I chose to watch one of the shows that my husband usually watches, Parks and Rec. The first time I watched the episode I watched closely to facial expressions and body language to see if I could determine relationships or see if I could tell what the characters were feeling. I thought that without the verbal, pitch, and tones it seemed like the characters were talking about something very serious. After watching a while, I started the show from the beginning and watched a second time with the sound on. The biggest difference that I noticed was that with sound I was then able to detect the sarcasm in the characters tone which made the nonverbal facial expressions seem not so serious. Nonverbal communication can also function as contracting behavior in which it conveys the opposite of one’s verbal message. (O’Hair & Wiemann, 2009, p.105)
Both verbal and nonverbal are important to communication. Each can provide information without the other but as I saw with this week’s assignment you can’t just pay attention to one or the other.
O’Hair, D., & Wiemann, M. (2009). Real communication: An introduction. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Emily,
ReplyDeleteThe sound did help to understand the voice tone of the message being sent to the other person. Good point about verbal and nonverbal communication-you can't pay attention to one or the other.
Tamara
Emily,
ReplyDeleteI had a similar experience when I was watching my show. It began to wonder about hearing impaired and deaf people and how important nonverbal communication is to them and how conflicting it can be. This assignment has made me more aware of my own nonverbal communication.
Meredith
You bring up a great point! I hadn't necessarily thought of how hard it is to detect sarcasm simply by watching nonverbal communication. With sarcasm, I guess the point is to seem very serious with your nonverbal cues or else it would not truly be a sarcastic remark. Sarcasm in general is an interesting means of communication because some have trouble detecting sarcasm while others speak it naturally without thinking about it.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the insight this week, Emily!
Emily-
ReplyDeleteI agree with Beki, it is hard to detect sarcasm by just paying attention to the nonverbal. You need both the verbal and nonverbal for a conversation. I tried just listening to a conversation without watching the nonverbal and it was a little difficult to always get the right message.
I Emily thank you for your post I have never watched that show and I did and I tried the excercise and it was funny that without the sound they looked serious and seemed to be communicating with one another but when I turned the sound back on their tone went to another level. Great post.
ReplyDelete