The Situated Multimodal Facets of Human Communication - Coverbal Synchrony in Human-Machine Interaction - page 190

speech and gestures are part of the same communicative plan, which
exploits multiple communication devices to effectively combine
the spatial and temporal features of the planned utterance (the
internal representation of the communicative act), resolve verbal
and nonverbal ambiguities efficiently, depict the social, physical and
organizational context, and succeed in being appropriately decoded
by the addressee. Without multiple communicative devices it would
be hard to implement an effective interaction. It also seems evident
that such synchrony disappears when there are no commonalities of
goals in the interaction, reflecting both the cognitive and functional
communication difficulties. It is not a case, for example, that when the
speaker lies there is a loss of this synchrony, reflecting a disembodied
communicative plan at the cognitive level.
5. Facial Expressions
Faces and consequently facial expressions play signifi cant communicative
functions in interaction. Changes in the facial muscles are exploited for
changing the meaning of a sentence, controlling the conversational
fl ow, expressing emotional states and guiding the speaker's intention.
Things that can be signaled in facial expressions include disinterest,
rising sympathy and empathy, distress, psychopathologies, cognitive
activities, intentions, physical efforts and personality. According to
Bavelas and Chovil (1997, p. 334), “ facial displays of conversants are actively
symbolic components of integrated messages (including words, intonation and
gestures) ”, i.e. they share with speech and gestures similar to semantic
and pragmatic functions. In other words and in a way more close to
the abovementioned discussion, facial expressions are co-involved in
communication and participate in concert with speech and gestures
to the communicative plan. This seems to be true also for non-human
primate as the recent works of Slocombe et al. (2011) and Parr et al.
(2010) aim to suggest. Bavelas and Chovil (1997, 2000) call them “facial
displays” making it clear that they are used by the speaker to illustrate
what she/he is saying and by the addressee as responses to the speaker
in order to avoid, if not necessary, interruptions.
These facial displays “ do not express inner emotions; rather, they
convey meaning to another person ” (Bavelas, 2012), “and to another
non-human animal” (we would like to add) following some recent
discussions on non-human primate multimodal communication
(Partan, 2002; Parr, 2004; Slocombe et al., 2011; Parr et al., 2010).
The idea that interaction, and therefore face-to-face dialogue,
is possible, with no exchange of emotional content, as well as that