David B. Givens, Ph.D.
204 West 23rd Avenue
Spokane, WA 99203
509-624-4794
nonverbal2@aol.com
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
David Givens began studying "body language" for his Ph.D. in
anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle. He served as Resident
Anthropologist and Director of Information Services and Programs at the
American Anthropological Association in Washington, D.C. from 1985-97, and is
currently developing the Center for Nonverbal Studies (CNS), located in Spokane,
Washington, and La Jolla, California. His expertise lies in nonverbal
communication, anthropology and the brain. Givens's book, Love Signals, is a
popular, often-cited study of courtship ritual and nonverbal rapport. Two of
Givens's academic articles on nonverbal communication are recognized as
international classics by the Max Planck Institute in Austria. Givens and
neuroscientist Paul D. MacLean introduced the word "isopraxism" (the reptilian
principle of mimicking) into the English language, as announced by the executive
editor of the American Heritage Dictionary, Anne H. Soukanov, in the Atlantic
Monthly in 1993. David Givens was a member of a team of anthropologists,
linguists, astronomers, nuclear physicists, psychologists and materials scientists
charged by the U.S. Department of Energy with designing a marker to warn
human beings 10,000 years in the future about the dangers of nuclear waste (see WIPP).
Givens has been invited to speak on nonverbal communication by the Smithsonian
Institution, National Academy of Sciences, New York Life Insurance
Company, South Carolina Trial Lawyers Association, Washington State
Administrator for the Courts and numerous other groups. He has done
communications consulting for Sandia National Laboratories, the Bechtel Group, U.S. Department of Energy, and others; his ideas on nonverbal
communication have been written about in magazines such as Omni, Harpers, the New Yorker and
U.S. News & World Report, and in newspapers such as the New York
Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. Author of many reports,
magazine and encyclopedia articles, Givens is completing his second book,
The Nonverbal Dictionary of Gestures, Signs, and Body Language Cues.
PUBLICATIONS
Copyright © 1998 - 2001 (David B. Givens/Center for Nonverbal Studies)