Index

Face-to-face communication is a highly interactive process where participants mutually exchange and interpret linguistic and gestural signals. Communication dynamics represent the temporal relationship between these communicative signals. Even when only one person speaks at a time, other participants exchange information continuously amongst themselves and with the speaker through gesture, gaze, posture and facial expressions. The transactional view of human communication shows an important dynamic between communicative behaviors where each person serves simultaneously as speaker and listener (Watzlawick et al., 1967). At the same time you send a message, you also receive messages from your own communications (individual dynamics) as well as from the reactions of the other person(s) (interpersonal dynamics) (DeVito, 2008).