Journal #1

I really had no idea what was involved in nonverbal communication. When I watched the video with Paul Ekman and the facial action coding system  I was floored at how much actually goes into the study. I found myself doing the expressions along with the people on the screen and like he explained felt my own emotions sway depending on the emotion.

I was also very interested at the peek we received of the training offered for people to start recognizing and defining micro expressions. I think the idea of looking deeper at nonverbal ques is something I would be interest in learning more about. Being able to read someone's emotions is an important skill.

Observation #1

For my observation I sat in the food court area at Costco in St George. Costco has always been one of my favorite places to people watch so this seemed like a good place to start. The overall feeling that you get from that store is rush. People are in a hurry to get their items, to get to the cashier, and to get back to their car. I found that most children shared 3 different expressions while being there. This was boredom, sadness, or playfulness, this seemed to be dependent on how the parent interacted with the child. Arms crossed, pouting of the face, smiles and playful hand gestures, pointing (a lot of pointing)

The employees almost seemed too busy. Running from one customer to the next, always smiling when interacting with customers but not necessarily when they interacted with other employees unless they were joking around.  Lots of hand gestures either pointing to something a customer was looking for or trying to show the size of an object. The people that were at Costco alone vs. the people that were with a friend/partner/family seemed to have fewer facial expressions, most of the time it seemed like they were observing more of their surroundings than those distracted by their companions.