Non-verbal communication and mental disorder.

People with mental disorders are often found to be difficult to deal with; they are ineffective in social situations, become rejected and isolated, and feel anxious or otherwise uncomfortable in these situations. Bryant et al. (1976) found that 27% of a sample of neurotic out-patients were agreed to be socially inadequate; probably all psychotics can be regarded as socially inadequate; the same is true of at least 7% of the normal population. As Hooper et al. (1977) point out, 'some of the most striking phenomena of what we call depression are only to be observed in the interaction and communication sphere', and the same is true of other syndromes. Social inadequacy takes a variety of different forms; one kind consists of failure to establish and maintain friendly relationships, another consists of failure of assertiveness. In each case both verbal and non-verbal communication are involved, but we have found that non-verbal signals have a far greater impact than verbal ones for assertiveness (Argyle et al. 1972) and friendship (Argyle et al. 1970). Accordingly, recent developments in social skills training (SST) have placed a lot of emphasis on non-verbal communication (NVC). (There are a number of other ways in which social behaviour can fail including lack of planning and initiation, failure to understand the rules or purpose of situations, failure to produce proper sequences of interaction.) Text books of psychiatry provide clinical descriptions of syndromes which include a lot of information about NVC. Recent research, using more specialized techniques and careful experimental designs, has been able to add to this information at a number of points. Here are some examples. Gaze. It has been confirmed that schizophrenics have a low level of gaze, when interviewed by psychologists about their problems; however, when talking either to patients or to strangers about impersonal matters their level of gaze is normal (Rutter, 1976). Tone of voice. Research using a speech spectrometer, by Ostwald (1963) and others, has shown frequency distributions of the voices of different kinds of patients, such as the ' hollow voice' with few high frequencies found in brain-damaged patients and those with generalized fatigue. Other studies show that anxious people speak fast, and unevenly, with a breathy voice, and make of lot of speech errors (Scherer, 1974). Spatial behaviour. Convicts and schizophrenics need a larger area of personal space than normals (Horowitz et al. 1969; Kinzel, 1970). Patients also differ from normals in their perception of NVC. Williams (1974) found that schizophrenics were not upset by conflicting verbal-non-verbal signals, as the double-bind theory might suggest; schizophrenics were simply much less responsive than normals to NVC. Research in the repertory grid tradition suggests that one reason for this may be schizophrenics' lack of stable constructs for emotions and persons (e.g. Bannister & Salmon, 1966). A number of studies have shown that delinquents are often inaccurate in the perception of approval and disapproval (McDavid & Schroder, 1957). In our SST at Oxford we have found that socially inadequate neurotics often do not attend much to the social signals sent by others (Trower et al. 1978). Our general approach has been to see social behaviour as a kind of social skill, in which there is constant modification of an actor's performance in the light of feedback (Argyle, 1969). Much of this feedback consists of NVC, e.g. from the other's face, and it is collected by looking in the right direction at the right time, the actor's glances constituting further NVC for the other (Argyle & Cook, 1976). This model needs to be supplemented in a number of ways; for example, in any social situation there are rules governing what behaviour (including NVC) is appropriate, and there is a repertoire