Non verbal communication

Important non verbal cues
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Eye gaze
Eye contact can indicate interest, attention, and involvement. Furthermore, eye contact with audiences increases the speaker's credibility. Gaze comprises the actions of looking while talking, looking while listening, amount of gaze, and frequency of glances, patterns of fixation, pupil dilation, and blink rate.

Facial expression

Universal facial expressions signify anger, fear, sadness, joy and disgust. Thus, if you smile frequently you will be perceived as more likable, friendly, warm and approachable. Smiling is often contagious and a person will react favorably.





Posture
Your posture–including the pose, stance and bearing of the way you sit, slouch, stand, lean, bend, hold and move your body in space-affects the way people perceive you. Studies investigating the impact of posture on interpersonal relationships suggest that mirror-image congruent postures, where one person’s left side is parallel to the other’s right side, leads to favorable perception of communicators and positive speech; a person who displays a forward lean or a decrease in a backwards lean also signify positive sentiment during communication.





Gesture


A gesture is a non-vocal bodily movement intended to express meaning. They may be articulated with the hands, arms or body, and also include movements of the head, face and eyes, such as winking, nodding, or rolling one's eyes. The boundary between language and gesture, or verbal and nonverbal communication, can be hard to identify. If you fail to gesture while speaking, you may be perceived as boring, stiff and unanimated.



Haptics
Touches that can be defined as communication include handshake, holding hands, kissing (cheek, lips, hand), back slapping, give five, a pat on the shoulder, and brushing an arm. The meaning conveyed from touch is highly dependent upon the context of the situation, the relationship between communicators, and the manner of touch.





















Paralanguage
Paralanguage (sometimes called vocalics) is the study of nonverbal cues of the voice. Various acoustic properties of speech such as tone, pitch and accent, can all give off nonverbal cues. Paralanguage may change the meaning of words.


Proxemics-
The nonverbal study of space and distance. The concept of territorial space refers to the area around the self that a person will not allow another person to enter without consent.
DISTANCE ZONES
Intimate : (up to 2 feet), modt sensitive zone, since it is reserved for close friends, and loved ones.
Personal : (2 to 4 feet)
Social : (4 to 12 feet)
Public : (greated than 12 feet)


Clothing and bodily characteristics


Elements such as physique, height, weight, hair, skin color, gender, odors, and clothing send nonverbal messages during interaction. For example, research into height has generally found that taller people are perceived as being more impressive. Melamed & Bozionelos (1992) studied a sample of managers in the UK and found that height was a key factor affecting who was promoted. Often people try to make themselves taller, for example, standing on a platform, when they want to make more of an impact with their speaking.

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