Contents


**Chapter 7 125** The Most Powerful Thing You'd Say Is Nothing at All: The Power of Silence in Conversation *by Bashir Ibrahim and Usman Ambu Muhammad*

Preface

The use of nonverbal cues in social activities is essential for human daily activities. Successful nonverbal communication relies on the acquisition of rules of using cues from body movement, eye contact, facial expression, tone of voice, and more. These nonverbal cues, with high relevance to evolutionary and socio-adaptive implications, are demonstrated to strengthen, complement, and conflict with our verbal messages, and exert immediate impact on a perceiver's inferences, evaluations, and decisions based on these cues. Although human nonverbal communication has been studied for decades, it is time to ask to what extent we have adapted our communication to a

This book examines nonverbal behavior based on research efforts with state-ofthe-art methodological approaches. It discusses how nonverbal communications are classified, how nonverbal cues adapt and function as social behavior, how nonverbal cues are used in different social domains and practices, how individuals in different cultures and groups express and understand nonverbal behaviors of their own and of others, how nonverbal communication is distinct in special populations, and how the use of nonverbal cues can be measured in different

With contributions from scientists from disciplinary backgrounds including psychology, artificial intelligence and computer science, communication sciences and disorders, linguistics and literature, and philosophy and sociology, this book characterizes research on fundamental issues related to the processing, learning, categorizing, and consequences of nonverbal communications, as well as showcases solutions to applied questions on developing and adapting methods to measure nonverbal behaviors. Three unique questions are addressed by six independent

The first two chapters contribute to the classification and training of nonverbal communication with advanced technologies. Chapter 2 by Dr. Mahesh Goyani presents a novel computer vision technique to recognize human facial expression, which is efficient in dealing with both local and global appearance-based features. The author demonstrates the performance of such an approach to be robust in various real-world scenarios like recognizing expressions from low resolution, with small training samples, and in the presence of noise. Chapter 3 by Dr. Lee I-Jui analyzes the mechanisms and benefits of applying augmented and virtual reality techniques to the training of nonverbal social communicative skills in autistic children, highlighting the role of novel technologies that create an immersive

The next two chapters give a selective overview of the factors underlying the learning and evaluating of nonverbal communications in educational settings and in digital worlds. Chapter 4 by Dr. Manuela Valentini et al. discusses how preschool and school-aged children coordinate their body language during the acquisition of communicative capacities, putting forward the role of cultural factors in children's grasping of certain conventions to communicate one's non-verbal behaviors.

chapters contributed by researchers from multiple scientific fields.

setting for nonverbal development in a special population.

new age of artificial intelligence.

applied settings.
