Demonstrative communication is human nonverbal communication. Including non-verbal and unwritten communication, this form of communication involves body language, eye contact, facial expressions, and a sender’s tone of voice. This paper describes demonstrative communication with focus on how it can be negative and positive for both sender and receiver as well as effective and ineffective. It also discusses how demonstrative communication involves both listening and responding.

As demonstrative communication is about sending/receiving in a non-verbal and unwritten way, it means that those who communicate use facial expressions, body language, eye contact, and the tone of voice to send and receive messages. Just as every human gives off hundreds of unwritten and nonverbal messages every day, body language makes up to 90 per cent of our daily communication. Under body language, one typically understand various body movements including signals and gestures. According to Phipps (20 12), individuals use body movements in three key ways: as a code or instruction (when body language replaces words and relays information to other people), emphasizer (when body language is used to draw someone’s attention to things), and indicator (when body language functions as an additional level of commentary).

Body language can be positive for its sender when it helps him/her achieve the goal of sending a particular message. For example, parents are recommended to cuddle their children while talking with them about important matters in order to reassure children in their love and support as well as reduce the level of a child’s possible stress (Kapoor & Kapoor, 2013). In this situation, the body language plays a positive role. At the same time, the body language can indicate some feelings that a person may not have wanted to be seen, in this way the body language plays a negative role. For example, when a man is speaking to a woman he finds attractive and starts rocking back and forth on his feet, looking down at the woman’s feet, and jingling change in his pocket, his body language shows might create an impression that he is having a seizure, while in fact he is just being nervous (Hagen, 2011). In the two examples above the body language was effective for both a sender and a receiver (in the example with a parent and a child, because it helped them achieve their aim in communication), ineffective for a sender (in the example with the nervous man, because it showed his feelings when he did not want) and effective or ineffective for the woman (depending on how she interpreted the message: if she interpreted that correctly, she learnt necessary information about the man, so it was effective; if not, she got the wrong information, so it was ineffective for her as a receiver as well).

Facial expressions and tone of the voice can act the same way as the body language in playing both positive and negative roles in communication, as well as being effective or ineffective means of communication. Specifically, it is believed that a face of a lying person becomes stiffer, a face may become paler (as a result of withheld blood – a sign of stress), lips become tighter and thinner, eye contact often breaks away from an interlocutor, nostrils may open wider, and a forehead gets tightened up between the eyebrows. As for the tone of the voice, it becomes high pitched (Rodrigues, n.d.). In this example, facial expression had been an ineffective means of communication; it was negative for the sender, because it indicated lying, and was positive for the receiver, because it exposed additional information. At the same time, facial and expressions and voice tone can help people communicate. It is believed that “the face is rich in communicative potential” and is “the primary source of information next to human speech” (McConnell, 1993, p. 126). For example, a smile shows that a speaker is friendly and helps communication, so it is effective.

Demonstrative communication also involves listening and responding. Listening is effective when the receiver is trying to keep the eye contact, avoids using crossed arms, frowning or yawning, i.e. attempts to show he or she is interested in an active way. In this sense, the listening is interrelated with responding. By nodding, using positive facial expressions, and using paralanguage (voice inflection), the sender can show love, interest, support, and other feelings that will help achieve effective communication. On the contrary, if used with a negative meaning, they can lead to ineffective communication (if they indicate boredom, anger, hate, etc) (McConnel, 1993).