Let’s Talk About It: Turning Confrontation into Collaboration at Work

CHAPTER 6

NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION

Nonverbal communication refers to the transmission of information apart from spoken words, and includes facial expressions, gestures, personal space, and tone of voice. While nonverbal communication is a critical component of how we send and interpret messages, the oft-cited statistic that 93 percent of communication is nonverbal (55 percent is attributed to body language and 38 percent to vocal qualities) is, quite frankly, absurd. This myth arose out of research conducted in the 1960s by Professor Albert Mehrabian at UCLA, which included two very limited studies in which subjects were asked to interpret emotions behind single, spoken words and guess a woman’s emotion from a photograph. In the words of Philip ...