Benjamin Disraeli is credited with having said that there is no index of character so sure as the voice. Indeed, it’s not what we say, but how we say it that’s important. When we open our mouths we reveal all kinds of things about ourselves that have nothing at all to do with the words we are uttering.The importance of this area of nonverbal communication was borne out historically in April 1974 when Richard Nixon sent written transcripts rather than audiotapes of his secret White House conversations to the House Judiciary Committee investigating his possible impeachment. Members of the Committee quite rightly complained that written transcripts could not convey the full and correct meaning of an utterance since they lacked the additional nonverbal cues that one derives from the voice: inflection, stress, context, and other such nuances. They demanded the actual tapes because they contained this vital information. The landmark decision to provide the Committee the tapes eventually led to Nixon’s resignation, but it also legitimized paralinguistic communication-the study of voice and how words are said. Sigue leyendo
