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Showing posts with the label paralanguage

Researchers Find 21 Different Facial Expressions

Researchers at the Ohio State University recently announced that the average human had 21 different facial expressions ( 1 ). Previously people thought there was only anger, happiness, disgust, surprise, sadness and fear. These expressions are considered universal across cultures, religions and races. That list has now been expanded to include more subtle impressions. The recognition is based off of the way the muscles move behind the skin to create an expression ( 3 ). People can generally recognize these emotions based upon the expression a person provides in any given circumstance. Finding 21 different expressions changes the amount of information a person can gain from watching anothers face. Famous philosophers such as Aristotle, Rene Descartes, Leonard Da Vinci and Charles Darwin believed in facial expressions as traits hundreds of years before modern findings. Research has now supported their discoveries originally derived from watching, studying, and artistically r

The Secrets to Successful Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication

Spoken language is the medium that allows us to express ourselves and obtain information with other people. Those who can communicate well are likely to find additional success that others are unlikely to realize. A paper by Binod Mishra (2009) helps to define how both verbal and non-verbal components of language interact to create higher levels of communicative skill.  He argues that social media interferes with our ability to communicate while writing reports and papers improve upon this ability. Social media such as texting might be more like “ttyl” or “brb”. The medium of cell phones limits full expression without significant effort and cost to the user in terms of contracts. Report writing, as seen in college, helps to encourage higher levels of expression. However, nothing compares to the verbal skills and non-verbal we use when communicating with others.  Verbal Skills: Verbal skills are the vocal messages we send to others. They can be figurative or literal. How

Effective Use of Paralanguage in the Workplace

Paralanguage is related to the use of subtle messages that includes tone, prosody, intonation, tempo, syllable emphasis, and other hints that create additional meaning beyond the words themselves. Knowing and understanding how paralanguage influences clarity can help in creating more effective conversation in the workplace. Managers who are capable of creating higher levels of congruency between the words they use and the paralanguage associated with those words can increase their communication effectiveness and organizational influence. Most information comes from non-verbal aspects of communication and alignment between these two concepts creates congruence. A study of university lecturers helped identify that those who used appropriate pitch, loudness, variability, pauses, and fluency increased audience satisfaction (Md Zani, et. al, 2011). The audience paid more attention and were more focused on the concepts. This helps ensure that the messages not only came across well