How Useful is Nonverbal Communicatios?

How Useful is the study of Nonverbal Communication?
Many people believe that nonverbal behavior represents "more true" characteristics, attitudes, and feelings about people than does verbal behavior, and that one can determine secret feelings about others from their actions (Patterson, 1983). Scholars and researchers, however, disagree exactly how much one can learn from observing kinesic actions.
In his book Silent Messages (1971), Albert Mehrabian suggests that people communicate through media other than our words much more than we do through the words we choose. He concluded, through a series of experiments, that "total feeling = 7% verbal feeling + 38% vocal feeling + 55% facial feeling" (Mehrabian, 1971). While this "empirical" percentage seems somewhat hard to swallow, it surely points out trends about the meaning we place on nonverbal communication, especially considering that he only focuses on facial cues and movements. Similarly, Ekman and Friesen examined nonverbal cues r...