Social Psychology: Body and language in social interaction

This contribution aims to provide an up-to-date picture of the theoretical models on communication and bodily communication in social psychology, from the classical Encoding/Decoding paradigm for explaining interpersonal communication in general to the contemporary Communication Accommodation Theory and Parallel Process Model for the explanation of bodily communication in social context. In introducing the paradigms, this chapter focuses on the role of bodily communication in social interaction, in particular on the main social-psychological processes involved in social situations, such as social perception, judgment, attribution, attitude, identity, interaction (both interpersonal and inter-group). The chapter analyzes contemporary dual system models in social psychology for the explanation of social behaviours: according to these models, social behaviours are activated by either reflective or impulsive processes which act in parallel way. The authors try to apply this type of models to the explanation of bodily communication. Finally, the importance of an embodied social-psychological perspective is outlined.