A Decade of Research Exploring Biology and Communication: The Brain, Nervous, Endocrine, Cardiovascular, And Immune Systems‪.‬

The study of communication has come a long way since Aristotle's conceptualization of persuasion in Rhetoric from the 4th century B.C. Today, scholars conceptualize communication in much more comprehensive ways than did those Greek Aristotelian philosophers. Still, much of the discipline of communication focuses on the way that messages have an impact on individuals or societies. Since the late 1970s a small group of communication scholars, greatly influenced by their peers in other social-science disciplines (i.e., psychology) began to direct their attention to the way that communication influences and is influenced by processes in the human body. During the early 1990s, a group of researchers proposed a set of meta-theoretic axioms leading to the goal that specific theories could be generated related to the ways that the human body influences communicative messages and behaviors (Beatty, McCroskey, & Pence, 2009). These researchers called this set of propositions a communibiological paradigm (see Beatty, McCroskey, & Valencic, 2001). While we are not going to belabor each of the major premises of this paradigm, it is important to recognize these propositions, as they relate to this review: