ABSTRACT

This chapter considers the way individuals communicate with others nonverbally. It discusses images and their role in the communication process. The chapter also considers images in dreams and the functions of images in advertising, religion, politics, and personal identity. It is possible to expand the term "message" to deal with nonverbal communication or "signs", such as facial expressions, body language, hair styles, clothes, props, and status symbols. Much nonverbal communication is unconscious. A considerable amount of the information we get about people comes from nonverbal communication which we can define as the exchange of information through facial expression, body language, and other physical signs that we learn to interpret as we grow up in society. The chapter examines a more general analysis of visual communication, at a higher level of abstraction, with a discussion of two different ways of perceiving the world "haptics" and "optics".