The Importance Of Non-Verbal Communication

Allan Pease (1995:9)????? is of the opinion that Charles Darwin’s book “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals” (1872) may be the most significant work of the last centuries. It tends to be considered a pioneer work in the field of non-verbal communication studies and it inspired many modern scientists to the further research in that sphere. As a consequence, it leaded to the observation and analyzes of a great number of non-verbal expressions. One of the researchers, Albert Mehrabian, discovered that the verbal means are of much less importance in the process of conveying a message than the vocal or non-verbal ones . He put forward the claim that “the total impact of a message is about 7 per cent verbal (words) and 38 per cent vocal including tone of voice, inflection and other sounds) and 55 per cent non-verbal ” (Mehrabian, 1974 in Pease, 1995:9). Along similar lines, the observation of another researcher, Birdwhistell (1956), lent support to the previous findings and provide confirmatory evidence to the minor role of words in comparison to non-linguistic elements in human communication. He also pointed out the fact of the surprisingly short time people tend to spend on producing speech every day. It was estimated to be not more than eleven minutes.
Gestures can be distinguished as one of the elements mentioned above. According to Desmond Morris (1997:24), they may be characterized as movements that have a power to express a certain meaning to the