Watching Days of Our Lives

I had to watch several shows before finding one that would work for this class.  I tried watching a show Nickelodeon, which seemed to be geared toward preteens, but found that it was just too predictable.  I also tried That 70s Show, but also found it to be very predictable.  It was very easy to tell what was going even without listening to the sound.  I decided to try watching a soap opera Days of Our Lives.  When watching the show without listening to the sound, it seemed that a priest was having an affair with a woman.  It also seemed that a young woman was either plotting with an older man or that the older man was counseling her.  Most of the other relationships were par for the course for soap operas.  There were 2 girls who were plotting against another girl over a boy.  There was also an estranged mother and son.  There were a wide variety of emotions and feeling displayed by the characters that were easy to read even without the sound.  Emotions and feelings the characters displayed included:  happiness, sadness, anger, disappointment, sympathy, and concern.

When watching the show with the sound, I found that for the most part, I had correctly interpreted the relationships and emotions. There were 2 relationships that I had misinterpreted.   The first was the relationship between the priest and the woman.  As it turned out, the woman was the mother of the priest and that was why they were kissing and hugging.  The other relationship that I had misunderstood was the one between the young woman and the older man.  The man was the woman’s father who was helping her with a problem she was having. 

This assignment gave me the opportunity to see how well I could interpret communication without actually hearing the words that people were using.  It was much easier to correctly interpret the emotions displayed than it was to accurately “read” the relationships between the characters.  Based on this experience, I have a better understanding of the limitations of only using nonverbal communication to make assumptions.  As O’Hair & Wiemann (2012) pointed out, “nonverbal communication is often ambiguous (p. 129) and so advise us to “regard nonverbal behavior as cues to be checked out rather than as facts” (p. 130). 

Reference

O'Hair, D., & Wiemann, M. (2012). Real communication: An introduction. New York New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s