Poker face, or no emotion
Note: Adapted from “Facial Displays Are Tools for Social Influence,” by C. Crivelli and A. J. Fridlund, 2018 , Trends in Cognitive Sciences , 22 (5), p. 394. Copyright 2018 by Elsevier Ltd.
BET = basic emotions theory. BECV = behavioral ecology view (of facial displays). Social-tool use refers to possible usage of common facial behaviors, cast in terms of behavioral consequence. Actual display behaviors and usages in BECV are dependent on interactant identities, histories, and the social context.
Second, BECV understands solitary faces as implicitly social in various everyday situations—for example, when people call out for rescue, pray to God, nurse their houseplants, curse recalcitrant computers, imagine attentive others, and praise themselves for their cleverness or performance (see Crivelli & Fridlund, 2019 ; Fridlund, 1991b , 1994 ; and Fridlund & Duchaine, 1996 ; for discussions of implicit and animistic interactions).
Third, BECV recognizes that natural selection and cultural selection can each generate commonalities or divergences via numerous mechanisms, and any human facial behavior will always reflect both nature and culture ( Lindquist et al., 2022 ). No universality can be presupposed, nor can commonalities be assigned a priori to nature with divergences left to culture.
Last, BECV considers the idea that faces “leak” to reveal breakthrough emotion to be unverified and probably unverifiable. Glimpses of incongruous facial behavior, such as so-called microexpressions, instead signify momentarily conflicting intentions (we discuss this further under the next misconception). Thus, parents disciplining their children for finding their way into the cookie jar may glare at them to press the point yet betray a flicker of a smile to approve their cleverness.
The common-sense view that categorical emotions were causally linked to certain iconic facial behaviors was rooted in Western philosophical and artistic traditions regarding the “passions.” The authors of BET’s foundational studies in Papua New Guinea perpetuated the Western narrative and regarded it as the self-evident product of human evolution. They made the existence of universal categorical basic emotions and corresponding eruptive overt behaviors (i.e., putative facial expressions of emotion) a fundamental part of human nature, such as bipedalism or stereoscopic vision, and the expressions were likened to other purported universals, such as color perception or analog numeracy ( Ekman, 1992 ; Henrich et al., 2010 ; Tracy, 2014 ).
In some respects, aspiring to prove universality in facial expressions—an all-or-none proposition—was always a tall order, because so few cultures were ever studied ( Nelson & Russell, 2013 ; Russell, 1994 ), and because behavioral traits tend to show much more variation than morphological ones. The most conspicuous example is handedness. Worldwide, the prevalence of right-handedness is roughly 90%, far above the cultural matching rates in any facial-expression study, yet no one has spoken of the universality of dexterity; sinistrality and ambidexterity are recognized, stable variations ( Crivelli & Fridlund, 2018 ). It therefore came as no surprise when recent studies in four small-scale African and Pacific societies failed to replicate BET’s canonical studies. The results, found in small-scale societies, were based on tests of both BET predictions and alternative hypotheses.
It appears that, with regard to facial expressions, the doctrine of universality has failed empirical testing. In the last decade, the data gathered in small-scale societies have extended our knowledge on the extent of diversity, context dependency, and flexibility in the behaviors that human beings use to negotiate encounters with others. These cross-cultural findings, which countered the presumption that human emotions were universally expressed on faces, were anticipated by Darwin (e.g., adaptive radiation in the Galapagos) and the behavioral ecologists who emerged in the 1970s.
We suggest that emotion may not be the best way to understand what we do with our faces. In the 1990s, BECV redefined how we conceptualize human facial displays using an externalist and functional perspective in a way that reconciles psychology with evolutionary biology, and it accorded humans the same subtlety and interactivity in their displays as modern theorists give to nonhumans. 10
The fact that expression does not imply categorical emotion is brought home in human-computer interactions in which people interact with avatars, or simulated humans, in real or virtual worlds. Suppose a child is interacting with a pedagogical avatar as part of computerized instruction ( Lin et al., 2020 ). If the avatar smiles at the child’s performance, do we conclude that the computer creating it is internally happy? And if the avatar scowls when the child uses blacklisted curse words, does its scowl mean that the computer is angry? Clearly, the avatar’s faces are intended to guide the child’s conduct. We believe that people’s faces work the same way.
This discussion does not and should not imply that cross-cultural research on facial expressions has become any less important. Commonalities and differences may emerge with detailed studies that do not favor either. Future studies of facial expressions should examine which faces occur, by whom, in what settings, in which societies. Such studies should proceed without undue theoretical burden, such as the stipulation that they express categorical emotions. In accordance with BECV and the systems approach we outline below, we believe that these studies should focus on how faces integrate with language and other nonverbal behaviors to regulate social interactions.
The final misconception concerns the claim that distinctive, identifiable nonverbal behaviors are reliable indicators of deception. The role of nonverbal cues in detecting deception has long been a popular topic for researchers and the lay public. The phrase “the body never lies” reflects an implicit, and sometimes explicit, assumption that deception can be detected by some disconnect between the content of a lie and the speaker’s nonverbal behavior ( Nierenberg et al., 2010 ). Where on the body those lies are supposedly detected has ranged literally from head to toe—from head movements and facial twitches to postural shifts and foot jiggling.
The notion has permeated Western popular culture, basic science, and high-stakes arenas such as global terrorism and counterintelligence, and it has become so longstanding and ingrained that streams of private and public funding now sustain a multibillion-dollar industry predicated on claims that liars can be caught by analyzing certain nonverbal behaviors. An August 2020 Amazon.com search for books on body language and deception turned up 305 results, including titles such as Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception and Detect Deceit: How to Become a Human Lie Detector in Under 60 Minutes ( https://www.amazon.com/s?k=%22body+language%22+and+deception&ref=nb_sb_noss_2 ).
Just as YouTube influencers tout what they call “body language” as key to success, they also guide their fanbases to learn how to spot deceit in in their partners, bosses, associates, and children. One YouTube channel, “The Behavior Panel” ( https://www.youtub.com/channel/UCx_8ri2rYergbu_06VNSPlw ), features the “world’s leading behavior experts” decoding videos of politicians and celebrities to divine what they really mean when they avert their eyes, twitch their lips or noses, sit straight or slump, and pause too little or too long when they speak. Is there any merit to such popular practices? To simplify our overview of research on nonverbal behavior and deception, we focus first on bodily movements and then on facial displays.
Sigmund Freud often noticed that his psychoanalytic patients made off-task movements as they free associated or related their dreams. With a seeming lack of awareness, they fiddled with their watch chains, removed and replaced their wedding rings, or jiggled their pocket change. Freud termed these “symptomatic and chance actions” parapraxes , and he considered them revelations of unconscious material that conflicted with what was conscious ( Freud, 1901/1915 ). Some nonverbal behavior researchers used the same logic to claim that bodily movements divulge the truth while the mouth tells the lie. The belief that lies are transparent dates back nearly 3,000 years and sees currency in the legal system, where jurors are instructed to notice the nonverbal behavior of people in the witness chair ( Vrij et al., 2019 ).
Could Freud’s conflict formulation, minus its conscious/unconscious corollary, explain the bodily movements held to indicate deception? Ethologists have long observed that animals show “conflict behaviors” when they are at behavioral junctures. To deter interlopers, birds at a territorial boundary must choose either to charge across the boundary or stand their own ground inside it, and they often displace or redirect the conflict by preening, pecking the ground, or plucking the grass ( Alcock, 1984 , Fridlund, 1994 ). Numerous studies have shown that increased psychological stress results in greater body muscular activity. Temperamentally anxious people tend to be tenser and more agitated as well ( Fridlund et al., 1986 ; Hazlett et al., 1994 ; Jung et al., 2016 ). Might this stress account for the supposedly telltale bodily signs of deception? Trivers (2011) suggested three reasons, all related to stress, why there might be such signs: (a) “because of the negative consequences of being detected . . . people are expected to be nervous when lying”; (b) because concern over appearing nervous may lead people to “exert control, trying to suppress behavior” leading to “overacting, overcontrol, a planned and rehearsed impression, or displacement activities”; and (c) because the cognitive requirements or “load” of lying means that liars “think too hard,” which has behavioral repercussions (p. 10).
How exactly would those factors be evident? Here we find a vast amount of lore regarding bodily signs of deception. Trivers suggested that deception would be accompanied by less blinking, fidgeting, and hand gesturing, but longer speech pauses and increased vocal pitch ( Trivers, 2011 , pp. 10–12). In Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception ( Houston et al., 2012 ), the authors descried the “behavioral myths” that pervade the field (p. 25) yet contended that being inappropriately polite (p. 38) is a clue, as is gesturing that hides the mouth or eyes. Throat clearing or swallowing is another giveaway, as are biting or licking the lips, grooming actions like hand-combing the hair, and “sweat management” such as hand-wiping the brow or pulling out a handkerchief to do it.
Were Trivers’s suppositions on target? Are the CIA retirees in Spy the Lie telling the truth? Unless various intelligence services have conducted top-secret validation studies, 11 we must be content with publicly available research, and it paints a starkly different picture. The consensus of deception researchers is the one reached by Charles Bond and Bella DePaulo in their analysis of over 200 studies of judgment accuracy in nonverbal detection of deception. This analysis found that judges were no more accurate “than would be expected by chance, and the best judges are no more accurate than a stochastic mechanism would produce” ( Bond & DePaulo, 2008 , p. 477).
Most of these studies had observers make global judgments about deceit and did not explore what specific behaviors informed their judgments. Isolating those behaviors was the goal of a massive earlier meta-analysis by DePaulo et al. (2003) , who compiled 120 separate data sets from 116 studies that encompassed nearly a dozen ethnic groups and found roughly 100 behaviors that were predominantly nonverbal. Restricting these cues to ones that emerged in more than six studies, 50 behaviors remained. Effect sizes were computed on the basis of mean occurrences of those behaviors in deceptive versus nondeceptive conditions. Only 14 of the 50 cues were statistically significant discriminators of potential detection, with the standout cue being “verbal and vocal immediacy . . . [the] degree to which responses sound direct, relevant, clear, and personal.” Following that was “discrepancy or ambivalence” in verbal and nonverbal presentation.
In their summary of DePaulo et al.’s (2003) most relevant findings, Vrij et al. (2019) observed that most cues that were at least partly nonverbal showed no relationship to deception whatsoever. For the ones that did, the effect sizes were small, leading Vrij et al. to the dismal conclusion “that those cues are mostly unrelated or, at best, weakly related to deception” (p. 302). Even this weak relationship is suspect. Most detection-of-deception contexts are likely to engender stress in both the innocent and the guilty, and it is crucial to remember, consistent with Trivers’s (2011) cautions, that any indications of stress can be interpreted in multiple ways. People may be stressed not because they are lying but because they fear being accused of it (rightly or wrongly), resent the fact that they are suspected of it, or are simply fraught at being put on the spot about it. 12
So what do we make of the evidence? Overall, it appears that “liars” give off nonverbal behaviors while they are lying. But such nonverbal behaviors do not certify their lying, because both liars and nonliars may give off the same nonverbal behaviors for reasons other than lying (i.e., when they are anxious). Given this state of affairs, Vrij et al. (2019) noted the patent, persistent, disturbing discordance between such findings and the current practices of so-called lie-detection experts: “Lively debates about the merits of nonverbal lie detection no longer take place at the scientific conferences that we attend. Yet nonverbal lie detection remains highly popular among practitioners, such as police detectives, and in the media” (p. 302). As we shall see, this same disconnect between the evidence on bodily movement and deception and its unwarranted application extends to facial displays and facial deception.
In light of the overwhelming evidence debunking the misconception that the “body never lies,” it may be unsurprising that commonly used detection-of-deception programs based on the misconception do not fare well. An important critical review captured the prevalence of this misconception and pulled no punches in slamming much of nonverbal-behavior detection of deception as unalloyed pseudoscience ( Denault et al., 2020 ). Among the egregious offenders was the most common behavior-oriented protocol, the Behavior Analysis Interview (BAI). The BAI involves a nonaccusatory interview at first, followed by an Inquisition-like confrontation consisting of 15 standard questions intended “to elicit an initial admission of guilt” ( Inbau et al., 2013 , p. 294, cited by Denault et al., 2020 , p. 4).
Certain examinee nonverbal behaviors in the BAI interrogation are stipulated to be signs of deceit, including maintaining a closed, withdrawn posture, sitting askew in the chair, and leaning forward constantly. Opposite movements and postures indicate honesty. Lack of eye contact and gaze aversion are likely to indicate the withholding of information, a clear departure from numerous findings indicating no relationship to deception. These behaviors are judged to indicate guilt on the basis of the BAI’s declaration that guilty parties will be more stressed by interrogation than innocent ones. This assumption may hold in some cases but is clearly unfounded in many others. For example, recidivists judged guilty yet again may be far less stressed at the prospect than innocent people who are falsely judged guilty. For them, the consequences could be catastrophic. As evidence of the flimsiness of the BAI’s rationale and practice, the only empirical investigation of the BAI in which the ground truth of guilt or innocence was known—a mock theft analogue study—found that BAI results could not discriminate the guilty from the innocent ( Vrij et al., 2006 ).
Perhaps no psychological theory has ever been tested at greater effort and expense—and gotten worse results—than the program for Screening of Passengers by Observational Techniques (SPOT) by the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Introduced in 2006 and premised on the claim that “behavioral indicators . . . can be used to identify persons who may pose a risk to aviation security” ( U.S. Government Accountability Office [GAO], 2013 ), the TSA deployed about 3,000 behavior detection officers across 176 U.S. airports. These officers were trained to observe airline passengers at prescreening using a 92-item checklist of criteria that included exaggerated yawning, mouth-covering, a bobbing Adam’s apple, excessive throat clearing, rapid blinking, complaining more than usual about the screening process, whistling while approaching screening, gazing down, a pale face in males from recent shaving, and the rubbing or wringing of hands ( Winter & Currier, 2015 ).
Denault et al.’s (2020) review of pseudoscience in nonverbal behavior detailed SPOT’s ignominious failure on field testing. Similarly, the GAO’s summary judgment on SPOT concluded that “meta-analyses and other published research studies we reviewed do not support whether nonverbal behavioral indicators can be used to reliably identify deception” ( GAO, 2013 , p. 15). The outcome data from SPOT might have been anticipated given the paucity of evidence that nonverbal behaviors were reliable indicators of deception per se ( Bond & DePaulo, 2008 ; DePaulo et al., 2003 ).
The GAO (2013), in its internal review of 400 separate studies related to detecting deception, noted that “the ability of human observers to accurately identify deceptive behavior based on behavioral cues or indicators is the same as or slightly better than chance (54 “percent”)” (p. 16). Moreover, the 178 sources of evidence the TSA used to justify its behavioral indicators boiled down to only three original research articles, and these few articles only supported the use of some of the indicators comprising the TSA’s checklist. The GAO’s overall assessment? “Decades of peer-reviewed, published research on the complexities associated with detecting deception through human observation called into question the scientific basis for TSA’s behavior detection activities” (GAO, 2013, p. 47). As Denault et al. (2020) indicated, SPOT cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $1.5 billion for 2007 to 2015, with little to show for it. Did the TSA disband SPOT as a failed program? As with many government programs, ineffectiveness has not compromised longevity, and SPOT seems simply to have reemerged under the radar as a new TSA surveillance program called Quiet Skies.
In detecting deception, does the face provide better clues than the body? The dominant theory of faces, BET, claimed that we deceive with our faces in two ways—by making faces discordant with how we feel, and by showing intrusive facial behavior that reveals emotions we try to suppress. We summarize and show fatal problems with both.
The presumption of authentic face-emotion links in BET widened the scope of deceit to unprecedented phenomena. Under the BET position that individuals feeling a basic emotion and not trying to conceal their feelings produced the same facial expressions across societies ( Ekman, 1980 ), BET researchers concluded that people whose emotional states did not match their facial expressions were lying about their feelings with their faces ( Ekman & Friesen, 1975 ). From this perspective, bursting into tears at discovering one’s child was not critically ill became deceptive, because a teary-eyed face is supposed to signal inner sadness.
Among the different facial displays that were considered universal expressions of emotion, the study of smiling has been pivotal. Under BET assumptions, for example, smiling at work while in a cranky mood would be deceptive, because authentic or “felt” smiles arise only with happiness ( Ekman & Friesen, 1982 ). However, this perspective does not take into account that the cranky person, though irritable, might also want to be authentically courteous; it turns everyday politeness into mendacity ( Fridlund, 2017 ). BET studies of facial deception nonetheless began promoting the idea that smiles accompanied by wincing, the so-called Duchenne smiles, were authentic, felt, and spontaneous, whereas those smiles without wincing were “unfelt,” deliberate, and therefore false and phony ( Ekman et al., 1990 ). This claim was accepted uncritically, despite the original report’s lack of discriminant validation and the fact that wincing in the Duchenne smile was an artifact of stimulus intensity and not hedonics ( Fridlund, 1994 ).
Indeed, subsequent research has shown that, contrary to BET proclamations, Duchenne smiles (a) are at least as affected by sociality as non-Duchenne ones, and occur frequently in highly scripted social encounters; (b) can be produced easily on request; and (c) occur as a function of both smile intensity and stimulus intensity regardless of valence ( Crivelli & Fridlund, 2019 ; Fernández-Dols & Carrera, 2010 ; Girard et al., 2021 ; Krumhuber & Kappas, 2022 ; Krumhuber & Manstead, 2009 ).
Micromomentary expressions were first discussed by Haggard and Isaacs (1966) , who reviewed videotapes of psychotherapy patients. They found flashes of facial behavior that interrupted more sustained expressions and were noticed mostly when the playback was slowed. Like Freud with his parapraxes, the authors saw these glimpses, which lasted only a fraction of a second, as revelations of suppressed content. Other researchers noted similar therapy-related behaviors and claimed that these fleeting facial movements revealed deception ( Ekman & Friesen, 1969 ). Microexpressions, however, arose as a post hoc explanation for the results obtained in a well-known study with nurses ( Ekman & Friesen, 1974a , 1974b ). The paradigmatic study, reviewed by Fridlund (2021) , had two experimental conditions. In the honest condition, female nursing students individually watched excerpts of a pleasant film with an interviewer present who asked participants to “truthfully describe their reactions” during the film. In the dishonest condition, the students were asked to watch a medical film detailing amputations and severe burns and to “conceal negative affect” during the film. In the dishonest condition, the questioning was confrontational (“What kinds of feelings are you having right now?”; “Are you telling me the truth?”; “Do you think I believe you?”; Ekman & Friesen, 1974a , p. 291). Untrained student observers who viewed video snippets could not distinguish honest from deceptive instances on the basis of facial behavior. One decade later, these researchers replicated the nursing studies, finding similar unimpressive results ( O’Sullivan et al., 1988 ).
Rather than accepting these null findings, the researchers faulted their judges, claiming that these microexpressions were so brief, with durations from 1/25 s to 1/5 s, that their untrained observers would naturally have missed them. To prove their point, they commissioned “four experienced facial analysts,” all unnamed, to judge the nursing students’ recorded faces, and they reported that these experts accurately judged both the honest and deceptive behavior in most of the trials ( Ekman & Friesen, 1974a ). These findings came with no description of the procedures used, the judgment criteria, the specific outcome data, or any assurance that the scoring was blind. Needless to say, these claims were greeted with skepticism (see Bond, 2008 ; Bond & Uysal, 2007 ; cf. Ekman et al., 2008 ).
The idea that microexpressions are to be seen in human faces gained traction mainly on the strength of such anecdotal evidence, and found its way into basic and applied science and self-help trade books. Eventually introductory psychology, criminology, and forensic texts mentioned microexpressions, and the range of applications soon extended from national security to marital relations and personnel recruitment ( Ekman, 2003 , 2009 ; Gladwell, 2005 ; Li et al., 2018 ; Navarro & Karlins, 2008 ).
These developments transpired years before the first independent targeted investigations of microexpressions and deceit ( Porter et al., 2012 ; Porter & ten Brinke, 2008 ; K. ten Brinke & Porter, 2012 ; L. ten Brinke et al., 2012 ). Porter, ten Brinke, and colleagues had participants view slides of various emotional-related stimuli while facing a camera that recorded their facial behavior, with instructions to “falsify,” “simulate,” or be “genuine.” Matsumoto and Hwang (2018) summarized these studies as showing (a) that microexpressions are quite rare, occurring in only 2% of all expressions ( Porter & ten Brinke, 2008 ); (b) that the studies did not distinguish genuine from feigned remorse ( L. ten Brinke et al., 2012 ); and (c) that the studies did not separate truthful from deceitful individuals regardless of stimulus intensity ( Porter et al., 2012 ). The final result stood even when judges were shown internationally televised videos of people pleading for the return of missing relatives, with half the pleaders having actually murdered the relatives themselves ( K. ten Brinke & Porter, 2012 ). Finally, controlled research on one well-established set of microexpression “training tools” found that, with training, overall accuracy at detecting deception was slightly below chance ( Jordan et al., 2019 ).
As we noted earlier, all these studies of faces and deceit were bizarre distentions of the concept of deception, in that deviations from theory-driven predictions were made criterial. It was assumed that participants experienced certain emotions because of situations contrived to produce them (whether participants were exposed to face photos or videos or staged scenarios), and it was assumed that the experienced emotions would produce certain stipulated faces. Suppressed emotion, it was also stipulated, would leak onto the face, and so instructions to suppress, falsify, or neutralize the predicted faces to produce microexpressions were pitting purposeful actions against natural faces, with any incongruities reflecting the latter’s irrepressibility. This conflict between willfulness and authenticity was said to emanate from a neurological tug of war between competing brain structures ( Matsumoto & Hwang, 2018 ; Matsumoto & Lee, 1993 ).
All this theorizing was unnecessarily complex and inattentive to the social demands of the experimental context. The nurses’ study ( Ekman & Friesen, 1974a ), like the many procedural variations used subsequently, was more prosaically understandable in terms of the instigation of ordinary conflicts in impression management. Simply put, nursing students were led to make faces that both reassured others (nurses must be empathic, and the participants were eager to become nurses) and showed stolidity (good nurses must conceal their discomfort from patients). If the “four experienced facial analysts” of the nurses’ study indeed observed microexpressions, then those signs were merely conflict behaviors arising from situationally contrived ambivalence, not telltale leakages of suppressed emotions ( Fridlund, 2021 ).
Can we accurately “read” the nonverbal behavior and microexpressions of partners who have cheated, children who stole cookies from the cookie jar, or defendants who killed victims they insist they never met? Research evaluating the use of bodily movements to detect deception has turned up either null or minimal results. Literature reviews and meta-analyses show that facial microexpressions are infrequent, and inferences about them readily lead to both false negatives and false positives ( Burgoon, 2018 ; DePaulo et al., 2003 ; Hartwig & Bond, 2011 ). Studies intended to be about deception per se often missed the mark precisely because they did not take into account the contextual factors that led to stress and ambivalence in their participants, signs of which were mislabeled “deception.”
The misguided belief that we can reliably detect deception using either the body or the face has been fueled in part by the lay conviction that people should be able to tell when they are being deceived, as the unpleasant truth leaves them vulnerable. 13 Yet another reason this belief persists lies in the fact that there is money to be made by claiming that one can teach how to detect deceit, and there is a history of flawed science supporting that enterprise ( Jupe & Denault, 2019 ; Jupe & Keatley, 2020 ). This creates a conflict of interest that jeopardizes the integrity of both research and its application ( Chivers, 2019 ).
What will happen to the understanding of deception when we participate as our own digital avatars in the metaverse? As we interact with virtual others, will we continue to believe that we can see deception in the synthetic representations of others? Or will we “world-switch” here, too? Will we learn to base judgments of others’ truthfulness on evidence other than their electronically replicated nonverbal behavior, as we should have done long ago in the real world? Or will a virtual jurisprudence evolve by which nonverbal indicators like on-screen gauges, possibly superimposed on virtual others, signal their credibility and ours, with virtual penalties for computer-detected instances of virtual deception?
In this article, we have discussed four common misconceptions about NVC. In our view, it is time to move beyond several ill-founded beliefs: (a) that NVC is a language; (b) that individuals possess a stable personal space that regulates their in-person contacts with others; (c) that our emotions are read out by universal, iconic, categorical facial displays; and (d) that the body never lies. From our vantage point, the Internet and social media have perpetuated these misconceptions, making claims that go well past the evidence. Propelled by obvious incentives, some professionals have used dubious science to promote practices that are unfounded, unreliable, and expensive.
How might we clear the field of these misconceptions, provide a better framework for research, and accurately represent our results to the public? The replication crisis in psychology and other sciences has led to increased skepticism about high-profile findings with large payouts but dubious evidential bases. As we have seen, well-known meta-analyses on detection of deception were largely ignored, and it took the failure of a $1.5 billion U.S. government program to bring the cautionary research to public attention. Our most specific recommendation is that such high-profile endeavors should receive the earliest and most thorough scrutiny. Of course, this is no guarantee that the field of NVC will be purged of either bad science or frank pseudoscience.
More generally, what we propose is not an alternative set of dogmas, but rather a systems approach to research and theory that stimulates wide-ranging inquiry. An example of this kind of approach is a recent model of dyadic nonverbal interaction ( Patterson, 2019 ). In general, the systems model describes and explains the dynamic interplay among individual, dyadic, and environmental processes in nonverbal interactions. That is, any particular outcome, whether it is a nonverbal display, a judgment of others’ nonverbal behavior, or a combination of both, is best understood as emanating from a network of interrelated processes. Although the details are beyond the scope of this article, the systems model embraces three principles that undercut the misconceptions we have described. Specifically, the model emphasizes that NVC engages multiple cues and behaviors concurrently; that NVC is interactive; and that context is critical, with the physical setting staging all our interactions, and with culture always the deep context. We review the importance of all three ideas.
NVC is the product of multiple cues and behaviors ( Patterson, 1995 , 2011 ). On the sending side, individuals at any given point in an interaction display a variety of appearance cues and initiate a complex of behaviors. On the receiving side, individuals have a complementary role, perceiving a wide range of others’ appearance cues and behaviors. Of course, not all available cues and behaviors may register, and some of them may be weighted more heavily than others ( Patterson, 2019 ). Simultaneous sending and receiving of such cue-behavior patterns occur even in brief interactions. To assume that any one behavior in isolation (e.g., a nose touch, or altered gaze) is part of a body language with invariant meanings misrepresents the configural nature of the multiple components that comprise NVC. Thus, the meaning of a specific action or display depends on the overall cue-behavior pattern. Likewise, the misconception of personal space results from an inattention to the multiple components (e.g., gaze, body orientation, facial displays, or other related behaviors) that determine the meaning and impact of NVC.
Our focus here is, of course, in social settings, but we must reexamine the boundaries of what is “social.” We cannot overlook the implicit sociality of the verbal and nonverbal behaviors that occur when we are physically alone, such as cursing at flaky computers, praying to God, rehearsing talks, plotting revenge, and pampering houseplants ( Crivelli & Fridlund, 2018 ; Fridlund, 1994 ; Fridlund & Duchaine, 1996 ). That people can be physically alone but essentially social was always true for letter writers, even though the communication was lagged. People who are passive viewers of others’ nonverbal interactions, whether in public or on social media or TV, assume the role of bystanders, and the interactants’ knowledge that there are bystanders (i.e., audiences) will affect their behavior.
In standard in-person social settings, however, NVC is a two-way street with interactants reciprocating appearance cues and a stream of nonverbal behavior. Such reciprocation does not require sustained interaction. It can happen in very brief encounters in which people simply share the same setting for just a few seconds. These are the unfocused interactions we reviewed previously. Even in these incidental interactions, the nonverbal behaviors are complex and open to multiple interpretations. A smile toward the boss in the office hallway may be meant as ingratiation, whereas that same smile may be flirtation toward a co-worker. Nor are the impacts of such behavior invariant. To the boss, the smile may be seen as ingratiation, friendliness, appeasement, or subversion. For the co-worker, it may be taken as friendliness, healthy interest, or sexual harassment.
Whether interactions are focused or unfocused in nature, the systems model views nonverbal interactions as goal-oriented behavioral exchanges shaped by interdependent perceptual, cognitive, and affective processes between partners ( Patterson, 2019 ). A failure to achieve goals increases the probability of behavioral adjustments or an early termination of the interaction ( Patterson, 2019 ). Thus, the systems model provides an interactive perspective on NVC that stands in stark contrast to the misconceptions discussed in this article.
The four misconceptions we describe generally ignore the fact that all patterns of NVC are situated within specific interaction contexts. Two aspects of such contexts, physical environment and culture, deserve far more attention.
We have previously detailed the role of the physical environment in our treatment of the misconception of personal space. The influence of the physical environment on social interaction is much broader, however. With some important exceptions (e.g., Altman, 1975 ; Barker, 1968 ; Oishi & Graham, 2010 ; Wicker, 1979 ), it has been sorely neglected in psychology generally, and in research and theory on NVC specifically ( Patterson & Quadflieg, 2016 ).
The physical environment shapes NVC in complex and sometimes subtle ways. The dynamics of behavior settings, a central construct in ecological psychology, illustrate these influences ( Wicker, 1979 ). Behavior settings are bounded geographical areas in which components such as the physical environment and behavioral norms collectively serve to facilitate ordered trajectories of events and behaviors over a limited period of time ( Wicker, 1979 ). In such settings, whether they are college classes, office meetings, political rallies, or religious services, most people behave in line with the physical and social constraints of the immediate environment rather than acting in ways that dramatize their personalities, attitudes, or motivations. Individuals migrating across settings change their behavior, both verbal and nonverbal, to suit the constraints and expectancies of the new settings. Furthermore, because people select settings and settings often select people, individuals who stray too far from the setting norms may be unwelcome ( Wicker, 1979 ).
Next, specific features of the physical environment also influence the give-and-take of NVC ( Patterson & Quadflieg, 2016 ). For example, the design and arrangement of furniture in a setting delimit the options for interpersonal distance and orientation in seated interactions. In turn, distance and orientation affect impressions and ease of communication within a group ( Altman, 1975 ; Patterson, 2021 ).
The measurable effects of subtle environmental features on NVC are discussed at length elsewhere ( Patterson & Quadflieg, 2016 ), but a few examples suffice. Dimmer ambient lighting decreases how much detail we see in others’ appearances, and this lack of distinctiveness may increase the probability of “they are all alike” stereotyping ( Cloutier & Macrae, 2007 ). Transparent glass barriers designed to separate or isolate people provide visual spaciousness but can decrease privacy ( Marquardt et al., 2015 ). Pleasant citrus scents can facilitate trust and reciprocity between strangers ( Liljenquist et al., 2010 ). Loud ambient noise is likely to drive people closer together so they can hear each other speak ( Lloyd et al., 2009 ). NVC can occur in absentia, because people who have left the scene leave physical traces and objects (e.g., the magazines they opened to read, or the food they failed to discard) that are informative about their attitudes and interests to those who remain ( Gosling et al., 2008 ; Webb et al., 1966 ).
Taken together, all these physical features shape the social interactions that occur amid them. Thus, the extent of this influence undercuts any mythical notion that nonverbal behaviors have invariant meanings across settings. A systems model will be required to understand current and upcoming video and metaverse modes of communication, which retain many of the features of in-person interaction but situate it in novel and sometimes otherworldly virtual settings.
Just as human cultures have evolved their own languages, so too have they evolved their own systems of nonverbal displays. The diversity of modes of NVC in various cultures was a persistent theme in Darwin’s Expression ( Darwin, 1872 ). Furthermore, anthropologists have documented exquisite diversity in the social roles, traditions, rituals, and social behaviors of indigenous peoples worldwide. For instance, among Australian Aboriginals, some groups use body-painting to signify their bloodlines; others inflict scars to signify social status. Unlike Westerners, who generally prefer their conversations face-to-face, some indigenous groups (e.g., the Guugu Yimithirr of northern Queensland, the Tenejapan Mayans in southern Mexico), find this confrontational and prefer speaking side to side or front to back ( Levinson, 2003 ). Several Amazonian indigenous groups in Bolivia point using lip protrusion rather than hand or head movements ( Key, 1962 ; Reiter, 2014 ). As yet another example of human diversity, the Wolof of northwestern Senegal regulate taking turns in seated conversations in part by grabbing the feet of their interlocutors ( Meyer, 2014 ).
Finally, we return to the BET presumption that there are universal emotions that we all experience in the same way, even if culture intercedes to modify the supposed universal faces expressing them. There is ample cause to question this assumption as well. If our language concepts bear any relation to our experience, then continuing to argue the case for universal emotions will be tough indeed.
What are the roles of biology and culture in shaping nonverbal behaviors? In making culture only a thin veneer over a fundamental, overriding biology, BET drastically oversimplified the respective roles of both ( Lindquist et al., 2022 ). Certainly, there are examples that fit BET’s universalist mold. People the world over have propositional speech, bipedal gaits, and opposable thumbs, and they yawn when bored or tired. These commonalities are all part of our biological heritage. But people also show great diversity in their music, cuisine, and clothing, and these are all aspects of enculturation.
In equating universality with biology and diversity with culture, BET ignored the ready examples that ran counter to its presumptions. For example, people show great diversity in their blood hemoglobin types, proportions of fast versus slow striate muscle fibers, and types of earlobes, and this diversity is also part of our biological heritage. Yet all peoples have weddings, use money, and cook with fire, and these universals are distinctly products of culture. Such commonalities would be expected, because humanity seems to have been the product of one long migration in which useful cultural practices tagged along. Geographic and other barriers can result in relative cultural and reproductive isolation, however, and so different cultures, in accommodating to changed circumstances, can diverge both in their genotypes and their practices.
Indeed, natural selection and cultural selection are now recognized as ongoing intertwined processes. Commonalities or diversity can result from either. Assignments to either biology or culture are likely to be oversimplified, as the kinds of analyses required to make those assignments—molecular genetic analyses of cultural phenotypes—are complex and do not admit of easy answers themselves ( Fridlund & Russell, in press ). The upshot is that when we examine how different cultural groups communicate nonverbally, we should not presume either commonality or diversity; we should be equally prepared to find either. Cross-cultural research, we suggest, should proceed in such a data-driven manner, without Western theory-driven preconceptions about likely findings. This will lead to a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of how diverse cultures communicate nonverbally.
We have reviewed four common misconceptions about NVC—that people (a) communicate using body language; (b) have a stable personal space; (c) use universal, evolved, iconic, categorical facial displays to express underlying categorical emotions; and (d) give off, and can detect, reliable telltale clues of deception.
We are not making an indictment of the field of NVC, which has made great strides based on good science. Rather, we present a focused critique of certain presumptions related to NVC that persist despite weak evidential bases and remain pernicious influences on professional practices, research conduct, and lay understandings of the field.
To counter these misconceptions and help prevent new ones, we propose a systems approach to NVC that centers on the interrelations of nonverbal cues and behaviors, rather than their roles in isolation; emphasizes that communication is fundamentally interactive, not unilateral; and acknowledges that the context of communication must include the form of the immediate physical environment and the interactants’ cultural frames of reference.
The authors thank Ruth Leys for insightful comments.
1. These three features are most relevant to our exposition, but they do not exhaust other aspects that linguists find in formal languages, such as arbitrary relationships between words and referents (onomatopoeia being a prominent exception), combinatoriality (the ability to make new words from existing ones), and precision translatability, both among languages and in the transformation of expression from speech to writing and signing (e.g., Bouchard, 2013 ).
2. Gestures such as the “OK” sign, the extended third finger, the tongue inserted in the cheek, and the exaggerated nose scrunch act as iconic substitutes for speech. They function as part of language ( Goldin-Meadow & Alibali, 2013 ), with more than 90% occurring in the presence of speech and facilitating speakers’ production of speech and listeners’ comprehension of its content ( Cartmill & Goldin-Meadow, 2016 ; Krauss, 1988). Thus, given their linguistic nature, one that includes many aspects of formal languages ( McNeill, 1985 ), such gestures might uniquely qualify as body language, but they are not among the nonverbal behaviors that usually comprise NVC.
3. Even here, some animals are 100% dog but have three legs (they are “tripawed”), and African Basenjis do not bark. Other (English) exceptions to 1:1 mappings of words onto meanings include homonyms in vocal speech (like rain , rein , and reign ) and polysemic words in speech and writing (like pen and mean ). Dog itself is polysemic, as one can “dog” (or hound) another by relentlessly following him, and doing so makes one a “dog” (“You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog”). Polysemy is usually rapidly disambiguated by a word’s context. Thus, the meaning of “Do you have a pen?” differs depending on whether the query is followed by “I need to sign my check” versus “I need a place to put my cattle.”
4. Discussion of the relative left-hemisphere predominance in speech should not minimize the right hemisphere’s parallel involvement. Recent data suggest that the left hemisphere may govern speech timing and sound transitions (e.g., consonants to vowels), with right-hemisphere mediation of spectral aspects of speech, such as intonation and prosody ( Floegel et al., 2020 ).
5. Searches were conducted on June 15, 2021 ( https://www.proquest.com ), updating earlier findings by Sommer (2002) .
6. This unprecedented stable interpersonal boundary took the form of the “6-foot rule” mandated by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in indoor spaces, along with the “1-meter rule” adopted by the World Health Organization and the “2-meter rule” adopted in the United Kingdom. These fixed boundaries were ultimately found insufficient to stop the spread of COVID ( Bazant & Bush, 2021 ).
7. Exceptions occur amid longstanding antagonisms among family or disparate social-group members. Spatial arrangements dependent on group identities also occur in caste or monarchic systems, in the self-segregation of racial and ethnic groups, among different age groups of students, in seating and section classes of theater-goers or airline and cruise passengers, and with people or groups that require protection.
8. Ekman and colleagues explained the departures from universality by claiming that the training and traditions within various cultures resulted in on-the-fly modifications of the supposedly natural and biological faces ( Ekman et al., 1969 ; Ekman & Friesen, 1969 ). Such display rules , an idea that originated with Wundt (1894) , were invoked ad hoc to explain low matching rates but never the high ones, and the experimental procedures and evidence used to support the operation of display rules were incompletely reported and fatally flawed ( Fridlund, 1994 ; Leys, 2017 ).
9. Scarantino et al. (2021) cast facial displays as appeals, but by signaling probable action the displays likely function more as nudges.
10. Since the introduction of BECV ( Fridlund, 1991b , 1994 ), numerous theories have been proposed to counter or modify BET by ratifying BECV’s focus on our facial displays as functional and interactional. Recent examples of these approaches are Elfenbein’s dialect theory ( Elfenbein et al., 2007 ), Keltner and Oatley’s (2022) social functional theory , Niedenthal’s social-functional framework ( Martin et al., 2017 ), Scarantino’s (2017) theory of affective pragmatics ( Scarantino, 2017 ), and Scarantino et al.’s (2021) appeal theory .
11. This is not farfetched, especially as agents of intelligence services such as the U. S. Central Intelligence Agency use interrogation techniques that are otherwise unavailable to the public. We also note that intelligence services have an interest in claiming they can spot deception just to intimidate guilty suspects into confessing. From this admittedly dark vantage point, the negative findings on detecting deception, though accurate, may give comfort to the guilty.
12. This lack of discriminant validity undercuts recent efforts to apply computer vision and machine learning to identify deception nonverbally, using training sets composed of videotapes of people known to be lying (e.g., Carissimi et al., 2018 ). Again, people may show certain nonverbal behaviors while lying, but not necessarily because they are lying, and the evidence suggests that the same behaviors occur outside of lying.
13. Fridlund (2021) contrasted our everyday assumption of transparency with the unpleasant fact that most people are by and large inscrutable, and he quoted Malcolm Gladwell in Talking to Strangers ( 2019 , p. 162): “Transparency is a myth—an idea we’ve picked up from watching too much television and reading too many novels.”
Action Editor: Tina M. Lowrey
Editor: Klaus Fiedler
Author Contributions
M. L. Patterson, A. J. Fridlund, and C. Crivelli conceived, prepared, reviewed, and edited the manuscript. All authors approved the final manuscript for submission.
The author(s) declared that there were no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship or the publication of this article.
IMAGES
COMMENTS
The APA Handbook of Nonverbal Communication provides scholarly reviews of state-of-the-art knowledge in the areas of nonverbal communication and nonverbal behaviors. It includes an entire section devoted to new and improved methodologies and technologies that allow for the recording, capture, and analysis of nonverbal behaviors. The primary audience for the book is researchers in the area, as ...
Throughout the paper, we offer ideas for future research as well as information on methods to study nonverbal behavior in lab and field contexts. We hope our review will encourage organizational scholars to develop a deeper understanding of how nonverbal behavior influences the social world of organizations.
The following paper will examine the major types of nonverbal communication and their role in day to day human interaction in the workplace. It will examine the ways that understanding of the meanings of nonverbal cues can assist in both interpretation and conveyance of unspoken messages, and the role that space, the environment and other physical factors play in successful communication.
Abstract. The field of nonverbal communication (NVC) has a long history involving many cue modalities, including face, voice, body, touch, and interpersonal space; different levels of analysis, including normative, group, and individual differences; and many substantive themes that cross from psychology into other disciplines.
The goal of this article is to examine critically what we consider four central misconceptions about NVC—namely, that people communicate using body language; that they have a stable personal space; that they use universal, evolved, iconic, categorical facial displays to express underlying emotions; and that they give off, and can detect, dependable telltale clues to deception.
and nonverbal vocalic to how the message is conveyed (e.g., voice tone, accent, pitch; Hargie, 2011). Thus, nonverbal communication is understood as "the sending and receiving of thoughts and feelings via nonverbal behavior" (Ambady & Weisbuch, 2010: 465). Any nonverbal behavior has the potential to communicate meaning (Burgoon et al., 201 1).
The present article discusses models of nonverbal communication and then summarizes findings with regard to the nonverbal communication of emotions, via the face, voice, posture, touch, and gaze.
non-verbal communication in effective management. It examines the case specifically by keep ing under r eview the f our. areas of nonverbal communication: kinesics, proxemics, vocalics, and ch ...
113 Nonverbal Communication Essay Topic Ideas & Examples. Nonverbal communication is a crucial aspect of human interaction, as it can convey just as much information as verbal communication. From facial expressions to body language, nonverbal cues can reveal a person's emotions, intentions, and attitudes. In this article, we will explore 113 ...
The ability to correctly use nonverbal signs during a dialogue helps to position people and interest them in an idea or project. The Use of All Senses in Nonverbal Communication. In these settings, using all the senses can become a key prescription in assessing the importance of nonverbal communication.
The field of nonverbal communication (NVC) has a long history involving many cue modalities, including face, voice, body, touch, and interpersonal space; different levels of analysis, including normative, group, and individual differences; and many substantive themes that cross from psychology into other disciplines. In this review, we focus on NVC as it pertains to individuals and social ...
Abstract. Nonverbal communication is hard to define but is often said to be all those modes of communicating other than words or a parallel way to process social stimuli alongside language cues ...
Nonverbal communication can substitute for verbal communication in a variety of ways. Nonverbal communication can convey a great deal of meaning when verbal communication is not effective because of language barriers. Language barriers are present when a person has not yet learned to speak or loses the ability to speak.
Also from Sage. CQ Library Elevating debate opens in new tab; Sage Data Uncovering insight opens in new tab; Sage Business Cases Shaping futures opens in new tab; Sage Campus Unleashing potential opens in new tab; Sage Knowledge Multimedia learning resources opens in new tab; Sage Research Methods Supercharging research opens in new tab; Sage Video Streaming knowledge opens in new tab
The chapter stresses that nonverbal behaviour, as a communication skill, is usefully understood when discussed in role- and setting-defined contexts. The skill is based upon evidence picked up directly or indirectly from the environment, and it is used for the attempted achievement of whatever issue may be required at the time of the ...
Nonverbal Communication. Nonverbal Communications; Reference & Background; Communications Research; ... APA style also provides guidelines for paper formatting. APA 7th Edition. Use this link for APA tips, examples by format, information on in-text citations & more! ... Center for Excellence in Writing; Communication Arts Studio; Computer Labs ...
ward definition might read: An y form of communication that does not specifically. use words is considered nonv erbal. This definition includes a speaker ' s vocal tones. and inflections, but ...
Non-verbal communication is an extremely important form of communication that all humans use. There are many forms of non-verbal communication that you can write about, and in this article we will discuss some of the best non-verbal communication topics for you to research about. Paper Format. Before we get on to the best topics for you to base ...
The purpose of this research paper is to examine the role of nonverbal communication in intercultural communication with a focus on the manifestation of nonverbal communication in the context of lying. The significance of this research paper is to help individuals to better understand nonverbal communication and its impact on intercultural ...
The evaluation of nonverbal communication and linguistic expression combined has opened avenues for neurolinguistic research on aphasia (e.g., Loveland et al., 1997; McNeill, 1985), and a wealth of information can be gleaned from nonverbal communication of autistic children. Researchers have credited assessment of nonverbal communication as being
Recommendations for improved communication in businesses included paying more at tention to nonverbal cues, especially the facial expressions, engaging in more eye con tact, and probing for more information when verbal and nonverbal cues are discrepant.
We have reviewed four common misconceptions about NVC—that people (a) communicate using body language; (b) have a stable personal space; (c) use universal, evolved, iconic, categorical facial displays to express underlying categorical emotions; and (d) give off, and can detect, reliable telltale clues of deception.