Nonverbal Communication

Welcome to the Nonverbal Communication Division (NVC) of the National Communication Association. The NVC Division was approved by the NCA Legislative Council on Wednesday, November 10, 2004, and we have since held meetings in Boston, San Antonio, and in Chicago.

Now we are looking forward to San Diego, 2008!

A note from Judee Burgoon concerning a schedule changes and an additional opportunity at NCA in San Diego:

First, due to an unavoidable conflict for several of your officers, we need to change the day and time of the NVC business meeting.

The business meeting will move to Saturday, 3:00 – 4:00 pm, immediately following our sponsored program on Agents and Avatars in Communication Research (which is in Manchester Grand Hyatt, America’s Cup C).

Please mark these dates on your calendar now and plan to attend both the panel and the business meeting. I will notify you when I have found a new location for us to hold the business meeting (Betsy Bach said she was unable to make any changes, so we’re on our own).

If you are interested in attending the event that displaced our business meeting, yours truly and Charles Berger will be the inaugural recipients of the Mark L. Knapp Award in Interpersonal Communication, and some of your NVC officers and fellow members will be on the program. That program will be held: Saturday, 12:30 – 1:45 pm (Manchester Grand Hyatt, Betsy B)

Second, we'll be holding an informal brunch/coffee hour Sunday preceding our sponsored panel on a Conversation with Leading Psychologists. This will be an opportunity to meet with our esteemed guests in advance. I will be getting a rough head count after our Saturday panel and will be announcing the location at that time. We will also send out emails with the information.

Sunday, 11:15 – 12:15 pm informal coffee/brunch with guest panelists (place TBA)

Sunday, 12:30 – 1:45 pm New Directions in Nonverbal Communication Research: A Conversation with Leading Psychologists (Manchester Grand Hyatt Madeleine A)

Again, please mark your calendar and help us host our guest speakers. See the newsletter for more details on the panels. And see you all in SD.
~ Judee

The Nonverbal Communication Division has a policy of sponsoring and co-sponsoring panels that include nonverbal communication research.

We were happy to continue this work in Chicago last year, where we scheduled two successful panels with
Guest Psychologists from
Chicago Area Schools

We also scheduled two panels co-sponsored by the
Interpersonal Communication Division
and the NVC Division:
Nonverbal Communication in
Interpersonal Relationships &
Deception in Interpersonal Communication

The NVC division officers encourage you to propose entire panels for the upcoming conference in San Diego. One of our interests is to engage local scholars. For example, two year ago at San Antonio, we sponsored two panels with guest psychologists from Texas schools.

If you know of nonverbal scholars from allied disciplines whose work would be of interest to our membership in the future, please forward their names to Judee Burgoon (jburgoon@cmi.arizona.edu).

The division does not sponsor competitive paper panels. However, it does offer awards for best nonverbal papers. If you are submitting a paper that has some relevance to nonverbal communication, be sure to notify the program planner from that division to forward the paper to our division (again to Judee Burgoon) for consideration.

We also will sponsor programs from other divisions that include papers related to nonverbal communication. Please notify us if you have nonverbal papers that are paneled by other divisions.

As we proceed, we are particularly interested in sponsoring invited panels addressing issues central to current NVC studies in a variety of contexts. Additionally, we shall be sponsoring and presenting featured speakers showcasing their work to a larger NCA audience.

In the future we hope to lighten the load of other division planners by asking the planners to encourage their members to participate with us by sharing those paper proposals that have been accepted by the individual divisions and that possess a nonverbal theme.

We greatly appreciate the support from NCA's Legislative Council and look forward with enthusiasm to more exciting challenges ahead in the promotion and dissemination of the best of research in nonverbal communication. We are open to all approaches and are eager to receive comments and suggestions for consideration. If you are interested in joining us and have not yet done so, please email us!