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 new age of artificial intelligence.

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 applied settings.

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 chapters contributed by researchers from multiple scientific fields.

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 setting for nonverbal development in a special population.

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.

**II**

**Chapter 7 125**

The Most Powerful Thing You'd Say Is Nothing at All: The Power of Silence

*by Bashir Ibrahim and Usman Ambu Muhammad*

in Conversation

Chapter 5 by Dr. Xiaoming Jiang provides an empirical study on how human-like animal stickers are perceived when used as nonverbal communicative tools on social media (e.g., Chinese WeChat). Importantly, the author shows how the user's gender, interpersonal sensitivity, and attitudes towards the ethical use of animals affects various perceptual attributes of animal stickers.

The final chapters characterize the latest advancements that uncover the psychological nature (in particular the communicative intents of the users of nonverbal cues) underlying nonverbal communication in conversations and other applied settings. Chapter 6 by Dr. Izidor-Mlakar et al. analyzes the association between dialogue acts and nonverbal communicative intents, especially during turn management. The authors demonstrate how to use ELAN to perform multimodal analysis of audiovisual stimuli of dynamic conversations. Chapter 7 by Dr. Ibrahim Bashir et al. presents a range of functions of silence in the conversation and how these functions of silent speech may change as a function of sociocultural norms.

This book is a unique and timely contribution to the field of human nonverbal communication. It is designed for a large audience for a variety of purposes, including students and professors in academic institutions for teaching and research activities as well as active researchers in industries related to human communication for applying relevant knowledge to the development of communication products, for both healthy individuals and special populations. We would like to thank the staff at IntechOpen, especially Ms. Dolores Kuzelj for her whole-hearted assistance over the entire process of preparing and publishing the book, and Ms. Ana Simcic for contacting me about this great opportunity to serve as the book's editor.

> **Xiaoming Jiang** Shanghai International Studies University, Institute of Linguistics, Shanghai, China

> > **1**

Section 1

Introduction

Section 1 Introduction

**3**

**Chapter 1**

Introductory Chapter: On the

Implication of Nonverbal

Communication

effects on the intergroup trust [11].

*Xiaoming Jiang*

**contexts**

Road towards the Social-Adaptive

**1. The adaptive use of nonverbal cues under various communicative** 

The nonverbal communication is by nature socially adaptive and has high relevance to the real-world application. Latest research efforts have witnessed a boost in the empirical studies of nonverbal communication which have yielded significant discoveries. Minimally verbal and nonverbal cues can be effective in predicting individuals with autism [1], cerebral palsy [2], dementia [3], and traumatic brain injury patients [4]. The interpersonal resonation of nonverbal behaviors has a unique role in the early detection of psychiatric status. The synchronized nonverbal acts can predict some level of severity in social anxiety disorder [5]. The synchrony of movement and facial expressions is a diagnostic features of depression [6]. The communication of nonverbal signals can be essential in understanding patient-doctor interaction, and more recently in particular, in nursing houses between nurses and older adults [7], and about chronic disease management consultations between patients with cancer and their oncologists [8]. The perception of nonverbal communication skills in the emergency department is associated with the department's service quality and patient satisfaction [9, 10]. The doctor-patient synchrony can mediate the strength of the social group effects on the social group

In terms of the application in social media and political communication, the video creators' nonverbal communication can impact viewer's intention to subscribe online media [12]. Sex differences existed in nonverbal cues marking political debates [13]. Communicating nonverbal cues in public speaking can be trained for the spokesperson to face the media in times of crisis [14]. The perceived debate style from nonverbal cues of a leadership role has an immediate impact on the perceiver's response on social media (e.g. Twitter [15]). As for the consequences in the realworld decision making, nonverbal presence can even predict the evaluations of one's hirability [16] in the recruiting situation, and can predict whether the volleyball game which the target player participated in is successful or not [17]. Moreover, the deception-related cues can bias legal decisions in the justice system [18], and have demonstrated to be useful in predicting forensic cases such as bribery [19]. Nonverbal cues are typically multimodal and often accompany linguistic messages with many forms to achieve an efficient communication. Nonverbal behaviors can reveal the speaker's characteristics of dominance, trust, composure [20],

eloquence [21], persuasion [22], and guilt [23] and can facilitate one's understanding
