Non-verbal communication refers to all those messages excluding spoken words. Those messages are body language such as gesture, facial expressions, eye contact and body posture. For instance, smile on our friends face on seeing us, before they utter even a greeting word, when we go to meet them after long time indicates that he or she is happy to see us.
Touch is another cue of non-verbal communications. It helps in indicating a person’s feelings or expressions, closeness, and illustrates characteristics of that person. A firm and stiff handshake or warm and lovely hug signify obviously different than a loose one.
Never the less, the sound, pitch, tone and volume of our voice while we are communicating can also be referred as forms of non-verbal communication. Voice use intonation, tone and vocally produced sounds. We use the pitch of voice to differentiate whether the sentence is a command, or advice or else a question or statement, and whether it shows aggressiveness; meaning vocal sounds and tone project our expressions. For example: Shaky and low volume of our voice when we present something in the class or when we speak to any kind of gatherings indicate that he or she fear or is not confident enough to do so.
The clothing we wear and its color are also other forms of non-verbal communication that commonly outline judgements among us depending on different cultures and custom. After all, we would find that non-verbal communication coexist alongside verbal communication, which can affect each other and aid each other in delivering right thoughts and ideas through interpersonal communication.
Importance of Non-verbal Communication
Firstly, we can say that non-verbal communication is important in expressing our emotions. Emotions such as happy, satisfied, confident, surprised, eager, tired, stressed, sad etc. These are almost all expressed through different body gestures and face. We are able to understand each other up on judging each other’s expression. For example if someone cries, it indicate that something has happened to him or her and others will be able to help it. Non-verbal gestures are what our recipients see in the first place, even before a single word is heard. These figurative messages can be a visual sign of feeling, but our words convey a different message. Using non-verbal cues help in expressing meaning, to navigate complicated state of affairs and build strong relationship for us at home or work. Thus, expression of the face becomes basic mode of non-verbal communication among people.
Secondly, it plays vital role in communicating interpersonal relationships. Through interpersonal communication we can establish trust in relationships and help determine a person’s fidelity. And these are possible only through using verbal and non-verbal communication mode. Interpersonal communication includes communications that occurs with our words and through our tone of voice, posture and facial expressions. It is also found by many researchers that non-verbal interpersonal communication like body language may communicate 93 percent of our attitudes and beliefs. We use language in verbal communication to communicate precise messages. Non-verbal communication involves any other information that we send and receive from others including our body language, eye contact or how we say a particular message. So, this also indicates that non-verbal is equally important as verbal in our daily life.
Thirdly, non-verbal communication is main supporter of verbal interaction. Infect they supplement each other and give full meaning. Because non-verbal communication can repeat the spoken message: contradict the message that individual is trying to convey; emphasize the message, substitute or complement meaning to make it understand clearly. For example, when the class teacher comes across his student with frowning face seeking permission to take rest, he would immediately grant permission because he saw how much the student was suffering not only by hearing the reason, but more by judging students facial expression. This is also another prove that prove equal importance of non-verbal communication to verbal communication.
Fourthly, non-verbal communication also reflects individual’s personality. Personality is the entire mental organization of a human being at any stage of his development. It embraces every phase of human character: intellect, temperament, skill, morality, and every attitude that has been built up in the course of one’s life. So according to the above definition personality concerns the most vital, obvious parts of an individual’s psychological life: it concerns whether a person is sad or happy, lethargic or active, brainy or tedious. And these are all aspects of non-verbal communication because we are able to define person’s personality through judging their facially expressed emotions and behaviors. For example, my friend wouldn’t tell all his personality orally. However, more than that, I will come to know his detail personality upon judging his daily behaviors and emotional expression. Therefore, this shows that nonverbal communication speaks more than verbal communication in our life.
Lastly, nonverbal communication plays greater role in performing rituals such as greetings and goodbyes. The smile we smile as soon as we see someone we recognize from distant itself tells a lot about importance of non verbal communication. Similarly, waving our hand indicating good bye is another example of non-verbal communication. None the less, nodding or shaking our head indicates accepting or refusing when others tell something or offers something. These are some of the details about how non-verbal communication interacts with verbal communication through the process of reinforcement, contradiction, and substitution, complementing or emphasizing.
Moreover, body language symbols and signs possess more than one meaning. These different meaning can be applied accordingly to the context and culture of different society. Non-verbal communication is not easily understandable and it is quite confusing because it is not exact and universal in every society. But body language plays pivotal role and it essential.
In addition, researchers of interpersonal communication have found that only 7% of the attitudinal meaning of message comes from words and other 93% comes from non-verbal signal. Indeed non-verbal gestures and signs use occurs early in life, before speaking your first words, to convey specific needs to our parents. As we grow older, our facial expressions, gestures, eye contact and even or voice tone helps us transfer messages to the recipient. So, by going through all this proves we can conclude that non-verbal communication shares equal importance with verbal communication. Infect, former one is more important than later one.