Development of Nonverbal Behavior in Children

When I organized a symposium on the development of nonverbal behavior for the 1980 meeting ofthe American Psychological Association, I was faced with an embarrassment of riches. Thinking about the many people who were doing important and interesting research in this area, it was hard to narrow down the choice to just a few. Eventually, I put together a panel which at least was representative of this burgeoning area of research. In planning this volume two years later, I was faced with much the same predicament, except to an even larger degree. For, during that short period, the area of children's nonverbal behavior carne to grow even larger, with more perspectives being brought to bear on the question of the processes involved in the development of children's nonverbal behav­ ior. The present volume attempts to capture these advances which have occurred as the field of children's nonverbal behavior has moved from its own infancy into middle childhood. The book is organized into five major areas, representative of the most important approaches to the study of children's nonverbal behavior: 1) Psychobiological and ethological approaches, 2) social developmental approaches, 3) encoding and decoding skill approaches, 4) discrepant verbal-nonverbal communication approaches, and 5) personality and individual difference approaches. The discreteness of these categories should not be overemphasized, as there is a good deal of overlap between the various approaches. Nonetheless, they do represent the major areas of interest in the field ofthe development ofnonverbal behavior in children.