12.9 Nonverbal Communication in Specific Situations

Just as with the Ethics chapter, I’ll end by digging into a few scenarios to show how an understanding of nonverbal communication can be useful .

Context #1: How to Tell If Your Partner Loves You

Some people never say the words “ I love you”

It’s not their style to be so bold

Some people never say those words “I love you ”

But like a child they’re longing to be told

Paul Simon, Something So Right (1973)

Human beings are apparently a little insecure, needing reassurance that people love us. In Minnesota there are a lot of “Ole and Lena” jokes about an old married couple, and my favorite goes:

Lena: Ole, you never tell me you love me!

Ole: I did when we got married. If I’d changed my mind, I woulda let you know.

I side with Lena on this one: telling someone just once that you love them is not enough, and Ole is not holding up his end. But that doesn’t mean he has to say the words “I love you,” which the Paul Simon song suggests is not everyone’s style. How else can you say it? Advertisers will tell you that a good way is to “say it with flowers,” or diamonds, or an exotic trip. Ole might be more inclined to say it by changing the oil in Lena’s car, making sure there’s a hot cup of coffee brewing when she wakes up, or just listening to her. There are many ways to convey love.

You may have heard of the concept of “love languages,” popularized by Gary Chapman in his 1992 book The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate (and several followup books focused on other situations like parent-child relationships or apologies). That book was not based on empirical research, and recent studies have questioned the validity of some of its central concepts, such as the assertion that a person has one “primary” love language, or that there are just five to choose from.^[1] But the enduring popularity of the concept suggests that it has value for people.

I prefer an older version of the same idea, proposed by Kenneth Villard and Leland Whipple in their book Beginnings in Relational Communication.^[2] Villard and Whipple called them “relational currencies” instead of love languages, and listed 14:

Positive verbal statements

Self-disclosure

Listening

Positive nonverbal affect displays

Touch

Sexuality

Aggression

Gifts

Money

Food

Favors

Service

Time together

Access rights (which refers to giving someone special permission to use a prized possession, such as letting someone drive your beloved car or sit in your favorite chair).

You can probably think of others, such as staying in touch, sacrifices, humor, discipline, and more . Since I value the concept of an expanded vocabulary, I don’t see the need to limit the the list to just five, or pinpoint one as your “primary” currency. I also like the term “currency” because it implies that these relational currencies are about conveying something of value, and also hints that not everyone values the same thing. For some people, Indian rupees or amusement park tokens or cryptocurrency may be priceless, but to others may be just “funny money ” — just as a bouquet of flowers or an expensive greeting card can be loaded with meaning for one person but a waste of money to another.

Having a wide vocabulary of approaches to express love is very useful, but there are several ways things can go wrong. One is the problem of mismatch: Lena wants to hear Ole say “I love you,” but Ole wants to express his love through acts of service. A parent disciplines their child as an act of love to form them into a responsible adult, but to the child the discipline feels like hatred, not love. Think how many movies involve a parent who sees themselves as providing “everything” for their children (meaning: gifts and money), but the child just wants them to stay home from work and toss a ball in the backyard (time together).

Another issue is implicitness: people may not explicitly tell others what makes them feel loved. Why is that important? Because if the other person doesn’t do that thing, the first person might silently brood about being unloved: “If he loved me, he would unload the dishwasher more often.” Even if one person does express their preferred currencies, it may still feel meaningless to the other (“doing dishes is just a chore, not an act of love”). Sometimes people just have to take it on faith that when their partner says doing dishes makes them feel loved, they mean it.

There are several lessons related to nonverbal communication that you can draw from this:

• Even if you think the nonverbal actions should convey love on their own, you may still need to verbally state your thoughts and feelings. This might feel uncomfortable or unnatural. For example, if the currency is sexual touch, many people feel awkward talking about sexual preferences (which is why sex columnists so often have to insist “Tell your partner what you like!”)
• If there is a contradiction between the verbal currencies (#1 and #2 in the list above) and the nonverbal currencies (all the rest of them), don’t be surprised if the nonverbal ones carry more weight. Even if Ole does say those magic words “I love you,” Lena might be paying more attention to his facial expression, gaze, or tone of voice as he says it. Does your partner’s face light up when you walk in? Do they come over to sit next to you when you’re in a room together?
• For many of these behaviors, expressing love is not the only variable: there may be reasons that some expressions of love are “off the table.” There might be good reasons your partner can’t eat the food you lovingly prepared. Your partner may have experienced sexual trauma or have a physical ailment that makes sex uncomfortable, and it’s not about you. Self-disclosure (opening up and saying what’s on your mind) may feel unsafe for people who have been in abusive relationships.
• Culture can play a big role in what kinds of expression are preferred. In some countries, public displays of affection are taboo and explicit statements of love are rare, but acts of sacrifice send the message “I love you.” It is not easy to overcome one’s culture, so even if you have had many discussions with your partner about what makes you feel loved, you may experience “bumps” and misunderstandings. That doesn’t mean you don’t love each other.

Context #2: Spotting Liars

For centuries, people have relied on nonverbal cues to tell if someone is lying. The amount of research on nonverbal cues to deception is staggering, and the number of cues that might be “giveaways” of lying is bigger than you might imagine . DePaulo’s 2003 meta-analysis of all the published research incorporated 158 different cues.^[3] These included subtle nonverbals such as “lip stretch,” “duration of facial expression,” “changes in foot movements,” and “neck muscles tightened,” as well as verbal factors such as “pronoun and tense deletion” and “self-references.” What is the big picture conveyed by all of this research? It’s murky at best. The more reliable indicators are connected to the content of the speech, not the nonverbal cues.

If you’ve assumed that eye contact is a good indicator — believing that liars can’t “look you in the eye” like truth-tellers can — the research doesn’t support that conclusion. One reason is because eye contact is so easy to control: there’s really nothing to prevent a liar from peering straight into your eyes while lying. Perhaps you, as the would-be lie detector, think that liars don’t know this is considered a “give-away” clue, but that’s naive: of course they know it. That implies they can’t look you in the eye even if they try to, but why would that be?

Let’s step back and ask a broader question: why would lying produce any physiological reactions at all? The assumption is that the act of lying creates anxiety and physiological arousal. This is what polygraph machines measure — heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, and perspiration — so instead of the nickname “lie detectors,” they should really be called “anxiety detectors.” For some people, the anxiety caused by lying does show up in those physiological reactions, but the problem is that for others , especially people who lie frequently and get away with it, it doesn’t.

This is why polygraphs aren’t admissible in most courts: the legal system knows about the dangers of false positives (a truth-teller failing the test) and false negatives (a liar passing). Why would a truth-teller fail a polygraph? Maybe because being hooked up to straps and leads and grilled by a suspicious interrogator makes them anxious. On the other hand, if the person keeps themselves calm, they will pass whether they are lying or not.^[4] This is what happened with Aldrich Ames, an American spy who was suspected of being a double agent for the Russians. His CIA supervisors became so suspicious of him that they made him do two polygraph tests, and he passed them both. How? In his words, “My Russian bosses told me to just relax.”^[5]

Polygraphs are also based on contrasts, assuming your body responds one way when you’re telling the truth and another way when you’re lying. That requires getting a good baseline measure of your “normal” heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure. If your heart rate suddenly spikes when they ask you if you’ve ever stolen from your employer, then they’ve got you. This can be easily manipulated by an unscrupulous polygraph examiner, but also suggests that someone who knows you well would make a better lie detector than a stranger. Family members, friends, and co-workers can tell when something is “off” about you or you’re not acting normally, which is much harder for police officers or customs agents to recognize.

Even if your blood pressure or perspiration don’t correlate with lying, does your face reveal it? The scholar who has done the most research on that subject is Paul Ekman, who learned everything he could about the human face, and developed the Facial Action Coding System, or FACS (cited in footnote 6). One of his discoveries is that the muscles in the human face are a blend of some that can be voluntarily controlled and others that cannot. If a liar sets their attention on controlling muscles that are thought to be indicators of lying, they’ll probably succeed — but the involuntary muscles, or the ones the liar doesn’t pay attention to, can be give-aways of anxiety. Ekman paid special attention to “micro-expressions” that are so fleeting (less than half a second long) that they may escape the attention of both the liar and an untrained observer, and recent research by Matsumoto and Hwang^[6] suggests that this could be a promising avenue for detecting liars. The problem, as these researchers would be the first to admit, is that even if you can tell what a person is really feeling from these facial expressions, you can’t tell why they are feeling that way.

Speaking of emotions: what emotions does a liar feel? They might feel guilty if they have a strong conscience — but not everyone does (apparently Aldrich Ames didn’t). Guilt could explain the theory about eye contact, since a guilty person might not want to directly face the person they are deceiving. Other liars might feel a fear of getting caught, which is different enough from guilt that it would presumably show itself differently. Then, to really complicate the picture, some liars enjoy the process of lying, which is called “duping delight.” Guilt, fear, and delight are quite a range of emotions to be on the lookout for.

Another avenue of research has looked at the cognitive side, and whether there are clues that the mind is working one way when lying and another way when telling the truth. If someone has to make up a complex lie on the spot, for instance, that takes a lot of mental work, which may show on their face. The theory of Neurolinguistic Programming, or NLP, includes a model of which direction the eyes go when performing certain mental functions (one direction when remembering something that happened, and another direction when making up something that did not happen). This led some people to think that a liar will look upward to the right when lying, and upward to the left when telling the truth. The research supporting this model is not strong,^[7] and the model doesn’t address some important variables like whether it’s a spontaneous lie or a rehearsed one. If you had plenty of time to craft a good lie, rehearse it, and perhaps tell it often, it shouldn’t take much mental effort.

The frustrating conclusion from all of this is that nonverbal cues may give away lying, but the indicators are weak at best. DePaulo et al. conclude, “In some ways, liars are less forthcoming than truthtellers, and they tell us less compelling tales… Their stories include fewer ordinary imperfections and unusual contents. However, many behaviors showed no discernible links, or only weak links, to deceit” (2003, p. 74). Reaching conclusions based on terms like “more tense” and “less forthcoming” can get you in serious trouble. It seems you’re better off not looking too hard at nonverbals, and focusing on the content of the lie instead: is it internally consistent? Plausible? If those are better indicators than the nonverbal ones, perhaps this section is in the wrong chapter.

Exercise: Nonverbal Interpretation

Mark Knapp and Judith Hall have developed an exercise to test students’ skill in receiving and sending nonverbal cues.  [CITE — Knapp, M.L., and Hall, J.A. (2013). Instructor’s Resource Manual for Nonverbal Communication in Human Interaction, 8th edition, Cengage. — MICAH, I DON’T KNOW HOW TO PUT THIS IN AN ACTUAL FOOTNOTE]

This dialogue is composed of ambiguous verbal phrases. It has no specific meaning. Speak only the words in the dialogue, but use all available nonverbal codes — eye contact, gestures, movement, space, touch, vocal cues, etc. — to convey the situation to the audience.

Person 1: Well, hello…

Person 2: Uh, hello…

Person 1: How are you?

Person 2: Fine.

Person 1: How is everything?

Person 2: About the same as usual.

Person 1: Are you busy right now?

Person 2: Well, not really.

Person 1: Would you care to talk?

Person 2: Do you want to?

Person 1: Well, we could…

Person 2: Yes, we could.

Person 1: Okay.

Person 2: Fine.

These are some of the combinations of people who might have an exchange like this:

• Two people on a blind date
• A person unexpectedly meeting an ex-lover at a bus stop
• A person visiting his or her parents in a nursing home
• Two friends who have had a disagreement, and have not spoken for several days
• A parent and child who have not seen each other for three months
• Two people who are certain that they have met, but are unsure about how or where it happened
• A businessperson who has sued another person meeting that individual at a mutual friend’s house
• Two people attempting to reconcile their differences
• A co-worker whom you dislike sitting next to you in a physician’s waiting room

Take some time to get into a different character. After role playing the conversation, discuss your understanding and displays of nonverbal communication. What other contextual elements might impact a simple conversation like this? Think about personal history, how the person’s day has been going, the temperature in the room, whether someone has a sore arm or hand, etc. The sky’s the limit.