Human communication is an extraordinarily diverse enterprise, and the communication of affection is no exception. Individuals use a broad range of behaviors to encode feelings of affection for each other. Some are verbal in nature, such as a spoken or written declaration of love. Others are nonverbal gestures, such as hugs or kisses or pats on the back. Still others consist of supportive behaviors that may not necessarily be thought of as affectionate expressions but have that connotative meaning within particular relationships. This chapter explores the different forms of encoding affectionate messages (including those that are idiomatic to particular relationships), and reviews research on what individual-, relational-, and contextual-level influences affect the encoding of affection. With respect to categorizing affectionate behaviors, one might offer that they can be most parsimoniously understood as comprising three separate but interrelated types.

A Tripartite Model for Encoding Affectionate Messages

Early work on the encoding of affectionate communication adopted, at least implicitly, a two-dimensional model wherein affectionate messages were either encoded verbally (e.g., by saying “I love you” or “I care about you”) or nonverbally (e.g., by hugging, kissing, or holding hands). Many measurement models assessed verbal and nonverbal expressions without making an a priori distinction between them. For instance, Noller (1978) examined videotaped interactions of 87 parent–child dyads and coded “the number of instances of interactive behavior that would normally be regarded as affectionate,” including kissing, cuddling, or saying “I love you” (p. 317).