 One of the things I love about studying and teaching communication is that it's very practical. Every aspect of it has a function, a particular purpose, and the same is true certainly for nonverbal communication. It has a specific function and in fact a variety of functions. So let's take a look at those functions of nonverbal communication, why it's important for us to care about nonverbal communication and use it appropriately. So the first function we can look at is that it's used for creating and maintaining relationships. We use nonverbal communication in a variety of ways to create and maintain relationships. We use it to signal interest in another person and we use it to, you know, we use eye contact and touch and just a personal space to convey interest or lack of interest in another person and create those relationships. Then we certainly use all of those things and more in maintaining that relationship. We know that nonverbal communication is a really important aspect of maintaining through, again, personal space and touch and even just the tone of our voice and vocalics and things, all of those important aspects in maintaining relationships as well. We use it to regulate interaction. So we use, for example, pause, which is a nonverbal element. We use pause and conversation to indicate that it's the other person's turn to speak or we, you know, may start looking around a little bit and avoiding eye contact to indicate that we no longer interested in talking with that person or we may just turn and walk away. Whatever we use it to regulate interaction in a variety of ways, so it performs that function for us as well. We use it to influence others. We can use nonverbal communication to intimidate others, for example. We can stand over them, tower over them, use a very stern tone of voice and change the tone of our voice and maybe point our finger at them and use that to influence others in that way or we can use it to sweet talk people. Again, we change the tone of our voice. We may use touch, a touch on the arm or something to, but we use it in a variety of ways to influence others. Nonverbal communication serves that function. We use it sometimes to conceal information or to deceive others. There are different elements of nonverbal communication that are used for that. In terms of, again, we think about eye contact, we think about tone. We think about just overall avoidance and avoiding that personal space, but we use it to conceal things. We use it to deceive others in some ways. We use it to manage impressions, the way that we dress, the way that we speak, the way that we behave and use our gestures and posture and so forth. We use it to create different impressions. That's a topic that we've discussed in another video, but when we're creating our face, so to speak, and our presenting selves, we use a nonverbal communication in a variety of ways to do that. So all this in more different types of functions that we have for nonverbal communication, all to say that nonverbal communication is an important aspect of communication. So if you have questions about any of the different functions of nonverbal communication or nonverbal communication overall, please feel free to email me, I'd love to hear from you in that regard. But in the meantime, I hope that you will consider these different functions and understand their importance in communication and developing our communication skills so that we can give the appropriate emphasis to how we treat in and how we develop our nonverbal skills.