Monday, October 1, 2012

Principles of Nonverbal Communication



After reviewing the eight principles of nonverbal communication, I am going to go over the following two principles:
1.     Our nonverbal communication affects the quality of our relationships: The nonverbal messages we give send messages about our personality, likes, dislikes and overall attitude. I can relate this to an example of the group we worked while in Deanza College. We were a group of 5 working together on a project for our intercultural communication class. There was one group member who always fell asleep in our discussions out of the class, which gave us the message that he was too stressed to handle all the work. Whichever meetings he did not sleep, he would keep texting without any participation and whistled or showed least interest in the project as if he did not care at all. We build an impression about him as a person who is not bothered about the project. So all of us started ignoring him or his requests in the group and never tried to build any working or friendly relationship with him.
2.     Research suggests that women and men differently decode nonverbal cues: I have seen a big difference in views of my husband and me in interpreting a person through his actions. One time we went to a party where we met with a woman who was acting very pricey with the show off of her branded stuff. She was pally with people whom she though were rich and ignored all others who were normal and in the moment of the party. When I told my husband on what I felt about that woman, he said I don’t think any of this is true. He thought of her as an introvert working her way in the party slowly.

1 comment:

  1. Thank you for sharing. You did a wonderful on identifying the principles of non verbal communication. I agree with your number one principle, on non verbal communication affecting the quality of our relationships. You gave a great example of your group member who kept falling asleep during the meetings. I agree that his non verbal communication was not showing he was participating in the group work. I also liked the second principle that you chose, of women and men decoding non verbal communication differently. I can completely relate to this principle because I find that that men are often taking my non verbal signs the wrong way. I am a happy, and nice lesbian. For some reason if I smile a a mans direction he feels that is a green light to get at me or ask me for my number. I am just a nice and happy person and feel that many men actually decode those non verbal signs the wrong way. I really enjoyed your post and felt that you understood and explained the principles very well. Thank you again for sharing and you did a good job.

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