Activity Illustrating Several Categories of Nonverbal Communication

Introduction

This is an activity to illustrate several categories of nonverbal communication, including eye contact, body orientation, territoriality, vocalics/paralanguage, touch, and chronemics. It is appropriate for something like Interpersonal Communication or a hybrid course such as Intro to Human Communication. It is an experiential activity, meant to sensitize them to these categories by embodying them in a controlled environment. Some moments in the activity can be a little uncomfortable, but I’ve never had a student complain. They all seem to learn something from the activity and appreciate it. 

Analog Clock

The standard educational clock you find in any classroom. 

You can use a stopwatch, but I don’t tell students I’m going to be timing them, so I find the clock is better. If you must use your watch, stopwatch, or phone app, don’t telegraph it to your students with your nonverbal signals. 

Pre-Activities

Facilitate a discussion of categories of nonverbal communication that include the ones illustrated by the activity. If you have already covered nonverbal communication, this can be a quick review. Be sure to cover:

• Body Orientation: the fact that how one turns one’s body can itself be communicative. I often use an example such as allowing/disallowing someone into a group conversation at a social function or turning one’s body away from a stranger’s when seated next to them on an airplane/train.
• Eye Communication: aspects such as the power of the gaze or the glance itself, eye contact, and pupil dilation as communicative elements.
• Vocalics/Paralanguage: inflections and other “nonverbal” qualities of the voice.
• Touch: the communicative importance of touch in general, how touch or lack of touch can be communicative or perceived as unimportant/not particularly communicative in some situations.
• Territoriality: your perception of your own territory, with some illustrations such as your workspace, home or car.
• Proxemics: the four main speaking distances (intimate, persona, social, and public), along with some discussion of intercultural variations.
• Chronemics: time as a communicative category, how we use, structure, and perceive time, intercultural variants of monochromatic and polychromatic time, and illustrations of time as situational (such as comparing 15 minutes at the doctor’s office and 15 minutes talking with your friends or watching your favorite tv show).

Activity

1. Find a partner and stand across the room from your partner (more than 12 feet apart). Note: If there is an odd number of students, one student can help you be an observer. You can pull this student aside and quickly brief them on what to watch for. Basically, they should watch for pertinent examples of the categories of nonverbal communication described above. 
2. Tell your student they are going to have a series of short conversations with their partner. When you say “go,” they are to begin a conversation with their partner. It can be about anything such as your day, traffic, or the weather, just something easy to talk about. When you say, “stop,” or “time,” they are to stop and refocus on me for more instructions. 
   
3. Conversation 1: Say, “Go.” Let them speak for 30 seconds and tell them to stop. then point out that, from our study of Proxemics, this was the Public Distancefrom, which for most cultures is anything beyond 12 feet. 
   
4. Conversation 2: Have them step to the Social Distance, anything from 4 feet to 12 feet. Here I usually remind them they still have two speaking distances to go, so don’t make it too close or they’ll have their hands in their partner’s pocket by the end. Say “Go.” Let them speak for 30 seconds and tell them to stop. 
   
5. Conversation 3: Have them step to the Personal Distance, typically anything from 18 inches to 4 feet. Say “Go,” let them speak for 30 seconds, and tell them to stop.
   
6. Conversation 4: Have them step to the Intimate Distance, typically contact to 18 inches. Say “Go,” let them speak for 30 seconds, and tell them to stop.
   
7. Conversation 5: We’re not quite finished. Have them move to “a comfortable distance.” They will self-regulate. Give them a few extra seconds to adjust. Tell them for this conversation they can’t speak. They can laugh, but they can’t speak. Their task is to make extended eye contact. Here I usually give them some tips. They can have a “stare-down,” or just quietly make eye contact, or start at the bridge of their partner’s nose. I tell them to try to keep contact until I call time, but if it gets too intense, they can look away. Say “Go,” let them make eye contact 30 seconds, and tell them to stop.
8. Conversation 6: Once they settle down from the last awkwardness, tell them to turn their backs on their partners and have a conversation. Say “Go,” let them speak for 30 seconds, and tell them to stop.
   
9. Tell them they can go back to their seats and we will talk about the exercise.
   

Debriefing

I run the debriefing as a facilitated discussion, asking the questions below, asking for a show of hands where appropriate, improvising and elaborating when I need to. 

• What categories of nonverbal communication did you notice in the exercise? 

• They usually noticed proxemics, eye contact, sometimes territory, and touch. 
• So, I get more specific.
• In Conversations 1 and 2, what did you notice about your paralanguage? 
  
• Strain in their voices from shouting across the room.
• Social awkwardness expressed in their paralanguage.
• In which conversation did you first notice territoriality?
• Usually they notice at the Personal Distance.
• Which conversation was the most uncomfortable?
• Almost invariably, they answer Conversation 5.
• An interesting discussion of eye contact typically ensures.
• I remind them of cultural and social differences in what extended eye contact means, including how in some cultures it is essentially forbidden, or perceived as a challenge, etc.
• In which conversation were you standing the closest to your partner?
• Sometimes they say Conversation 4, because they were at the Intimate Distance. 
• I typically inject some doubt, such as “Was it?...” or “Anybody notice another?...” 
• Someone usually points out that they were standing closest, sometimes touching, when they were back-to-back. They often even turn their heads to look at each other over their shoulders. We often end up talking about how we learn to ignore uncomfortable invasions of our intimate space (also territoriality) riding in a bus, plane, or being on an elevator.
• This discussion point also often leads us into body orientation.
• Which conversation seemed to take the longest?
• Almost invariably Conversation 5 is perceived as the longest.
• At this point I tell them I was timing the conversations, and they were all 30 seconds long.
• A discussion of chronemics ensues, allowing me to make several points about situational experiences of time.

At this point I provide a quick conclusion. I usually make a couple of points such as:

• Time, as an element of communication, isn’t clock time, it’s experience of time.
• Space, as an element of communication, isn’t measured space, it’s experienced space.