Situational Effects of Task and Gender on Nonverbal Display

Abstract

This study examines the impact of sex, psychological gender, and task on ten nonverbal conversational dominance and listener attentiveness cues. Results of a repeated measure analysis on task demonstrate that subjects, in general, use more warmth-attentiveness cues on the feminine task and more conversational control cues on the masculine one. But androgynous males adapted nonverbal cues to fit task demands, while androgynous females remained constant in frequency of cues between task situations. Masculine males, however, were more controlling on the feminine than on the masculine task, while sex-typed females were more expressive on the feminine than on the masculine task. Correlations among nonverbal acts demonstrate that cues cluster into listener behaviors and body movement or speaker acts and that the same subjects employ different patterns across task situations.