PAUL EKMAN and WALLACE V. FRIESEN The Repertoire of Nonverbal Behavior: Categories, Origins, Usage, and Coding 1 If we are to understand fully any instance of a person's non-verbal behavior — that is, any movement or position of the face and/or the body — we must discover how that behavior became part of the person's repertoire, the circumstances of its use, and the rules which explain how the behavior contains or conveys information. We will call these three fundamental considerations ORIGIN, USAGE, and CODING. The interrelationships among and the differences within these three aspects of nonverbal behavior are extremely complex. The task of unrav- eling nonverbal behavior in these terms is enormously difficult; and it becomes impossible if we fail to consider the possibility of multiple categories of nonverbal behavior. The need to develop such a categorical scheme has emerged from the results of our empirical studies over the past eight years, and has been crystallized by our two current research projects, the study of cross- cultural differences in nonverbal behavior, and the study of nonverbal leakage of information during deceptive situations. We will briefly trace how some of the findings raised questions which led us to attempt to 1 Part of this paper was given at the Symposium: ''Communication Theory and Linguistic Models in the Social Sciences" at the Center for Social Research of the Torcquato Di Telia Institute, Buenos Aires, Argentina, October, 1967. The research reported in this paper was supported by research grants from the Advanced Research Projects Agency, administered by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AF-AFOSR-1229-67), the National Institute of Mental Health (MH- 11976-03) and a Career Development Award (1-K3-MH-6092-02). The authors are indebted to Patricia W. Garlan for her helpful suggestioni on content and editorial criticisms of style. Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/14/16 4:41 AM