A study investigated the validity and usefulness of the Affective Communication Test (ACT) which measures a person's ability to project a nonverbal message to others. The ACT test was reduced to 10 items and administered to 130 college students. The results were analyzed for interpersonal display of effect, public display, and small group display. Two hypotheses were generated: (1) the more anxious a person is when communicating verbally, the more inhibited the person will be when communicating nonverbally; and (2) since females are better at decoding nonverbal cues than males, they will score significantly higher than males on the self-reports of affective communication ability. Results indicated that the lack of nonverbal encoding ability is a strong correlate of communication anxiety for both males and females. Also, males and females tend to make the some distinctions of nonverbal affect; therefore, different scales are not necessary for the two genders. The shortened scale, the ACT-10, is brief enough to be administered quickly yet reliable enough to assess accurately the self-report of nonverbal encoding ability. (SRT)