To many, nonverbal communication may take a back seat to verbal communication. It is often overlooked and may be deemed unimportant. However, this aspect of communication speaks volumes. Nonverbal communication may consist of looking, smiling, frowning, touching, or expressions of surprise as seen in Weisfeld and Stack’s research study (2002). Women have been found to exhibit these forms of communication more often than men. Weisfeld and Stack studied nonverbal behaviors related to the closeness of a couple and found that women looked at their partners for a significantly longer amount of time as compared to men. The average length of a wife’s look was 7.5 seconds while the husband’s was 4.5 seconds. However, while men express less emotion and nonverbal communication, this may not necessarily mean that they are not listening when their wives speak to them. For instance, Weisfeld and Stack theorized that men may show less emotion because they have been taught to dampen emotions such as anger. When a husband and wife have a disagreement, the situation can escalate quickly if the husband fully expresses his emotions by becoming violent. Therefore, it was suggested that many men fail to show emotion in general because they have trained themselves to be “emotionless” in these conflict situations. Sabatelli, Buck, and Dyer (1982) also suggested that this is true. In their study focusing on nonverbal communication and its relationship to marital complaints, they found that wives who had husbands who were good communicators tended to have more complaints about their husbands. Their hypothesis was that because men are expected to tone down their emotions, having good nonverbal communication skills may be seen as socially unacceptable to their wives.
It is important to consider who the more effective communicator is so that we can learn from each other on how to communicate better. Noller (1980) found that there is a connection between a couple’s marital adjustment and their skill at communication. She had each participant first take the Marital Adjustment Test (Locke & Wallace, 1959) to determine their overall marital satisfaction. Then, after the couples’ communication was studied, the results showed that those with low marital adjustment demonstrated considerably fewer good nonverbal communications than those with high marital adjustment. However, the question must be raised: Do couples have a higher marital adjustment because they have good communication, or do couples have good communication because they are happy within their marriage?