Chapter 4: Nonverbal Communication

The Situational Context

Dancing at a funeral. Raising your Starbucks cup to toast your professor. Making long, steady, somewhat flirtatious eye contact with your doctor. Wearing a business suit to a rock concert. Do these situations sound strange or potentially uncomfortable? The situational context has a powerful impact on nonverbal communication. Recall from our model of competent communication (Chapter 1) that the situational context includes spheres like the place you are in, your comfort level, the event, current events, and the social environment.

Now imagine dancing at a wedding, toasting your friend’s accomplishment, flirting with an attractive friend, or wearing a business suit to a job interview. In each instance, the situational context has changed. Situational context determines the rules of behavior and the roles people must play under different conditions. Competent communicators will always consider the appropriateness and effectiveness of nonverbal communication in a given context.

Two of the primary factors involved in situational context are the public–private dimension and the informal–formal dimension. The public–private dimension is the physical space that affects our nonverbal communication. For example, you might touch or caress your partner’s hand while chatting over dinner at your kitchen table, but you would be much less likely to do that at your brother’s kitchen table or during a meeting at city hall. The informal–formal dimension is more psychological, dealing with our perceptions of personal versus impersonal situations. The formality of a situation is signaled by various nonverbal cues, such as the environment (your local pub versus a five-star restaurant), the event (a child’s first birthday party or a funeral), the level of touch (a business handshake as contrasted with a warm embrace from your aunt), or even the punctuality expected (a wedding beginning promptly at 2:00 P.M. or a barbecue at your friend Nari’s house going from 6:00 P.M. to whenever) (Burgoon & Bacue, 2003). Competently assessing the formality or informality of the situation affects your use of nonverbal communication—you might wear flip-flops and shorts to hang out at Nari’s, but you probably wouldn’t wear them to a wedding and certainly wouldn’t wear them on a job interview.

If your nonverbal communication does not appropriately fit the public–private and formal–informal dimensions, you’ll likely be met with some nonverbal indications that you are not being appropriate or effective (tight smiles, restless body movements, gaze aversion, and vocal tension).

BACK TO

Pixar Animation Studios

At the beginning of this chapter, we considered how animators at Pixar use elements of nonverbal communication to tell elaborate stories in films like Up and WALL-E. Let’s reconsider some of the ways nonverbal codes operate in these and other films.

The directors of Up used simple visual cues to highlight the characters so their appearance provides insights into their personalities. Carl is very squarish in appearance, so he’s perceived as boxed in, in both his house and his life. Eight-year-old Explorer Scout Russell is round and bouncy—like Carl’s balloons, reflecting his optimistic, energetic personality. These nonverbal elements carry subtle yet influential messages.
Animators study human kinesics to make decisions about how their animated characters should move. To animate the aged Carl, they studied their own parents and grandparents and watched footage of the Senior Olympics. If Carl moved like eight-year-old Russell, the credibility of the film would be compromised.
It takes talented voice actors to bring a script to life. The veteran actor Ed Asner breathed life into Carl, delivering not only his lines, but also believable vocal cues—grunts, sighs, speaking through clenched teeth—that made those lines more human and real. But for the roles of young Ellie and Russell, the directors chose nonactors who would give genuine, unpolished performances full of childish energy—the goal was for them to sound more like real children than actors reading from a script.