The dual pathway model posits that spontaneous and volitional laughter are voiced using distinct production systems, and perceivers rely upon these system-related cues to make accurate judgments about relationship status. Yet, to our knowledge, no empirical work has examined whether raters can differentiate laughter directed at friends and romantic partners and the cues driving this accuracy. In Study

This systematic review analyzes the differential use of gestures in learning by children with intellectual disability (ID) compared to typically developing ones (TD). Eleven studies published between 2000 and 2020 fulfilled the inclusion criteria (N = 364 participants). The results identify three key elements: (1) Children with ID accompany their spoken language with more gestures than TD children; (2)

The Media Bias Effect (MBE) represents the biasing influence of the nonverbal behavior of a TV interviewer on viewers’ impressions of the interviewee. In the MBE experiment, participants view a 4-min made-up political interview in which they are exposed only to the nonverbal behavior of the actors. The interviewer is friendly toward the politician in one experimental condition and hostile in the other

Why do eye-blinks activate during conversation? We manipulated informational content and communicative intent exchanged within dyads. By comparison to a silent situation, both emitters and receivers increased their blink rate when the former delivered a treasure hunt route to the latter. When the previously known route was repeated, or when the alphabet was reeled off within the same dyads, the receiver

Social resemblance, like group membership or similar attitudes, increases the mimicry of the observed emotional facial display. In this study, we investigate whether facial self-resemblance (manipulated by computer morphing) modulates emotional mimicry in a similar manner. Participants watched dynamic expressions of faces that either did or did not resemble their own, while their facial muscle activity

Previous research has shown that White people smile more in interracial interactions compared to same-race interactions. However, the morphological features of smiles in such interactions have not been investigated. We explored the duration and frequency of Duchenne smiling (activation of AU6) among White American college students (N = 92) in brief same-race and interracial dyadic interactions. Results

Production and comprehension of gesture emerge early and are key to subsequent language development in typical development. Compared to typically developing (TD) children, children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) exhibit difficulties and/or differences in gesture production. However, we do not yet know if gesture production either shows similar patterns to gesture comprehension across different

Anesthesiologists must recognize and respond both verbally and nonverbally to their patients’ pain. The current study analyzed 65 videotaped interactions between anesthesiology residents, a standardized registered nurse, and a standardized male patient in pain awaiting urgent repair of a perforated gastric ulcer. Interactions were assessed using a modified version of the Empathic Communication Coding

The claim that nonverbal cues provide more information than the linguistic content of a conversational exchange (the Mehrabian Conjecture) has been widely cited and equally widely disputed, mainly on methodological grounds. Most studies that have tested the Conjecture have used individual words or short phrases spoken by actors imitating emotions. While cue recognition is certainly important, speech

Physical attractiveness is a heuristic that is often used as an indicator of desirable traits. In two studies (N = 1254), we tested whether facial attractiveness leads to a selective bias in attributing moral character—which is paramount in person perception—over non-moral traits. We argue that because people are motivated to assess socially important traits quickly, these may be the traits that are

Verbal irony is a rhetorical device that is not only verbal but also paraverbal. In the present study, we explored the paraverbal expression of verbal irony which has been largely underinvestigated, especially facial expressions. Given the role played by facial expressions in the detection of emotions, we hypothesized that speakers can communicate irony by facial expression alone. We asked 104 speakers

Despite the wide range of theoretical explanations for human laughter, it is generally agreed to function, at least in part, as a social signal. We tested the hypothesis that laughter serves as a signal of group affiliation. Participants viewed a video clip depicting a confederate partner of unknown group affiliation displaying either a neutral expression, a smile, or laughter in response to a joke

The role of face and context in emotion perception was investigated by manipulating features relevant to the stimuli and to the observer. A nested-stimulus design was used, with subjects nested under stimulus item (an encoder’s facial expression or a written emotion-eliciting scenario presented alone or in an incongruent pair) and type of task instruction (judgment of encoder’s expressed or felt emotion)

The human voice communicates emotion through two different types of vocalizations: nonverbal vocalizations (brief non-linguistic sounds like laughs) and speech prosody (tone of voice). Research examining recognizability of emotions from the voice has mostly focused on either nonverbal vocalizations or speech prosody, and included few categories of positive emotions. In two preregistered experiments

While much is known about how negative emotions are expressed in different modalities, our understanding of the nonverbal expressions of positive emotions remains limited. In the present research, we draw upon disparate lines of theoretical and empirical work on positive emotions, and systematically examine which channels are thought to be used for expressing four positive emotions: feeling moved,

Since Darwin’s (1872) publication of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, emotion researchers have made tremendous progress in understanding the function, structure, and significance of emotion. Yet, the bulk of this work has focused squarely on the face. Recent research has shown the importance of augmenting facial expression research with a focus on other modalities, and carefully attending

This article unpacks the basic mechanisms by which paralinguistic features communicated through the voice can affect evaluative judgments and persuasion. Special emphasis is placed on exploring the rapidly emerging literature on vocal features linked to appraisals of confidence (e.g., vocal pitch, intonation, speech rate, loudness, etc.), and their subsequent impact on information processing and meta-cognitive

Past research has largely focused on how emotional expressions provide information about the speaker’s emotional state, but has generally neglected vocal affect’s influence over communication effectiveness. This is surprising given that other nonverbal behaviors often influence communication between individuals. In the present theory paper, we develop a novel perspective called the Contextual Influences

For many people, emotions are frequently expressed in the context of communication with their God. The practice of prayer is clearly embodied and affords the study of full body expressions of emotions in a relevant context. Surprisingly uncharacterized in empirical scientific research, we document full body postures representing prayers in different emotional registers (i.e., prayer, worship, praise

Although emotion expressions are typically dynamic and include the whole person, much emotion recognition research uses static, posed facial expressions. In this study, we created a stimulus set of dynamic, naturalistic expressions drawn from professional tennis matches to determine whether movement would result in better recognition. We examined participants’ judgments of static versus dynamic expressions

We conducted two studies to explore the potential meanings associated with the “heartfelt” gesture, which involves placing one’s hand with a flat palm in the center of the chest. In Study 1, we approached 176 participants in various social settings and asked them to recall an example of the gesture and the emotion they associated with its use. Although shock and surprise emerged as important themes

Age-related deficits are often observed in emotion categorization tasks that include negative emotional expressions like anger, fear, and sadness. Stimulus characteristics such as facial cue salience and gaze direction can facilitate or hinder facial emotion perception. Using two emotion discrimination tasks, the current study investigated how older and younger adults categorize emotion in faces with

Past research has demonstrated that children understand distinct emotion concepts and can accurately recognize facial expressions of distinct emotions by a young age, but few studies have assessed the age at which children develop the ability to recognize bodily expressions of distinct emotions. The current pre-registered research is the largest study to date (N = 552) examining the age at which children

Two paradigms measuring teaching effectiveness in higher education—one focusing on instructional behaviors (SET), and the other, on teachers' nonverbal and verbal immediacy (NVI-VI)—have been estranged from each other for decades despite their common focus on teaching effectiveness. To juxtapose the two paradigms, both SET and NVI-VI questionnaires were administered at separate times in courses taught

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of conversational role (speaking versus listening) and conversational agreement (agreement versus disagreement) on eye gaze toward the interlocutor in the context of controversial, political conversations. Previous studies have only examined these variables independently of one another and typically not in face-to-face conversations. Participants

People tend to assign higher attractiveness to an individual viewed from the back than head on. This tendency is pronounced when males rate the attractiveness of women. This study investigated reasons for the previously observed gender difference in this bias, focusing on the social relationship between raters (participants) and rated models (stimuli). To manipulate the assumed social relationship

Emotions are expressed by physical expressions such as body posture. Physical cues play a crucial role in recognizing emotional states. We hypothesized that bodily expressions are stored in long-term memory in association with emotion and that such memory representation, knowledge of emotion, enables us to recognize mental states as a certain emotion. The present study focused on sadness as the target

The current research tested how expectations and mimicry in an interracial interaction influence positive and negative affect. Existing research suggests that individuals do not expect mimicry, a behavior that should otherwise engender liking, in interracial interactions. Although past research has focused on how Whites’ expectations for interracial interactions leads to poor experiences, the present

Children show sex differences in early speech development, with girls producing a greater number and variety of words at an earlier age than boys (Berglund et al. in Scand J Psychol 46(6): 485–491, 2005)—a pattern that also becomes evident in gesture (Butterworth and Morisette in J Reprod Infant Psychol 14(3): 219–231, 1996). Importantly, parents show variability in how they produce speech when interacting

The adult voice is a strong bio-social marker for masculinity and femininity. In this study we investigated whether children make gender stereotypical judgments about adults’ occupational competence on the basis of their voice. Forty-eight 8- to 10- year olds were asked to rate the competence of adult voices that varied in vocal masculinity (by artificially manipulating voice pitch) and were randomly

Emotion decoding competence can be addressed in different ways. In this study, clinical psychology, nursing, or social work students narrated a 2.5–3 min story about a self-experienced emotional event and also listened to another student’s story. Participants were video recorded during the session. Participants then annotated their own recordings regarding their own thoughts and feelings, and they

Nonverbal markers of childhood trauma have been identified in the literature. Yet, the relationship between childhood trauma and the voice is still largely unexplored. We report preliminary findings from a study (N = 48) that investigated whether self-reported childhood trauma is related to acoustic measures on sustained phonation before and after childhood trauma recall. Childhood trauma and minimization/denial

Physical attractiveness plays a central role in psychosocial experiences. One of the top research priorities has been to identify factors affecting perceptions of physical attractiveness (PPA). Recent work suggests PPA derives from different sources (e.g., target, perceiver, stimulus type). Although smiles in particular are believed to enhance PPA, support has been surprisingly limited. This study

In this study, we investigated the cognitive processes and nonverbal cues used to detect altruism in three experiments based on a zero-acquaintance video presentation paradigm. Cognitive mechanisms of altruism detection are thought to have evolved in humans to prevent subtle cheating. Several studies have demonstrated that people can correctly estimate levels of altruism in others. In this study, we

Emotional tears have been proposed to serve as a signal of distress, appeasement, and helplessness, which promotes prosocial responses in observers. They may also facilitate the perception of sadness. A still unanswered question is what information tears convey about emotional states when they are combined with different muscular facial expressions. The current study evaluated three hypotheses: Tears

People are accurate at classifying emotions from facial expressions but much poorer at determining if such expressions are spontaneously felt or deliberately posed. We explored if the method used by senders to produce an expression influences the decoder’s ability to discriminate authenticity, drawing inspiration from two well-known acting techniques: the Stanislavski (internal) and Mimic method (external)

Thin slices, or excerpts of behavior, are commonly used by researchers to represent behaviors in their full stimulus. The present study asked how slices of different lengths and locations, as well as different measurement methodologies, influence correlations between the measured behavior and different variables (predictive validity). We collected self-rated, perceiver-rated, and objectively measured

In the fields of face recognition and voice recognition, a growing literature now suggests that the ability to recognize an individual despite changes from one instance to the next is a considerable challenge. The present paper reports on one experiment in the voice domain designed to determine whether a change in the mere style of speech may result in a measurable difficulty when trying to discriminate

The left-cradling bias is the tendency to cradle an infant on the left side, regardless of the individuals’ handedness, culture or ethnicity. Many studies revealed associations between socio-emotional variables and the left-side bias, suggesting that this asymmetry might be considered as a proxy of the emotional attunement between the cradling and the cradled individuals. In this study we examined

This paper investigates the paradoxical finding that physical pain in certain social situations makes people smile. A number of models have been proposed to explain emotional behaviour, and we tested some important predictions they make regarding the mental antecedents and cognitive properties that could characterize such distress smiles, specifically ones that occur in informal and non-serious social

Nonverbal pain cues such as facial expressions, are useful in the systematic assessment of pain in people with dementia who have severe limitations in their ability to communicate. Nonetheless, the extent to which observers rely on specific pain-related facial responses (e.g., eye movements, frowning) when judging pain remains unclear. Observers viewed three types of videos of patients expressing pain

The present research attempted to test how skilled people are at predicting perceptual-motor performance of professional darts players based on short observations of pre-performance nonverbal behavior. In four thin-slices experiments (total N = 490) we randomly sampled stimulus material from the 2017 World Championships of Darts showing short video recordings of the players immediately before throwing

The significance of the body-mind link and the contribution of nonverbal communication in the context of psychotherapy is enjoying increased interest. Yet, the main measurements used in psychotherapy studies rely mostly on verbal measures, missing other channels of communication that would allow rich and implicit, nonverbal information. The present study is a first step toward using the mirror game

On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic. The new physical distancing rules have had many consequences, some of which are felt throughout the justice system. Courts across the world limited their operations. Nonetheless, given that justice delayed is justice denied, many jurisdictions have turned to technologies for urgent matters. This paper offers an

The aim of the present work is to investigate the facilitating effect of vocal emotional intonation on the evolution of the following processes involved in language: (a) identifying and producing phonemes, (b) processing compositional rules underlying vocal utterances, and (c) associating vocal utterances with meanings. To this end, firstly, I examine research on the presence of these abilities in

Nonverbal vocal aspects of communication, often related to affective states, are crucial to social interactions not only for animals but also for humans during early infancy, as well as being one of the pillars of human language development and acquisition. The thread that binds together the contributions to this Special Issue is the analysis of nonverbal vocal communication during development, both

Although evidence is available about preterm newborns’ spontaneous behavioral repertoire during the first weeks of life in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), studies on infant behavioral responses to external social stimuli are scarce. The main aim of this study was to analyze preterm infant behaviors in response to the maternal voice, speaking or singing, in the NICU, compared with a control

Preterm infants’ behavioral state and physiological parameters are affected by environmental noise and adult voices. Only a handful of studies have explored the effects of direct maternal vocal communication on preterm infants’ autonomous nervous system responses. Furthermore, to our knowledge, no study to date has investigated the effect of the father’s voice on preterm infant’s behaviors and physiological