Demonstrative Communication
Communication at its core is the sending and receiving of information between two people. For communication to be effective the message must first be understood by the receiver. The receiver must also understand the senders’ intentions, his feelings and thoughts. If not the message will not be received correctly. Communication can be broken down into two categories; verbal and non-verbal. When we are talking about demonstrative communication then we are referring to non-verbal communication. How do you determine what people are trying to communicate to you when they are using demonstrative communication? There are three main ways to recognize demonstrative communication: facial expression, tone of voice and body language. Recognizing and responding to these non-verbal cues are a skill that we begin to learn as babies. We practice and fail often before we learn the subtleties of non-verbal language that helps us understand the full extent of what is being communicated to us by others. Like verbal communication non-verbal must communicate the meaning, be governed by rules, it is influenced by context, location and the relationship between the sender and receiver One of the main types of non-verbal communication is the facial expression. We can learn a lot of information from someone simply by looking at his/her face. Are they sad, angry, stressed, happy, confused etc.? How do we know this just by looking? Practice! It is a skill begun at birth and usually mastered by early adulthood. We learn by trial and error how to interpret what people are really trying to say to us. Often people’s words do not match up with the expression on their face. Sarcasm is a great example of this. People will say one thing and mean something exactly the opposite. Or they will say everything is “fine” when their facial expression says I’m sad,