ABSTRACT
Everyone knows that verbal and nonverbal cues fit together into integrated messages like interlocking pieces of a puzzle, but nobody really knows how. It is one of the most fundamental and intriguing questions about social interaction, and at the same time it is one of the most intractable. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the study of messages of emotion. We know that emotion is expressed or communicated through words, faces, voices, and bodies, usually in rich combinations, but we know very little about how those cues work in concert or in conflict. Despite decades of prolific and highly sophisticated research on verbal, facial, and vocal expressions in particular (Bowers, Metts, & Duncanson, 1985), we have only a handful of studies that attack the problem of how cues combine, and only a few of them are recent. It is as if researchers have given up studying the puzzle to work on the pieces, and that is understandable considering how complex the pieces themselves are.
