Nonverbal Communication: Where Nature Meets Culture (Psychology Library Editions: Comparative Psychology) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0815373279 ISBN 13: 9780815373278

Publisher: Routledge, 2018

Synopsis

The field of nonverbal communication is a strategic site for demonstrating the inextricable interrelationship between nature and culture in human behaviour. This book, originally published in 1997, aims to explode the misconception that "biology" is something that automatically precludes or excludes "culture". Instead, it points to the necessary grounding of our social and cultural capabilities in biological givens and elucidates how biological factors are systematically co-opted for cultural purposes.

The book presents a complex picture of human communicative ability as simultaneously biologically and socioculturally influenced, with some capacities apparently more biologically hard-wired than others: face recognition, imitation, emotional communication, and the capacity for language. It also suggests that the dividing line between nonverbal and linguistic communication is becoming much less clear-cut.

The contributing authors are leading researchers in a variety of fields, writing here for a general audience. The book is divided into sections dealing with, respectively, human universals, evolutionary and developmental aspects of nonverbal behaviour within a sociocultural context, and finally, the multifaceted relationships between nonverbal communication and culture.

About this title

Review:

...an important book and should be selected by undergraduate-level libraries.
—CHOICE

Everyone will find something of interest in this eclectic volume of psychophysiology, economics, ethology and history, all of it documenting the close ties between nature and culture in human affairs...the book's breadth is exciting, its reach invigorating...the book is an intellectual smorgasbord...the book admirably establishes nonverbal behavior as a focal point of the dynamic interplay of biological and social origins of behavior.
—American Scientist

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0815373279
• ISBN 13: 9780815373278
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320
• Editor: Segerstrale Ullica, Molnar Peter