Nonverbal behavior and communication

An attractive feature of nonverbal communication as a research area is that it has captured the interest of scholars of different disciplinary backgrounds- psychologists, linguists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists- with each discipline bringing to the area its peculiar theoretical and methodological perspectives and biases. Each of these disciplines also tend to have a favorite topic or problem area within the general domain of nonverbal communication. For example, for fairly obvious reasons, psychiatrists primarily have been interested in the expressive correlates of affective experiences, especially anxiety, whereas anthropologists have done most of the early work on proxemics. Along with the varying yet overlapping topical concerns that the different disciplines bring to the area of nonverbal communication are major differences in methodology.