This volume presents, in an integrated framework, the newest, most contemporary perspectives on the role of nonverbal behavior in social interaction. The book includes empirically-grounded work and theories that are central to our understanding of the reciprocal influences between nonverbal behavior and social variables. In doing so, it contributes to the on-going controversy now shaping the field regarding the degree to which nonverbal behavior represents social, as opposed to biological, forces. The volume also highlights a number of recent subareas in the domain of nonverbal behavior that hold much promise, including the role of nonverbal behavior in group membership and media influences on nonverbal behavior. The proposed volume also presents data and theories that have applied value, useful to people working in such fields as communication, psychotherapy, and counseling. Finally, the volume gathers contributors in different sub-fields that are rarely presented jointly, such
In his important book, first published in 1997, Thomas Scheff offers an approach to researching human behavior which relates the smallest parts of social interaction to the greatest wholes of social structure. These are the details and connections usually found only in the finest novels, but Scheff combines the insights of the humanities and social sciences to capture the same evocative details of sight, sound, and context, better to understand what he calls 'human reality'. He puts a fresh emphasis on the importance of emotions in the social bond, and describes in newly subtle ways the outer and inner lives of persons in real life, such as inner-city children, and in fiction, such as Jane Austen's heroines. By closely observing the significance of words and gestures in the context in which they occur, he is able to illuminate the connection between people's lives and the society in which they live.
In this fascinating book, Anna Wierzbicka brings psychological, anthropological and linguistic insights to bear on our understanding of the way emotions are expressed and experienced in different cultures, languages, and culturally-shaped social relations. The expression of emotion in the face, body and modes of speech are all explored and Wierzbicka shows how the bodily expression of emotion varies across cultures and challenges traditional approaches to the study of facial expressions. As well as offering a perspective on human emotions based on the analysis of language and ways of talking about emotion, this intriguing and controversial book attempts to identify universals of human emotion by analysing empirical evidence from different languages and cultures. This book will be invaluable to academics and students of emotion across the social sciences.
The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest in both the nature and expression of emotion and in the process of social interaction. Researchers from a number of disciplines - psychology, anthropology, psychiatry, ethology, sociology, linguistics, and semiotics - have been attacking what are really a series of overlapping problems. These range from studies of brain mechanisms in emotion at one end of the spectrum to detailed analyses of the rule structure governing conversational sequences at the other. This series is intended to be an easily identifiable resource for scholars and students with shared methodological concerns whose work derives from historically separate research traditions. Research monographs, scholarly surveys, methodological treatises, and multi-author collections will all be included if they break new ground.
The study of emotional expressions has a long tradition in psychology. Although research in this domain has extensively studied the social context factors that influence the expresser's facial display, the perceiver was considered passive. This 2007 book focuses on more recent developments that show that the perceiver is also subject to the same social rules and norms that guide the expresser's behavior and that knowledge of relevant emotion norms can influence how emotional expressions shown by members of different groups are perceived and interpreted. Factors such as ethnic-group membership, gender and relative status all influence not only emotional expressions but also the interpretation of emotional expressions shown by members of different groups. Specifically, the research presented asks the question of whether and why the same expressions shown by men or women, members of different ethnic groups, or individuals high and low in status are interpreted differently.
Speech and culture most evidently differentiate people from animals. Yet, the biological precursors to verbal communication exists in animal communication and obvious links have been found between human and animal nonverbal vocal communication. In Nonverbal Vocal Communication specialists from several disciplines review the present knowledge on neural substrates of vocal communication, on primate vocal communication, and on precursors and prerequisites of human speech. Among other points, the book illustrates that animal vocal signals appear to be much more complex than mere expressions of effective states. The non-verbal communication data is complemented by comparative and developmental research of the preverbal period of human vocal communication. The book provides a forum for consideration of phylogenetic and ontogenetic continuities and precursors of verbal communication that will allow for critical interpretation of speech acquisition by a wide range of workers.
Affect and Social Behavior, first published in 1990, provides a comprehensive and integrative examination of research and theory into the role that emotion plays in influencing social behavior. The contributors investigate a number of important domains such as aggression, altruism, romantic attraction, and consumer behavior and the role that affect plays in instigating and regulating these behaviors. The chapters were written by some of the most prominent researchers in the field and they provide a review of research and theory in this important area of study.
Because of the complexity of human behaviour a great many research variables must be constructed from the building blocks of human judgement. A teacher's warmth, a psychotherapist's ability to create rapport, a patient's inner state - these all tend ultimately to be defined by the judgements of others. The purpose of this book is to describe the design, the analysis and the meta-analysis of studies employing judgements in sufficient detail that readers can conduct such studies, and more wisely evaluate them. While the author's examples are drawn primarily from research on non-verbal behaviour, the book is designed for any investigators employing judges, observers, raters, coders, or decoders, whether or not the behaviour being assessed is non-verbal. Judgment Studies: Design, Analysis, and Meta-Analysis constitutes a unique resource for advanced students and researchers in the behavioural and social sciences. It offers the first integrated summary of methodological issues in judgement
Emotions are an elemental part of life - they imbue our existence with meaning and purpose, and influence how we engage with the world around us. But we do not just feel our own emotions; we typically express them in the presence of other people. How do our emotional expressions affect others? Moving beyond the traditional intrapersonal perspective, this is the first book dedicated to exploring the pervasive interpersonal dynamics of emotions. Integrating existing theory and research, van Kleef develops the Emotions as Social Information (EASI) theory, a groundbreaking comprehensive framework that explains how emotional expressions influence observers across all domains of life, from close relationships to group settings, conflict and negotiation, customer service, and leader-follower relations. His deeply social perspective sheds new light on the fundamental question of why we have emotions in the first place - the social influence emotions engender may very well constitute their
Emotions play a powerful role in close relationships. Significant progress has been made in understanding the temporal features of emotions associated with the development and maintenance of close relationships across the lifespan. This advancement has revealed further questions: which theories help conceptualize interpersonal emotion dynamics? What are the ways researchers can assess and model these dynamics? How do interpersonal emotion dynamics manifest in different close relationships? And do these emotion dynamics contribute to the maintenance or dissolution of relationships? Interpersonal Emotion Dynamics in Close Relationships addresses these and other questions by bringing together state-of-the-art perspectives from scholars widely recognized for their contributions to the study of emotions in relationships. Each chapter defines interpersonal emotion dynamics, reviews methodological or empirical work, and offers important directions for future research. This volume will be a
Written by experts in comparative, developmental, social, cognitive and cultural psychology, this book introduces the novel concept of affective social learning to help explain why what matters to us, matters to us. In the same way that social learning describes how we observe other people's behaviour to learn how to use a particular object, affective social learning describes how we observe other people's emotions to learn how to value a particular object, person or event. As such, affective social learning conceptualises the transmission of value from a given culture to a given person and reveals why the things that are so important to us can be of no consequence at all to others.
Gerald C. Cupchik builds a bridge between science and the humanities, arguing that interactions between mind and body in everyday life are analogous to relations between subject matter and style in art. According to emotional phase theory, emotional reactions emerge in a 'perfect storm' whereby meaningful situations evoke bodily memories that unconsciously shape and unify the experience. Similarly, in expressionist or impressionist painting, an evocative visual style can spontaneously colour the experience and interpretation of subject matter. Three basic situational themes encompass complementary pairs of primary emotions: attachment (happiness - sadness), assertion (fear - anger), and absorption (interest - disgust). Action episodes, in which a person adapts to challenges or seeks to realize goals, benefit from energizing bodily responses which focus attention on the situation while providing feedback, in the form of pleasure or pain, regarding success or failure. In high
Do emotions happen inside separate hearts and minds, or do they operate across the spaces between individuals? This book focuses on how emotions affect other people by changing their orientation to what happens in the social world. It provides the first sustained attempt to bring together literature on emotion's social effects in dyads and groups, and on how people regulate their emotions in order to exploit these effects in their home and work lives. The chapters present state-of-the-art reviews of topics such as emotion contagion, social appraisal and emotional labour. The book then develops an innovative and integrative approach to the social psychology of emotion based on the idea of relation alignment. The implications not only stretch beyond face-to-face interactions into the wider interpersonal, institutional and cultural environment, but also penetrate the supposed depths of personal experience, making us rethink some of our strongly held presuppositions about how emotions
Written by experts in comparative, developmental, social, cognitive and cultural psychology, this book introduces the novel concept of affective social learning to help explain why what matters to us, matters to us. In the same way that social learning describes how we observe other people's behaviour to learn how to use a particular object, affective social learning describes how we observe other people's emotions to learn how to value a particular object, person or event. As such, affective social learning conceptualises the transmission of value from a given culture to a given person and reveals why the things that are so important to us can be of no consequence at all to others.
