Responsivity to Facial and Linguistic Cues

Though information regarding personality and emotional variables are communicated through facial cues, linguistic cues, vocal cues, body position cues, and body movement cues, many individuals are aware of only responding to the linguistic content of others' behavior. Since such a wide variety of cues are available to the expressive individual, contradictory messages will be communicated by most individuals from time to time. The present study investigated the response of judges to incongruent cues. Judges were presented a 46 item test in which they were to rate the affect communicated through an individual's concurrent facial expression and linguistic message. On 32 of these items the face and the words communicated markedly different levels of pleasantness. Groups of 42 and 35 undergraduate students were tested for their tendency to utilize one or the other kind of cue. Data analysis suggested strikingly high reliability in individual's responsivity to facial or linguistic cues (r =.87, .92). Tests of this kind cannot be used to make statements about the general level of the public's responsivity to one kind of cue or another, since the artificial cues can be manipulated to make one or the other cue more or less striking, and the collector of any artificial cues has no way of knowing to what extent his material is representative of communication in the world at large. The reliability of this test, however, allows future research to divide groups into those more or less responsive to facial or linguistic cues.