Studies in the symbolism of voice and action: V. The use of behavioral and tonal symbols as tests of speaking achievement.

Personality and the structure of the nonverbal communication of emotion

“…The present study found a negative relationship between nonverbal sending and receiving abilities in all channels in the unaware condition (I), and a significant negadve reladonship in the face and body channel in the two communication conditions (II & III). The present study failed to find the positive relationship between sending and receiving abihty in the voice channel in the communicadon condidons which had been reported in the Levy (1964), Zaidel and Mehrabian (1969) and Knower (1945) studies. Thus, the present study eliminated the possibility that the use of negative emodons or a situadon fostering spontaneous rather than posed emodonal expression accounted for previous inverse relations between sending and receiving skills. lthough the past findings of posidve encoding-decoding ability correladons apparently cannot be attributed to the fact that the emodons were posed, these earlier studies did involve more demanding requirements in which subjects were required to express a series of diverse emodons, and judges were required to code emotions into a number of discrete categories.…”

“…Levy (1964), using graduate students, reported a positive correlation between being correctly judged on audio tapes expressing ten arbitrary emotions and correctly judging a standardized recording of ten vocally expressed emotions. Knower (1945) conducted an early test of nonverbal skills during a school class session in which each student attempted to convey thirteen emotions, first by the face and body and subsequently by vocal tone. Each student was judged by his classmates, and positive correlations were reported between sending and receiving ability with the voice and with the face.…”

“…Each student was judged by his classmates, and positive correlations were reported between sending and receiving ability with the voice and with the face. The Knower (1945) report unfortunately neglected to specify such details as the nature of the class, the students' familiarity with each other or the rationale presented for the test, making generaUzation difficult. Zaidel and Mehrabian (1969) reported a positive relationship between abihties as a sender and as a receiver in the vocal channel but a negative relationship between sending and receiving skills in the facial channel although neither correlation was statistically significant.…”

“…The studies finding negative sender-receiver relationships also dealt only with the transmission of a negative emotion. The Levy (1964), Knower (1945) and Zaidel and Mehrabian (1969) studies, while using both negative and positive emotions, required subjects to pose one arbitrary emotion after another, with little opportunity for subjects to "get in the mood" or subjectively experience the emotion prior to its expression. Since subjects lacked a personal or even dramatic context for the emotions they were asked to express, these studies may have demanded the rather esoteric skills of the technical, as opposed to the method actor (see Stanislavski, 1961).…”

Posed and spontaneous communication of emotion via facial and vocal cues1

“…The relationship between encoding and decoding abilities has been examined in several studies with intriguing but inconsistent results. Knower (1945), Levy (1964), and Zuckerman et al (1975) foimd positive and significant correlations between the ability to encode and decode vocal and facial expressions. Zaidel and Mehi-abian (1969) and Zuckerman et al (1976) found nonsignificant but mostly positive encoding-decoding correlations.…”