Psycho-socio-pathological aspects of nonverbal communication, with special reference to body language

Abstract

Man has been interested in observing and studying his own behaviour and the ways in which he communicates since , perhaps , time immemorial. The different models and theories proposed to explain human behaviour are as diverse as man's infinite creative abilities themselves. Such theories do not only reflect the evolution of human ideas and knowledge and the time they were produced, but also the different biases of choice of explanation philosophers, artists, linguists, psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists all shared in the attempt to explain the phenomenon of how we behave and communicate. Before until very recently, the study of exotic behaviour , like the theatre and dancing, was the most attractive and popular. This approach , may be ,was part of life itself. At the same time, man was more interested in discovering what other people were doing in other parts of the world than to observe what he was doing himself : the old anthropologists were more interested in going on far reaching journeys and coming back home to tell stories on how a member of a certain tribe in the jungle ate his own hair while dancing round a fire in the breeze of a full moon. The interest was in exotic ritual ; the foreign and therefore the strange. The old anthropologist back home forgot that his relationship with his wife or with friends - waving goodbye from a train station platform constituted another form of ritual. Therefore , in discussing literature on studies of human nonverbal interaction and communication I thought, that perhaps the best idea is to bring together some of the important ideas from different theoretical viewpoints and disciplines .