Nonverbal Communication Functions

5. Functions of non verbal communication

5.1 Providing inforamation

The very important and basic of any type of communication is giving information. All the form of nonverbal communications likes appearance and behaviour of person can give direct idea and impression to someone.(10) This cues can give someone chance to survive in many situations through out the life. Interpretation of nonverbal cues can be improve and get better by exprience. But generally people can intrepet and give an accurate judgement just by looking to person’s behaviour.(11)

5.2 Expressing intimacy

Person’s nonverbal behaviour can show the attachment and feeling toward another individual.Touching and mutual gaze will be higher in level in parent towards their children.(10)

During the conversation, the behaviour exchange and facial expression between the speaker and listener will determine the outcome of the conversation.(10) For example, as the speaker give and express their thought, listener usually show the agreement by head nod or brief vocalizations like “uh,” “yeah” and others. When its time to change the turn to speak, the speaker will lower down the voice, start to silence and looks to the listener and the listener will take a breath, change the posture and become a speaker then. It is a compliment process and happen outside of our awareness. In a public setting, nonverbal communication control the amount of contact between people. For example, keep distance from people and lower the gaze can reduce the accessibilty to others. Another example like smile signal openess and gaze avoidance signal the

(20) There are four personal space zones that are proposed by Edward Hall in 1992 which are; intimate zone (0 to 2 feet) or in other word is zone belongs to ourselves except people that close to us and a zones that we often talk about secret things, personal zone (2 to 4 feet), social zone (4-12 feet) or normal distance for social interactions and not need to keep secret to other peple, and lastly a public zone ( more than 12 feet).(10) We also can know status of someone by looking to their personal space by giving example of employees from higher status will have better and wider personal space or office compared to employees of higher status. We can see in typical environment of working place where higher ranking employee can easily enter their inferior’s personal space and room. No need to ask for permission as compared to their subordinates.(3) Other aspect of proxemics is a seating arrangements. The arrangement is depend on the certain situations. Mark Knapp from University of Vermont in his book Nonverbal Communication in Human Interaction said the environment may have an effect on the position chosen. There is one study on effects of classroom seating arrangements on children’s question asking by Alexandra Marx in 1998 where the result showing children asked more questions in the semicircle than in a row and column