问答题 It seems almost incredible that, over the million or more years of man"s evolution, the non-verbal aspects of communication have been actively studied on any scale only since the 1960s and that the public has become aware of their existence only since Julius Fast published a book about body language in 1970. 1 This was a summary of the work done by behavioural scientists on non-verbal communication up until that time, and even today, most people are still ignorant of the existence of body language, let alone its importance in their lives.
Charlie Chaplin and many other silent movie actors were the pioneers of non-verbal communication skills; they were the only means of communication available on the screen. Each actor was classed as good or bad by the extent to which he could use gestures and other body signals to communicate effectively. 2 When talking films became popular and less emphasis was placed on the non-verbal aspects of acting, many silent movie actors faded into obscurity and those with good verbal skills prevailed.
3 As far as the technical study of body language goes, perhaps the most influential pre-twentieth-century work was Charles Darwin"s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals published in 1872. This spawned the modern studies of facial expressions and body language and many of Darwin"s ideas and observations have since been validated by modern researchers around the world. 4 Since that time, researchers have noted and recorded almost one million non-verbal cues and signals. Albert Mehrabian found that the total impact of a message is about 7 percent verbal (words only) and 38 percent vocal (including tone of voice, inflection and other sounds) and 55 percent non-verbal. Professor Birdwhistell made some similar estimates of the amount of non-verbal communication that takes place amongst humans. He estimated that the average person actually speaks words for a total of about ten or eleven minutes a day and that the average sentence takes only about 2.5 seconds. 5 Like Mehrabian, he found that the verbal component of a face-to-face conversation is less than 35 percent and that over 65 percent of communication is done nonverbally.