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Developmental Aspects Of Nonverbal Communication, Richard Norris

Student Work

Developmental differences in encoding and decoding abilities were investigated in this study with subjects ranging from 5 years to 88 years of age. The 94 white, middle-class males and females were placed into five age groups. Subjects were asked to encode each of six emotional expressions, after which they were presented with three decoding tasks. The video tape mode required subjects to decode the same six common nonverbal expressions of emotion (i.e., anger, surprise, fear, happiness, sadness, disgust). A second decoding task consisted of four expressions (anger, fear, sadness, happiness) which were schematically depicted. Subjects' decoding of affect in a …