ABSTRACT
In psychiatry, human group behavior has traditionally been examined in terms of the personal, unique life experiences and behavioral expressions of each subject. This is a psychological view. Communication, then, includes all behaviors by which a group forms, sustains, mediates, corrects, and integrates its relationships. In the flow of an interaction, communicative behaviors serve to give continuous notification of the states of each participant and of the relationships that obtain between them. This chapter shows how posture and postural shifts mark their duration and termination. When people show a postural orientation vis-à-vis each other, particular types of social interaction usually occur between them. Lexically, they engage in conversation or courtship or instructing or arguing. Since an individual in a given culture can sit in only a limited number of postures, one immediately wonders whether postural congruence is purely coincidental. But even a very few continued observations of a group quickly end any theory of coincidence.
