Communicative Competence in the Nonverbal Behavior of Married Couples

The present study investigated the hypothesis that spouses' marital satisfaction is related to their ability to understand each other's nonverbal communication. Twenty-one couples rated their marital satisfaction and then participated in a task designed to measure nonverbal communicative competence independent of verbal competence. Twenty-one additional husbands and wives then viewed videotapes of opposite-sexed partners in the first group and attempted to read the same nonverbal cues. This design permitted identification of the presumed satisfaction/nonverbal competence relationship as being primarily a function of message sending, message receiving, or both. Results indicated a positive relationship between marital satisfaction and nonverbal competence, but only for husbands reading their wives' nonverbal cues. Comparison with the ratings of observing married strangers suggested that the relationship is a function of the husbands' characteristics as receivers of their wives' cues. In comparison to the male strangers, the husbands of satisfied wives were more able to read their wives' nonverbal cues, while the husbands of dissatisfied wives were less able to read them. The overall reception rate of the male strangers was unrelated to the satisfaction of the wives sending the messages. Some hypotheses drawn from the marital interaction literature are related to the data.