A closer examination of a study on verbal and non-verbal messages

self-evident truth. In the first experiment, subjects were asked to listen to a recording of a female saying the word ‘maybe’ in three tones of voice to convey liking, neutrality and disliking. The subjects were then shown photos of female faces expressing the same three emotions and were asked to guess the emotions in the recorded voice and the photos. It was found that the photos got more accurate responses than the voices. In the second experiment, subjects listened to nine recorded words spoken in different tones of voice. Three words had positive meanings (e.g. honey), three were neutral (e.g. oh) and three were negative (e.g. terrible). Again, the subjects had to guess the speaker’s emotions. It was found that tone of voice carried more meaning than the individual words. From these experiments the researchers concluded that 7% of our feeling towards a speaker is based on the actual words they use, 38% on their tone of voice, and 55% on their body language (e.g. facial expression).