Hall, Judith A.

Judith A. Hall is a social psychologist whose research has focused on dyadic communication processes with a special emphasis on nonverbal communication, gender, and social power. She earned her BA in 1967 from Harvard College and her PhD from Harvard University in 1976. She served on the faculty at Johns Hopkins University and held appointments at the Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health before moving to Northeastern University's Psychology Department in 1986. She has served as the editor and associate editor of the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior and the editor of Patient Education and Counseling, as well as on numerous editorial boards.

In her basic research on nonverbal communication, Hall studies both interpersonal sensitivity and specific nonverbal behaviors, both with respect to social power and gender and in relation to other social psychological or personality variables. She is a coauthor of Sensitivity to Nonverbal Communication: The PONS Test (1979), coauthor of Nonverbal Communication in Human Interaction (2005), and author of Nonverbal Sex Differences: Communication Accuracy and Expressive Style (1984). She is also coeditor of the volume Interpersonal Sensitivity: Theory and Measurement (2001).

In her applied research, Hall studies the communication of physicians and patients, both as a process and in relation to antecedent and outcome variables. She is coauthor of Doctors Talking With Patients/Patients Talking With Doctors: Improving Communication in Medical Visits (2006).

In her entry on Nonverbal Communication and Power for this encyclopedia, Hall draws on several meta-analytic reviews of the “verticality” concept (subsuming the related concepts of power, dominance, and status), as well as other recent research, to summarize the present state of knowledge about the relation of verticality to nonverbal behavior and interpersonal sensitivity. This topic also intersects with her interest in gender differences in communication style, insofar as gender and power are linked in society and may be linked in the phenomena under review. Hall concludes that “verticality,” regardless of which specific conceptual or operational definition is under discussion, is more a structural variable than a psychological one, meaning that prediction of the psychological states and therefore the nonverbal behavior of persons in different vertical positions is far from clear-cut. Because nonverbal behavior is the product of proximal states (including emotions, goals, motivational states, and role construals), and because vertical positions do not map unambiguously onto such states, the relation of verticality to nonverbal behavior and sensitivity is bound to be a highly moderated one.

As a very broad summary (one that needs much qualification), higher verticality predicts higher nonverbal sending and receiving skills and predicts using more open postures, approaching others more closely, using louder speech and more verbal interruptions, and engaging in a relatively higher proportion of looking while speaking than while listening in conversation. Beliefs about the relation of verticality to specific nonverbal behaviors are stronger and more numerous than are the actual relations, based on meta-analysis. Finally, she [Page 304]shows gender differences in nonverbal skill and behavior do not closely parallel verticality differences in nonverbal skill and behavior.