structural:expansion, structural:scholar_edition
History of research

Scientific research on nonverbal communication and behavior was started in 1872 with the publication of Charles Darwin 's book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In the book, Darwin argued that all mammals, both humans and animals, showed emotion through facial expressions. He posed questions such as: "Why do our facial expressions of emotions take the particular forms they do?" and "Why do we wrinkle our nose when we are disgusted and bare our teeth when we are enraged?" Darwin attributed these facial expressions to serviceable associated habits, which are behaviors that earlier in our evolutionary history had specific and direct functions. For example, a species that attacked by biting, baring the teeth was a necessary act before an assault and wrinkling the nose reduced the inhalation of foul odors. In response to the question asking why facial expressions persist even when they no longer serve their original purposes, Darwin's predecessors have developed a highly valued explanation. According to Darwin, humans continue to make facial expressions because they have acquired communicative value throughout evolutionary history. In other words, humans utilize facial expressions as external evidence of their internal state. Although The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals was not one of Darwin's most successful books in terms of its quality and overall impact in the field, his initial ideas started the abundance of research on the types, effects, and expressions of nonverbal communication and behavior.

Despite the introduction of nonverbal communication in the 1800s, the emergence of behaviorism in the 1920s paused further research on nonverbal communication. Behaviorism is defined as the theory of learning that describes people's behavior as acquired through conditioning. Behaviorists such as B.F. Skinner trained pigeons to engage in various behaviors to demonstrate how animals engage in behaviors with rewards.

While most psychology researchers were exploring behaviorism, the study of nonverbal communication as recorded on film began in 1955–56 at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences through a project which came to be called the Natural History of an Interview. The initial participants included two psychiatrists, Frieda Fromm-Reichman and Henry Brosin, two linguists, Norman A. McQuown and Charles Hockett, and also two anthropologists, Clyde Kluckhohn and David M. Schneider (these last two withdrew by the end of 1955, and did not participate in the major group project). In their place, two other anthropologists, Ray Birdwhistell, already then known as the founder of kinesics, the study of body motion communication, and Gregory Bateson, known more generally as a human communication theorist, both joined the team in 1956. Albert Scheflen and Adam Kendon were among those who joined one of the small research teams continuing research once the year at CASBS ended. The project analyzed a film made by Bateson, using an analytic method called at the time natural history, and later, mostly by Scheflen, context analysis. The result remained unpublished, as it was enormous and unwieldy, but it was available on microfilm by 1971. The method involves transcribing filmed or videotaped behavior in excruciating detail, and was later used in studying the sequence and structure of human greetings, social behaviors at parties, and the function of posture during interpersonal interaction.

Research on nonverbal communication rocketed during the mid-1960s by a number of psychologists and researchers. Michael Argyle and Janet Dean Fodor, for example, studied the relationship between eye contact and conversational distance. Ralph V. Exline examined patterns of looking while speaking and looking while listening. Eckhard Hess produced several studies pertaining to pupil dilation that were published in Scientific American. Robert Sommer studied the relationship between personal space and the environment. Robert Rosenthal discovered that expectations made by teachers and researchers can influence their outcomes, and that subtle, nonverbal cues may play an important role in this process. Albert Mehrabian studied the nonverbal cues of liking and immediacy. By the 1970s, a number of scholarly volumes in psychology summarized the growing body of research, such as Shirley Weitz's Nonverbal Communication and Marianne LaFrance and Clara Mayo 's Moving Bodies. Popular books included Body Language (Fast, 1970), which focused on how to use nonverbal communication to attract other people, and How to Read a Person Like a Book (Nierenberg & Calero, 1971) which examined nonverbal behavior in negotiation situations. The journal Environmental Psychology and Nonverbal Behavior was founded in 1976.

In 1970, Argyle hypothesized that although spoken language is used for communicating the meaning about events external to the person communicating, the nonverbal codes are used to create and strengthen interpersonal relationships. When someone wishes to avoid conflicting or embarrassing events during communication, it is considered proper and correct by the hypothesis to communicate attitudes towards others non-verbally instead of verbally. Along with this philosophy, Michael Argyle also found and concluded in 1988 that there are five main functions of nonverbal body behavior and gestures in human communications: self-presentation of one's whole personality, rituals and cultural greetings, expressing interpersonal attitudes, expressing emotions, and to accompany speech in managing the cues set in the interactions between the speaker and the listener.