Unitization of spontaneous nonverbal behavior in the study of emotion communication.

Videotapes of spontaneous facial and gestural reactions to affective slides were segmented by observers using a group adaptation of Newtson's unitization technique. In Experiment 1, 46 females and 35 males segmented the expressions of a variety of children and adults; in Experiment 2, 50 males segmented the expressions of high- versus low-expressive male and female senders. Results demonstrated that the unitization technique applied to emotion expression yields reliable patterns of segmentation that may be used to investigate the relationships of communication accuracy to both the nature of the sender's behavior and the attentional patterns of the receiver. In particular, differences in segmentation results for males and females suggest that the technique may allow the detailed examination of process-level gender differences in nonverbal sending accuracy and receiving ability. Nonverbal sending accuracy is defined as an individual's spontaneous tendency to accurately communicate his or her emotional state to others via such nonverbal behaviors as facial expressions, gestures, and body movements. One method of measuring sending accuracy is the slide-viewing paradigm derived from R. E. Miller's (1974) cooperative conditioning procedure (Buck, 1978). In this paradigm, senders view and discuss a series of emotionally loaded color slides (i.e., familiar, sexual, scenic, unpleasant, and unusual slides) while unknown to them their facial and gestural reactions are videotaped and viewed by receivers. The receivers attempt to guess on each trial what kind of slide was viewed by the sender and how the sender felt about the slide. Using this procedure, it has been possible to study sending accuracy in college students, preschool children, and brain-damaged persons and to relate individual differences in sending accuracy to a variety of measures, including sex, age,