ABSTRACT
Postures and positions were used as a source of information about client’s characteristics, attitudes, and feelings about themselves and others. Deutsch and W. F. Murphy and S. S. Feldman provided several specific examples of how clients’ feelings and attitudes could be inferred from their postures, mannerisms, and gestures. Experimental evidence on the significance of posture and position cues in social situations has been accumulating rapidly. As pleasant body positions they chose relaxed postures with little movement; as unpleasant positions, they chose those involving obvious muscle tension or fidgety and nervous activity. Several experiments conducted in laboratory were designed to explore positions and postures associated with the communication of varying degrees of status or liking, and the liking or status levels inferred from these cues. The very complex results of the various experiments on implicit attitude and status communications are best summarized by proposing a two-dimensional scheme to characterize posture and position cues.
