ABSTRACT

Fascination with nonverbal aspects of social intercourse can be traced back to scholars such as Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian in the West and Confucius in the East. In classical and medieval times, forms of specific gesture were identified in the teaching of rhetoric along with their planned effects on audiences (Gordon et al., 2006). The concerted attention by social scientists to nonverbal matters has been shown to be much more recent, having a starting point in the 1960s (Knapp, 2006). This followed a long period during which the topic was deprecated as inconsequential, and those interested in it as academically suspect. For example, Aldous Huxley (1954: 77) described nonverbal education as a subject which was ‘for academic and ecclesiastical purposes, non-existent and may be safely ignored altogether or left, with a patronising smile, to those whom the Pharisees of verbal orthodoxy call cranks, quacks, charlatans and unqualified amateurs’. Such milestones in the evolution of the subject as Charles Darwin’s The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals (Darwin, 1872/ 1955) only began to receive serious social scientific recognition in the past few decades (Ekman and Keltner, 1997).