Nonverbal Communication in Interaction: Psychology and Literature

Abstract

When about 40 years ago I began to ponder the complexity of interaction — face-to-face and with the environment — I realized researchers tended to neglect a great number of instances as merely “incidental,” “contextual” or “marginal,” and thus identified at most a series of interactive facts in a cause-effect sequence that dismissed what “did not happen,” even more what “would or would have not happened” (had an activity or non-activity taken place), let alone what “had not happened yet” or “was not even going to happen.” I always conceived of interaction as:

The conscious or unconscious exchange of behavioral or nonbe- havioral, sensible and intelligible signs from the whole arsenal of somatic and extrasomatic systems (independently of whether they are activities or non-activities or did or will happen at all) and the rest of the surrounding cultural systems, as they all act as sign emitting components (and as potential elicitors of further emissions) which determine the specific characteristics of the exchange.

Havill’s face had been not unpleasant until this moment, when he smiled; whereupon there instantly gleamed over him a phase of meanness, remaining until the smile died away. It might have been an accident; it might have been otherwise.

(T. Hardy, A Laodicean)