Important communication skills are

Important communication skills are nonverbal. When the proverbial Indian said, "White man speak with forked tongue," he doubtless meant among other things that what the white man was saying in words did not jibe with what he was doing or expressing nonverbal. The abilities to know what is going on in a social setting and to set the correct emotional tone for it are crucial life-outcome criteria. Newmeyer (1970), for instance, has found a way to measure success at enacting certain emotions so that others receive them correctly and to measure success at receiving the correct emotions over various enacting. He found that black boys at a certain age were consistently better than white boys at this particular kind of communication skill, which is a far more crucial type of criterion behavior than most paper-and-pencil tests sample.