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DOMINIC W. MASSARO,
Editor
University of California, Santa Cruz
MAKING THOUGHTFUL CHOICES IN NONVERBAL RESEARCH
The Sourcebook of Nonverbal Measures:
Going Beyond Words
Edited by Valerie Manusov. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005. x +
540 pp. Paper, $55.
Scholarship on nonverbal communication
has evolved since the mid-20th century. Early work in the 1950s and 1960s
focused primarily on identifying and classifying various codes of nonverbal
communication. For example, classic books such as Birdwhistell's Introduction
to Kinesics (1952), Hall's The Silent Language (1959), and
Hall's The Hidden Dimension (1966) ushered in new areas of research
related to the nonverbal codes they labeled kinesics and proxemics. Birdwhistell
(1966) described an elaborate system for tracking kinesic markers (e.g.,
head, hand, and eye movement) in relation to linguistic codes. Hall identified
different conversational zones (intimate, personal, social, and public)
and different types of environmental features (fixed and semifixed). During
that era, other scholars focused on eye behavior (Exline, 1963), touch
(Frank, 1957), and vocalics (Trager, 1958). Ekman and Friesen (1969) also
published an influential article that identified five categories of nonverbal
behavior: emblems, illustrators, affect displays, adaptors, and regulators.
This descriptive work provided a strong foundation for research on nonverbal
behavior. |
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