Nonverbal communication

1
Non-verbal communication

• Nv com how we communicate intentionally or not
  without words
• Facial expressions, tone, gestures, posture, eye
  gaze and touch

2
Facial Expressions as Universal

• For 6 major emotional expressions, they are
  anger, happiness, surprise, fear, disgust,
  sadness
• May be as many as 10 love, peace,
  shame-embarassment, heroism

3
Detecting Anger

• Placed one angry face in a sea of happy or
  neutral faces
• Also placed one happy/neutral face in a sea of
  the other facial expressions
• Participants were asked to find the discrepant
  face in the crowd

4
Display Rules

• Children in the U.S. taught to hide their
  emotions, particularly negative emotions
• So are men (no crying, no grief)

5
Culture differences

• Spatial distance (closer in Arab countries)
• Eye gaze

6
Lying

• Although women better at decoding/encoding
• Men better at lie detection
• Women may politely ignore deception

7
In the beginning

• We start lying at about age 3 but are poor at it
• Deception really begins at 5
• Prior to that, have difficulty deceiving people

8
Small gender differences in good liars

• Girls lie by omission more often
• Boys by commission (distort information)
• At this pt, boys more successful liars

9
Rapid escalation

• How often do adults lie?
• At least one lie a day
• One lie in every 5 social encounters
• Lie to at least 30 of the people in our lives

10
Relationships

• Highest rate of lying is to strangers
• Lowest to best friends
• Lie a bit more to romantic partners
• Spouses lowest rate 1 lie in 10 transactions

11
Romantic partners

• May lie to protect relationship (e.g. about
  infidelity)
• Also tell more altruistic lies (e.g. you dont
  look fat in that dress).

12
Are some people better at detection?

• Yes, professionally trained police detectives
• But not cops in general
• Clinicians who look for lies
• But not clinicians in general

13
Detection

• Few agreed upon cues
• Agreed that it is idiosyncratic
• That is, depends on person to a large extent

14
Verbal Behavior

• Truthful subjects respond directly liars answer
  evasively.
• Ex when did you last see Ms.X?

15
Deceptive people also say

• If my memory is correct
• As far as I know
• At this point in time
• To the best of my knowledge
• Etc.
• QUALIFIERS

16
Alibi statement

• Answer includes an alibi as well as a deniallie
• Ex. I know I didnt do it because I was in the
  library.

17
Final verbal clue

• Truth tellers use contractions
• Liars do not
• EX. I did not have sex with that woman.

18
Paralinguistic behavior

• Response Latency

19
Responses

• Longer answerstruth
• Shorter answerslying
• More grammatical errors, less fluent speechlying
• Higher pitched voicelying

20
Visual clues

• Rapid blinking
• Dilated eyes
• Lack of eye contact

21
Gestures

• Hair grooming-often lying
• Lint picking-always lying (opinion of LM)

22
Hand Gestures

• Moving away from the body, usually telling the
  truth
• Steepling, chest thumping, fairly clear truth
  telling gestures

23
Change in posture

• If at key question, probably lie
• Hand coming in contact with face-lie (may cover
  lips, eyes)

24
Anger after accusation

• Goes away fairly quickly if lying
• Does not fade if telling the truth