A process occurring when a person transmits a message to another person who receives it. The message may be comprised of verbal (e.g., thoughts, feelings) or non-verbal information (e.g., gestures, emotional expressions) or both. Both the person transmitting the message and the person receiving it must share a common code (e.g., system of shared symbols, signs, or behavior) for communication to be successfully transmitted from person to person. Some symbols, in the sense of ‘display rules’, will be (more or less) universal (e.g., certain facial expressions such as an eyebrow flash) while others will be culture specific (e.g., Greek head movement for answering ‘no’).
See Action unit, Ages and Stages Questionnaire (ASQ), Co-regulation, Display rules, Conversational context, Conversations, Facial expressions, Joint attention, Interaction, Mutual gaze, Proximal processes, Shared reference, Signs, Still-face paradigm, Symbols