Communicative functions of facial displays in conversation
Date
1989
Authors
Chovil, Nicole
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Abstract
Historically, most researchers investigating facial displays have focused on facial displays solely as indicators of underlying emotion. Although facial displays have also been recognized as having a communicative function, research on facial displays as they are used in conversations has been scarce, as have experimental investigations of social fac tors that affect facial displays. The theoretical position underlying the studies reported here is that many displays are communicative. The first study examined facial displays used while discussing three diverse topics (planning a dinner menu consisting of disliked foods, a past conflict situation, and a "close call" situation). The resulting facial displays were analyzed in order to discover, inductively, the functions they served in the conversation. Both the syntactic and semantic linguistic functions were served by facial displays. The general categories found were syntactic displays, speaker illustrators, speaker comments, listener comments, and adaptors. Within these general categories, specific kinds of displays were also distinguished, for example, question markers, back channels, etc. The results demonstrated that facial displays convey a broad range of information that can be independent of as well as closely connected to the verbal messages.
In the second study, the social nature of the situation was experimentally varied in order to examine the effect of social factors on the frequency of facial displays. Subjects listened to "close call" stories in one of four conditions: Face-to-face, Partition, Telephone, and Alone. The results supported the hypothesis that the visual availability of a receiver was the important factor in determining whether motor mimicry displays would be produced. The study demonstrated that facial displays are used to convey information about the listener's understanding and appreciation of what was being said. Together, the studies provide a better understanding of how facial displays are used in conversation.