Professional connections and public relations in Early Childhood

Sunday, July 10, 2016

A television show "communication" experiment


I chose a television show that my daughter enjoys watching that I don’t usually watch. The name of the show is “Jessie”. Jessie is a young girl who wants to be a movie star and takes a job as a nanny for a wealthy family to have an income, just until she can break into show business.

When the sound was turned off on the show I thought that Jessie was angry and resentful and did not like her job, therefore she had a poor relationship with the children, the butler and the family. Jessie made faces that indicated that she was angry and talked with her hands a lot. I began to question why I would even let my daughter watch this show. All of the character relationships seemed strained and communication was sarcastic at best.

So, I turned on the sound and wow! The nonverbal communication did not match the verbal communication much at all. Although, there was a lot of sarcasm and innuendos throughout the show; the relationships were much more caring than I first believed. Jessie seemed to care for all of the children and helped them through their daily struggles, as their nanny.


I think that had I been watching a show that I know well I would have known the character’s personalities better and my assumptions would have been based on what I know about the characters. With this experiment all I could base my assumptions on were the interactions I was observing without sound. This is an interesting experiment and gives you some insight into how important body language and non-verbal cues are. 

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