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5: Nonverbal Communication

  • Page ID
    115941
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    Nonverbal communication is defined as communication that is produced by some means other than words (eye contact, body language, or vocal cues, for example). 1 Over the past decade, Botox has been used to paralyze facial muscles for the purpose of reducing the appearance of wrinkles. However, the unintended consequence of this practice is reduced facial expression! The frozen facial expression was recently celebrated by Shape.com, who interviewed a noted plastic surgeon about Hollywood’s most notable “frozen faces” (See Figure 5.0.1). The reality starlet pictured is only 40, but she is already a fan of Botox, “as you can tell by her taut forehead,” Dr. Youn says. “Some stars start treatment early, hoping to prevent wrinkles, but risk robbing their face of natural emotions in the process!” Imagine the lack of a variety of emotional facial expressions if everyone’s face was frozen. The world would be a much less interesting place, and it would be more challenging to stimulate accurate meaning in the minds of others; thus, we will begin this chapter by discussing the importance of nonverbal communication.

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    Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Celebrity Frozen Face “Kim Kardashian at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival for the premiere of ‘Wonderful World’.” by David Shankbone. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

    Thumbnail: Obie Fernandez (https://unsplash.com/photos/0GFNAelMPZA)

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    This page titled 5: Nonverbal Communication is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Jason S. Wrench, Narissra M. Punyanunt-Carter & Katherine S. Thweatt (OpenSUNY) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.