Journal of Mother Tongue Education

Abstract

Communication is carried out in two ways as verbal and
non-verbal. While oral communication is the language of expression, the means
of expression in nonverbal communication are the head, face, various parts of
the body, or the body itself as a whole. Body language, which is the most basic
element of non-verbal communication, is a form of communication that consists
of gestures, mimics, and body movements. Body language, which attracted
attention as “a new field” in world literature in the mid-1960s, was indeed a
field of study that came to the fore in the 1930s in Turkey. Mumtaz Turhan, a
faculty member in the department of Experimental Psychology at Istanbul
University, in his work entitled "An
Experimental Analysis of Facial Expressions" which he presented as his
associate professorship thesis, performed an experimental study on mimics
which form a sub level of body language. In 1941 he published his work as a
book. Turhan, having conducted a series of experiments, proved that it would not
be possible to interpret mimics accurately in isolation, that a mimic could
mean something only in a particular context, and that they could be correctly
interpreted only in those contexts. With that study, Turhan became one of the
first scholars who studied body language not only in our country, but also in the
world science literature. However, a glance at the studies made in our country
would show that Turhan's work seems to have been ignored and forgotten. Starting
at this problem, this study aims to introduce Mümtaz Turhan's work "An Experimental Analysis of Facial
Expressions" and show its significance in body language studies.