Doctoral Dissertation Research: Nonverbal Behaviors in Social Interaction

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9701587 Smith-Lovin Within the field of Social Psychology, Affect Control Theory (ACT) has been used to understand the ways in which people perceive events generally (i.e., cognitions, emotions, and behaviors emerging from an event). ACT conceptualizes situations as consisting of actor-behavior-other and quantifies the definitions of actors and behaviors on three dimensions: Evaluation, Potency and Activity which have been shown to be human universals for responding to stimuli. However, nonverbal behaviors have an impact on how people perceive the situations in which they find themselves everyday. This Doctoral Dissertation Improvement proposes to extend ACT to include nonverbal behavioral that modify actions, with nonverbal behaviors being defined as "those aspects of a person's demeanor which communicate additional information about the behavior being performed. For example, nonverbal behaviors tell others whether a subject is performing an action enthusiastically (with a smile) or reluctantly (with a roll of the eyes). A four-phase research design will be used. The first phase entails collecting information on nonverbal behaviors independent of an event context. Phase two will pair nonverbal behaviors with other behaviors to see how they combine in people's perceptions. The third and four phases involves performing two experiments (one on paper and one via videotape) to see what effects the inclusion of nonverbal behaviors has on impressions people form of events. Data will be collected from undergraduate students at a major U.S. university. This research has the potential to increase our understanding of the relationship between nonverbal behaviors and impressions. In addition, it will increase the utility of Affect Control Theory in predicting event perception and will allow for more accurate understanding of the complex situations in which people interact. ****