins, 2008; Tracy, Robins, & Lagattuta, 2005).

• There is no clear evidence that women are more emotional: women are more expressive of their emotions, but both genders feel the same.
  Men report experiencing the same emotions to the same extent (Barrett, Robin, Pietromonaco, & Eyssell, 1998; Kring & Gordon, 1998; Robinson, Johnson, & Shields, 1998), and studies comparing the physiological reactions of men and women have found that, if anything, men’s physiological responses to emotion-inducing events tend to be stronger than women’s (Kring & Gordon, 1998)

• Touching behavior is highly contextual
  • Younger men and older women touch more: For dyads younger than 30 years of age, male-initiated touch dominates, but the opposite (more female-initiated touch) is observed for dyads older than 30 years of age J. A. Hall & Veccia, 1990; Willis & Briggs, 1992; Willis & Dodds, 1998)
  • Men in non-intimate and women in intimate relationships touch more: Males initiate touch more than females when the relationship is nonintimate and in public. Among married couples, wives touch husbands more (Smith, Vogel, Madon, & Edwards, 2011)
  • Man:man touch the least, woman:woman touches the most: female-female dyads exhibit the highest levels of interpersonal touch and male—male dyads the lowest
  • Men are less comfortable with same-sex touch, especially men who self-reported homophobia, and homophobic attitudes are higher in men than in women, thus initiating less touching (Roese et al., 1992)
  • Women self-touch more (r = .22; J. A. Hall, 1984; McCormick & Jones, 1989) but particularly in the context of cross-sex flirting interactions (Moore, 1995; Scheflen, 1965)

• Women face the speaker more although this effect is smaller than other gender differences
  • Flirting men and women face each other: the difference disappears in courtship and flirtation, where men and women both face each other (Fichten et al., 1992)

• Women head-nod more

• Men are more fidgety, But:
• Women self-touch more (r = .22; J. A. Hall, 1984; McCormick & Jones, 1989) particularly in the context of cross-sex flirting interactions, where women self-touch during the initial stages of flirting, and before contact is initiated (Moore, 1995; Scheflen, 1965)

• Women lean in more towards their interaction partner (r = .16; J. A. Hall, 1984; HelwegLarsen, Cunningham, Carrico, & Pergram, 2004)

• Men adopt larger interpersonal distances with interaction partners (r = .27; 17 studies in J. A. Hall’s, 1984, meta-analysis) and it’s at maximum in male—male dyads. This has been shown cross-culturally

• Women mirror more than men: in same-sex dyads, feminine (i.e., sex-typed) women body mirrored significantly more than same-sex dyads of masculine males (M. LaFrance and Ickes, 1981)
  • Androgynous men mirror the most

• Men adopt more expansive and ‘high-comfort’ poses, with relaxed postures (i.e., asymmetrically arranged arms and legs; r = .33) and expansive body postures (i.e., limbs reaching farther away from the body; r = .46; J. A. Hall, 1984).
  Women take more restricted postures with legs close together and arms close to the torso

• Women notice adjacent intrusions, men frontal ones: women were more affected by an immediately adjacent intruder, men by an intruder directly opposite them (Fisher & Byrne, 1975).
  Women were more likely to put their books and personal items adjacent to them, whereas men put their books and materials directly opposite them

• Men speak louder than women (J. A. Hall, 1984; Schmid Mast & Sczesny, 2010)

• Men have more ‘speech disturbances’ such as filled pauses—“ah,” “um,” or incomplete sentences

• Women use more ‘back channeling’ while listening to others (J. A. Hall, 1984; Leaper & Robnett, 2011).

• Men interrupt more, but the difference is larger (r = .08 vs r = .16) when considering:
  • Men use more ‘intrusive interruptions’ to interrupt others’ speech to take over the conversation, sometimes referred to as intrusive interruptions, rather than merely speaking at the same time as another person (Anderson & Leaper, 1998)
  • Men use more interrupting statements (assertive) (M. LaFrance and Carmen, 1980)
  • Women use more interrupting questions (responsive) (M. LaFrance and Carmen, 1980)
  • Men interrupt more in groups, men make more intrusive interruptions especially in mixes group settings (i.e., more than two interacting partners; r = .30; Anderson & Leaper, 1998) with a negligible difference for dyads (r = .06).
    (r = .30 in same-sex and r = .06 in mixed-sex groups for intrusive interruptions, and r = .01 in same-sex and r = .08 in mixed-sex groups or dyads for overall interruptions; Anderson & Leaper, 1998)

• Women sway hips, men swagger shoulders, and it is these perceptions that aid in the inference of the gender of a walking target (Johnson & Tassinary, 2005)

• Women cry more (Bekker & Vingerhoets, 1999, 2001; Vingerhoets & Scheirs, 2000), consistent across several cultures, even though the magnitude of the difference differs (Becht, Poortinga, & Vingerhoets, 2001).

In children younger than 8 there is no difference, or even boys crying slightly more. Why this divergence happens has been the subject of considerable debate

• Women are more subtle flirting to potentially deny having sent any indicator of interest.
  That’s why both males and females are more accurate at deciphering when a man is being flirtatious than when a woman is (Grammer et al., 2000; Place et al., 2009).

Psychological gender may matter more than biological gender

Most casual readers and commentators may take the above differences as evidence for biological differences.

Instead, suggest the authors, they may as well be the evidence for psychological self-identification:

psychological gender may be more critical than biological gender.
In other words, nonverbal behaviors may often be telltale indicators of femininity and masculinity rather than manifestations of biological femaleness and maleness.
The critical issue may thus be the degree to which any male or female personally subscribes to societal definitions of masculinity and femininity. In some cases, psychological gender dovetails with biological gender

Albeit this obviously doesn’t deny the important role of biology, I think it’s a great point and several pieces of evidence indeed support this view.

Attractiveness Is Gender-Linked: Fertility & Dominance

Fertility seems to apply exclusively to females, and dominance exclusively to males.

Some other traits apply to either both genders or lean more towards one gender:

Health applies equally to both genders, but signals of availability also seem to favor females over males, as females are the limiting sex

Also see:

• The traits of attraction and mate value

Appearance and Physiognomy

• Attractive people are viewed more positively in general, a phenomenon known as the attractiveness halo effect (Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972).

• Greater homogeneity in skin texture is attractive (Fink, Grammer, & Thornhill, 2001)

• Light-skinned women are more attractive: Preferences for light skin in women have been found across cultures (Coetzee et al., 2012; van den Berghe & Frost, 1986) and may reflect the need for increased Vitamin D synthesis Jablonski & Chaplin, 2000)

• Average-weight faces are more attractive: Faces rated as average weight were perceived as healthier and more attractive than those rated as underweight or overweight (Coetzee et al., 2009). Adiposity mediates the relationship between attractiveness and immunocompetent. Adiposity serves as a cue to attractiveness via its strong relationship with health and immunocompetence—a heritable genetic trait that can be passed to offspring

Physiognomy: appearances can tell you something

First off: the correlation between appearance and personality is small, so don’t jump to conclusions:

Reported correlations between personality judgments are usually minor to moderate (with the most striking correlation coefficients reaching 0.2-0.4, and most falling below this range; Zebrowitz & Collins, 1997).

But they exist nonetheless, especially in some traits.
There are four possible mechanisms through which facial appearance and personality converge:

1. Biological causes for both appearance and personality: Genetics or hormones influence both facial appearance and personality traits.
2. Environmental cause for both appearance and personality: Life experiences and surroundings shape both personality and facial features over time.
3. Facial appearance shapes personality: People may develop traits based on how others react to their looks.
4. Personality shapes facial appearance: Expressions and habitual behaviors gradually influence facial features.

Among the findings shared in the book:

• People consistently judge characters from faces there is consistency in judgments of personality from faces

• People’s judgments of personality from faces may be accurate Many studies have now shown that perceptions of personality drawn from single face images, short videotapes, or very brief personal encounters align with the target’s self-reported personality (Ambady, Hallahan, & Rosenthal, 1995; Berry, 1990; Bond, Berry, & Omar, 1994; Borkenau & Liebler, 1992a, 1992b, 1993a, 1993b)

• Faces hold cue of future (workplace) success: Several studies, focusing largely on leaders’ faces, examined correlations between attributions of faces and objective measures of workplace success. Business leaders’ success is correlated with perceptions of dominance and power drawn from images of their faces (Rule & Ambady, 2008b, 2009).
  Other studies found relationships between perceived power and success among managing partners of law firms (Rule & Ambady, 2011)
  And judgments of dominance and competence from political candidates’ faces correlate with electoral success (see Olivola & Todorov, 2010, for review).

• Judgments of power and babyfacedness predict success in terms of business and political leadership. Youthful and friendly (AKA babyfacedness) make one appear weak and incompetent (ZebrowitzMcArthur & Apatow, 1984) AND reduces the likelihood of attaining leadership positions in politics (Zebrowitz & Montepare, 2005), and are detrimental to business leaders (Rule @ Ambady, 2008b)

• Republican faces are viewed as more powerful: Using facial stimuli of American politicians (cropped tightly around the outer edge of the hair), Rule and Ambady (2010) found that faces of Republicans were viewed as more powerful

• Political attitudes and affiliations can be guessed by appearances: German and Swiss perceivers correctly judged left- or right-wing affiliation from the faces of Swiss and German participants, respectively (Samochowiec, Wanke, & Fiedler, 2010).
  Ratings of dominance predicted both perceptual and actual political affiliation, with more dominant looking people tending to have right-wing affiliations (Samochowiec et al., 2010)

• People could recognize ethnicity: empirical studies investigated whether Jews could be distinguished by appearance (Allport & Kramer, 1946; Elliott & Wittenberg, 1955; Lindzey & Rogolsky, 1950; Pulos & Spilka, 1961).
  Two recent meta-analytic reviews of this research found that people were able to accurately categorize Jews and non-Jews from still facial photographs alone (Andrzejewski, Hall, & Salib, 2009; Rice & Mullen, 2003), and one study found that similar effects still apply in modern times (Andrzejewski et al., 2009).

Nonverbal behavior & personality

Facial expressions signal character traits

Facial expressions signal individual differences, which by their very nature reflect broad tendencies to think and act in a specific fashion.

• Natural smiles & expressivity signal trust and cooperation: spontaneously occurring smiles have also been linked to trust, cooperation, and prosocial behavior, and recent research suggests that overall expressivity, not limited to smiles, may be such a marker (Boone & Buck, 2003; Schug, Matsumoto, Horita, Yamagishi, & Bonnet, 2010).

• Duchenne smiling predicted relationship satisfaction and multiple measures of personality (i.e., affiliation, warmth, competence), plus personal well-being, and marital satisfaction at various times over the next 30 years

• Facial expressions of disgust (and glaring) differentiate Type A or B personalities,
  • Contempt, anger, and disgust all correlated with various speech indices of hostility, anger, competitiveness, and despondency (Chesney, Ekman, Friesen, Black, & Hecker, 1990)

• Dominance can be perceived from human faces, both in terms of physical strength, and dominant behavior

Say the authors (redacted for brevity):

Masculinizing human faces increases perceived dominance, whereas ‘feminizing’ them decreases perceived dominance (Boothroyd et al., 2007; DeBruine et al., 2006; Jones et al., 2010; Main, Jones, DeBruine, & Little, 2009; Perrett et al., 1998).
Masculine and dominant looking faces are perceived as more aggressive and threatening (Oosterhof & Todorov, 2008), and untrustworthy (Stirrat & Perrett, 2010).
Men with dominant-looking faces have higher social status (Mueller & Mazur, 1996), and people are more likely to follow their gaze (Jones et al., 2010; Ohlsen, van Zoest, & van Vugt, 2013).
Perceptions of dominance also drive the expectation of anger and contempt (Hess, Adams, & Kleck, 2005), and men with dominant-looking faces act less cooperatively and less trustworthy in real life (Stirrat & Perrett, 2010).

Voice can also signal character traits

Listeners can predict with some accuracy personal characteristics and traits from vocal stimuli, such as:

• Dominance, associated with certain vocal characteristics such as lower pitch (Anderson & Klofstad, 2012).
• Neuroticism (Hu, Wang, Short, & Fu, 2012)
• Extraversion (Scherer, 1978)

Attractiveness & facial masculinity are complex

Male facial attractiveness is less straightforward than women’s facial attractiveness:

The high amount of variation in women’s preferences for men’s facial masculinity may arise from the differential benefits attributed to masculine and feminine faces.
A masculine face structure cue genetic benefits, but masculinity is also linked to undesirable traits and aggressive behavior, both perceptually and in real life

Culture and environment may also affect male facial attractiveness, and facial masculinity is favored in cultures where paternal investment is traditionally low, such as rural Jamaica (Penton-Voak, Jacobson, & Trivers, 2004), suggesting that women select mates for genetic benefits when male commitment is unlikely.

That being said, attractive women seem to prefer masculine faces:

This replicates results from static stimuli demonstrating that attractive women prefer more masculine men (Penton-Voak et al., 2003) and may partly explain the lack of masculinity preferences found in previous studies where observers’ attractiveness was not rated. (Morrison et al., 2010).

Finally, adiposity may be a better marker for male facial attractiveness than testosterone:

Moreover, another recent study found that facial adiposity, not masculinity, mediated the relationship between facial attractiveness and immunocompetence (Rantala et al., 2013). These findings suggest that plastic, flexible cues such as adiposity may be better indicators of immunocompetence than masculinity, a static cue that is invariable after puberty.

Touch (haptics)

• Touch conveys positive emotion, closeness, comfort, compassion, intimacy, immediacy, interpersonal closeness, liking, acceptance, warmth, and love (Richmond, McCroskey, & Payne, 1991; Thayer, 1986).
  • Withholding touch can signal an assortment of negative feelings, such as resentment, hostility, anger, or mistrust (Richmond et al., 1991).

• Men are more likely to interpret touch as communicating affection and sexual attraction, whereas women are more likely to separate those meanings (Hollender, Luborsky, & Scaramella, 1969; Nguyen, Heslin, @ Nguyen, 1976).

• More touch = more cooperation in NBA players and improved performance (Kraus, Huang, & Keltner, 2010).

• Touch by female wait staff increased tips offered at restaurants (Ebesu Hubbard, Tsuji, Williams, & Seatriz, 2003).

• Touch may increase compliance in some settings. In one of the first studies (Kleinke, 1977) An experimenter approached the person who next used the phone, asking if he found the money. 96% of the people who were touched returned the money, whereas only 63% of the people who were not touched did.
  Touch also increased compliance to signing petitions and completing research surveys (Patterson, Powell, & Lenihan, 1986; Willis @ Hamm, 1980) as well as complying with a physician’s request to take antibiotics (Guéguen et al., 2011).
  • There are likely cultural differences. One study in Poland found that touching by a man of another man when making a request negatively affected the chances for compliance (Dolinski, 2010); the noncompliance was related to homophobic attitudes among the participants.
  • If the costs to the request are high touch doesn’t work—for example, donating blood—(Guéguen & Vion, 2009).

• Self-touching may be indicative of negative affect, anxiety, withdrawal, hostility, or depression (Mahl, 1968; Mehrabian, 1972).
  • Self-touching behavior is also related to information processing (Barroso, Freedman, Grand, & Van Meel, 1978); language construction (Freedman & Bucci, 1981); Type A behaviors such ambition, rigid organization, status consciousness, impatience (Friedman, Hall, & Harris, 1985), distractability (Barroso & Feld, 1986, Barroso et al., 1978).
    In general, self-touching also signals psychological functioning.

Posture

• Open body postures communicate more power (Cashdan, 1998; J. A. Hall, Coats, & LeBeau, 2005).

• Open arms and legs in a seated position communicate a more positive attitude and openness
  • arms akimbo (arms on hips) or arms crossed in front of one’s body generally are associated with more negative attitudes.

• Posture can also signal anger, sadness, and happiness, with some obtaining greater than 90% agreement rates (Coulson, 2004)
  • Anger was conveyed by a backward head tilt, absence of a backward chest bend, no abdominal twist, arm raised forward and upward, and weight transfers either forward or backward
  • Happiness was conveyed by backward head tilt, no forward movement of the chest, and arms raised above shoulder level and straight at the elbow.
  • Sadness was conveyed by a forward head tilt, forward chest bend, no twisting, and arms at the sides.
  • Disgust, fear, and surprise could not be detected beyond chance levels

• Nonverbal cues reliably signal rapport across cultures (Bernieri & Gillis, 1995).
  It includes:
  • smiling (Rotenberg et al., 2003)
  • direct body orientation
  • uncrossed legs
  • symmetrical arms
  • moderate eye contact (Harrigan, Oxman, & Rosenthal, 1985)
  • congruent limbs
  • forward-leaning postures (Trout & Rosenfeld, 1980)
  • Voice change (Garrod & Pickering, 2004), breathing together, speaking at the same rate in conversational speech (McFarland, 2001; Pardo, 2006), and converging on similar pitches.
    With greater rapport, also similar words, syntactic structures, and pronunciations of certain words (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999).

• The triumph expression is ‘over the top’, includes an expanded posture with chest out and head back, arms away from the body and raised above the shoulders, and torso pushed out. With an aggressive component, facial grimaces or aggression, fists, punching motions, and shouts or utterances.
  It’s been documented around the world, even in congenitally blind individuals, immediately after a victory in an agonistic context (Hwang & Matsumoto, 2014b). But status-oriented cultures have more of these whole body expressions than more egalitarian cultures

• deShame overlaps with submission opposite to triumph (e.g., head tilted forward or down, tongue out, eyes closed, and one or both arms pulled in toward body) has been referred to as “shame”, also associated with submission (see also Andrews, Brewin, Rose, & Kirk, 2000; Dickerson, Gruenewald, & Kemeny, 2004; J. A. Hall et al., 2005; Keltner & Harker, 1998). If there is a difference between the two, it must still be found

Gait

• Pepole can read from gait angry, happy, sad, or neutral emotions situations from 3 seconds videoclips beyond chance levels (Montepare, Koff, Zaitchik, & Albert, 1999),

• Angry movements were jerkier, stiffer, faster, more expanded, and harder

• Depressed patients walk slower, with shorter strides, decreased coordination of arms in movement (Lemke, Wendorff, Mieth, Buhl, @ Linnemann, 2000)

• Victim-looking strides are ‘constricted’, with too long or too short strides, not swinging their feet, and moving in only two dimensions compared to three (Grayson & Stein, 1981).

Nonverbal Behavior Like Gait Signals Power – Or Exploitability

gait signal non-formidability and a potential target of aggression.
Individuals imprisoned for mugging others agreed on which individuals (…) they would choose to victimize (Grayson & Stein, 1981).
Individuals high in psychopathy could recognize, from gait alone, which individuals had been previously assaulted (Book, Costello, and Camilleri, 2013)
Thus, one’s body actions seem to draw the attention of the more violent predator-like individuals in society

The psychopaths mentioned the would-be victims showed ‘low confidence’ in their gait.

MORE WISDOM

Hold off your judgment across cultures for expressiveness and reservation

It is easier for people from expressive cultures to judge those from reserved cultures as being untrustworthy, inscrutable, sly, deceptive, or shifty. At the same time, it is easier for people from reserved cultures to judge those from expressive cultures as arrogant, loud, rude, immature, or vulgar.

Men may over-estimate women’s sexual interest because of poor reading -‘error management theory’-

The common evolutionary explanation suggests that it’s advantageous for men to overestimate women’s sexual interest because a false-negative (i.e., missing cues of sexual interest) would lead to a missed mating opportunity (B. H. La France et al., 2009).

This means that men have a lower decisional threshold than women for labeling ambiguous behaviors as sexual (Haselton & Nettle, 2006).

BUT:

The problem with this explanation, however, is that men “see” more sexual interest in both males and females (Shotland & Craig, 1988).
Additionally, Farris et al. (2008) found that male participants mistook friendliness for flirtatiousness just as often as they misread flirtatiousness as friendliness, providing evidence for men’s lower ability to accurately read the nonverbal cues of others.

Personally, I’d be surprised though if the evolutionary explanation doesn’t provide any explanatory power on this phenomenon.

Ignoring others’ gaze is a power move that makes others feel excluded

the violation of mutual looking and acknowledgment norms can induce feelings of social exclusion (Wesselmann et al., 2012; K. D. Williams, Shore, & Grahe, 1998; Wirth, Sacco, Hugenberg, & Williams, 2010). For instance, when confederates were instructed to look at passing pedestrians without making eye contact, that is, “as though looking through air,” the affected individuals subsequently reported stronger feelings of disconnection from others than individuals who received either a gaze or a gaze and smile from the confederate (Wesselmann et al., 2012).

Autism can be seen as ‘extreme male brain’

The authors note it may be telling that men show similar patterns of facial scanning as autistic individuals, given the conceptualization of autism as an “extreme male-brain” disorder (Baron-Cohen, 2002).

We’re Biologically Wired To Recognize Facial Similarity

This ability to recognize faces is surprisingly robust;
participants (…) are more likely to choose the cooperative move when they see a photo (…) that has been morphed with a photo of the participant himself (DeBruine, 2002).
(…)
Taken together, we can argue that we seem biologically wired to recognize individuals, to recognize when they are kin, and to band together with them to defeat nonkin competitors

Don’t force ‘mirroring’

Albeit it’s popular advice, forcing mirroring likely backfires:

Mirroring (…) in general has been supported by the available evidence as producing positive regard for the other.
However, some studies also show null or even negative effects on rapport as a function of mirroring (La France & Ickes, 1981).
These data suggest that mirroring may positively influence rapport if it is done naturally and subconsciously (or at least appears to be so); if an interactant partner feels that one is deliberately trying to mirror behaviors, the partners are likely to feel manipulated, diminishing the chances for rapport building.

Practical Takeaways

Signal power

The authors show that how you move and behave can help you signal status, confidence, and power.

We have many articles here, including:

• High power social behavior
• Dominant body language
• High power communication

Quit carnivore, eat vegetables & Fruits

It also makes you more attractive:

One recent study examined how real facial skin coloration is altered with changes in carotenoid consumption over a Appearance and Physiognomy 6-week period, revealing that an increase in carotenoids equivalent to an extra 3.3 portions of fruits and vegetables per day was enough to make participants reliably more attractive (Whitehead, Re, Xiao, Ozakinci, & Perrett, 2012).

Use gestures & aim for moderate level of expressiveness

People remember things more when you accompany your words with gestures.

And you’ll be clearer with some facial expressiveness, but keep it balanced:

Sending accuracy will tend to be greatest (all else equal) at moderate levels of expressiveness, and it will be low at the extremes of low or high expressiveness

Also see:

• Law of optimum balance

🙋🏼‍♂️ Lucio’s Analysis

As for almost all handbooks reviewed here, I’d wished for book-level editing that consolidated all repeated information, and more information-sharing about studies sample size and quality.

• Few studies were cited multiple times

Which made me question whether the empirical evidence supporting certain claims was as diverse as it could have been.

• Sometimes you’d benefit with a ‘TPM supplementation’

The authors say they ‘understand the function of communication to facilitate the sharing of social intentions’.

And that’s certainly true.
However, a broader look at communication would also include deceit and manipulation.

• Rarely I felt it was culturally deterministic

For example:

Walking on dark streets late at night will evoke fear in some cultures but not in others, and these different emotional reactions occur because of culturally learned differences about the meaning of that specific context.

At my current level of psychological understanding, I feel pretty strongly that the cultural impact is limited.
Anyone -especially a woman- in a dangerous environment will be apprehensive to walk alone at night, independent of culture.

• Some findings may have benefited with some more caution

For example, women’s increased attraction to stronger and ‘formidable’ males in dangerous area or the hands—digit ratio.

PROS

• Tells it as it is: this book does not hide or sugarcoat things, including sensitive topics
• Learned a ton
• Really good gender analysis: the section on differences between men and women was really good
• Deep insights into social status
  • Empirical insights into dominance VS submissiveness nonverbal behavior

REVIEW

The APA Handbook of Nonverbal Communication is an authoritative resource for nonverbal behavior studies.

I learned a lot for it and I’m grateful to the editors’ and authors’ work.
And the biggest compliment I can pay to any resource, it allowed me to improve several articles and even our flagship product Power Univeristy.

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