How should you improve your communication skills? I am sometimes asked by students, "Professor, I want to be able to communicate better" or "I want to acquire communication skills." Whenever I would then ask, "What do you think you should do?" some students would answer, "I guess I need to gain more experience" or "My parents and people at my part-time job advised me that 'Practice makes perfect.'"
It is true that there are aspects of communication that involve "learning physically" and "becoming accustomed" by accumulating experience. However, is that enough? Will communication improve with experience?
When we think of knowledge, studying and learning may come to mind, but when we play sports or when we cook, we always use our accumulated knowledge to act. For example, when practicing figure skating, if all you have to do is skate on ice, you may become capable of doing it well by getting your body used to the feeling of balancing despite falling over and over again. However, if you want to do advanced jumps and spins, you will not be able to do it well unless you know and understand theories and move your body based on those theories.
The same is true when communicating with others. By repeating the experience, you will be able to communicate at a certain level. However, if you are aiming for better communication and more desirable communication skills, it is necessary to acquire the theory and rules of communication as knowledge, and then generate messages and interpret messages received from others. In other words, correct and abundant knowledge about interpersonal communication influences the quality of communication, such as creating messages well and reading the intentions and emotions of others appropriately.
What is Knowledge About Nonverbal Communication?
Do you know specifically what kind of differences there are in facial expressions when others are happy versus when they are angry? Do you know the peculiarities of the way you speak when you are stressed? To have knowledge about nonverbal communication is to know the characteristics and rules of human communication behavior concretely, rather than vaguely. Now, do you have correct and abundant knowledge?
Psychologists Janelle Rosip and Judith Hall focused on nonverbal communication and developed the Test of Nonverbal Cue Knowledge (TONCK), which measures a person's knowledge related to nonverbal cues. This was a test in the form of answering a question, such as "Rapid head nods are a signal to the speaker to finish quickly," with a choice of either true or false. However, the TONCK had 81 items, a large number, and so, along with Judith Hall, I developed a new version (TONCK-II) to make it easier to use. People who have a high percentage of correct answers on this test have a lot of correct knowledge about nonverbal communication. The TONCK tests and another one, the GEMOK-Features which was developed by Swiss psychologists Katja Schlegel and Klaus Scherer to measure knowledge about cues to emotion, are the only validated tests of nonverbal cue knowledge. Many avenues of future research open up with these tests. Two things we already know: People who score higher on these knowledge tests actually are better at interpreting emotional expressions conveyed by face, body, and voice, as measured with tests showing people's nonverbal cues. And, women tend to have an edge over men in their knowledge of nonverbal communication.
Negative Effects of Inaccurate Knowledge
If knowledge is to be acquired, of course it must be accurate knowledge. However, when it comes to communication, it is difficult to determine what the correct answer is in the first place, and the correct answer may change depending on the context. Therefore, the knowledge that you possess may actually be wrong. For example, according to Quinn Hirschi at the University of Virginia and colleagues, people assume that speaking less when meeting someone for the first time makes you more likeable. However, when they conducted an experiment, they found that this belief was false, and that the more people spoke, the more likeable they were.
False knowledge and beliefs can lead to ineffective or undesirable communication behaviors. In addition, people sometimes possess stereotypical cognitions of gender, nationality, age, etc. regarding communication behaviors. While there are communication behaviors that actually differ according to gender and culture, others are simply based on people's assumptions. Having correct knowledge is critical.
To those of you who read this article and decided to go to a bookstore and buy a book on communication: There are many unfounded and unreliable manuals in the world, so be careful when choosing books!
For Further Reading
Ogawa, K., & Hall, J. A. (2022). Development of the Test of Nonverbal Cue Knowledge-II (TONCK-II). Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 46(4), 569-592. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-022-00414-5
Rosip, J. C., & Hall, J. A. (2004). Knowledge of nonverbal cues, gender, and nonverbal decoding accuracy. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 28(4), 267–286. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-004-4159-6
Schlegel, K., & Scherer, K. R. (2018). The nomological network of emotional knowledge and understanding in adults: Evidence from two new performance-based tests. Cognition and Emotion, 32(8), 1514–1530. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2017.1414687
Kazumi Ogawa is Professor of Faculty of Psychology at Aichi Shukutoku University in Japan. She is interested in how we can improve our interpersonal communication performance, and in recent years has been studying the effectiveness of knowledge for interpersonal communication.
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