Nonverbal Skills and Abilities

T he practice of nonverbal communication relies on a range of innate and developed foundational processes. One foundation underlying the use of nonverbal communication focuses on individual differences in the abilities to communicate nonverbally. This ability, or skill, approach is akin to a personality perspective in that it focuses on individual differences in the sending (encoding), receiving (decoding), and regulation (management) of nonverbal communication (for more on personality, see Gifford, this volume). In other words, people vary in their abilities to convey nonverbal messages to others accurately, “read” others’ nonverbal communications, and monitor and control their nonverbal displays. The skill approach to nonverbal communication was advanced in a 1979 book edited by Robert Rosenthal, Skill in Nonverbal Communication: Individual Differences, and by the work of Rosenthal and colleagues (1979) on the Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity (PONS), a measure of individual differences in the ability to decode nonverbal messages. In Rosenthal’s Skill volume, Friedman (1979) argued that the skill approach to nonverbal communication represented three important shifts in conceptualizing the study of human social interaction. The first was a shift from an emphasis on cognitive processes (e.g., attitudes, cognitive attributions) in interpersonal relations to a focus on emotional processes. The second shift moved the focus from abstract traits to more 5