Silent Messages: Implicit Communication of Emotions and Attitudes

The book argues that nonverbal communication is not a chaotic collection of idiosyncratic gestures but a systematic system whose referents can be described on three independent dimensions: pleasure-displeasure, arousal-nonarousal, and dominance-submissiveness . It rejects the prevailing approach of cataloging individual cues—this gesture means this, that expression means that—without an organizing framework. Mehrabian came to psychology with an engineering background and conceptualized the problem in terms of variables and their relationships, using factor analysis to identify these underlying dimensions . The claim is that most nonverbal cues function to communicate feelings and interpersonal attitudes rather than semantic content.

Mehrabian began studying nonverbal communication in the 1960s and found the diversity of bodily and vocal cues overwhelming when each was treated separately. Factor analyses of data from his studies, in which numerous nonverbal variables had been scored, revealed that groups of cues clustered around a limited set of referents . He concluded that instead of focusing on the cues themselves, the productive approach was to analyze what nonverbal behavior communicates—feelings and attitudes—and organize findings around those referent dimensions. This analytical move, from cues to referents, is the book's methodological signature.

A frequently cited claim attributed to Mehrabian states that communication is 7% verbal, 38% vocal, and 55% facial. This figures derives from two of his studies involving inconsistent messages about feelings and attitudes—situations where the words contradicted the tone or expression . Mehrabian himself has emphasized that these percentages apply only to the communication of feelings and attitudes when verbal and nonverbal channels conflict, not to communication in general. The book's dimensional framework was about how emotions are encoded, not a ranking of channel importance for all communication.

The book's extension of nonverbal dimensions to environments connected the three referent dimensions—pleasure, arousal, dominance—to how people respond to physical spaces. This framework was later developed systematically in Mehrabian and Russell's An Approach to Environmental Psychology (1974), where the same three dimensions were used to model emotional responses to environmental stimuli. The pleasure-arousal-dominance model became a standard tool for studying how architectural and spatial variables affect affect and behavior . Silent Messages laid the conceptual groundwork by showing the dimensions applied beyond face-to-face interaction.

The 1981 second edition added a new introductory chapter presenting the theoretical framework explicitly, making the dimensional model more accessible to non-specialists . Mehrabian noted that he wrote the second edition more informally and primarily as a text, while updating the framework with new findings from the intervening decade . Ellen Berscheid's review in Contemporary Psychology called it an excellent book for the interested non-specialist, suggesting the revision achieved its aim of broader accessibility . The core framework remained consistent between editions.

Argyle's 1973 review in Contemporary Psychology described Silent Messages as a brief and fairly popular account of research on the nonverbal communication of interpersonal attitudes, covering liking, power, contradictory messages, personality and environmental variations, and verbal expressions of attitudes . The characterization as "popular" signals that Argyle saw the book as synthesizing and presenting research rather than advancing new experimental findings. This framing is consistent with the book's role as an integrative framework rather than a primary research report.