Roles Of Nonverbal Communication In Intercultural Interactions

As mentioned earlier, cultures can range from high to low context with respect to communication. Research has shown that low-context communicators tend to write relatively longer and less polite (as rated by low-context raters) compared to others in high-context cultures. In addition to this, the slang words we might use during online communication differs culturally as well. For instance, if you crack a joke, your American friend might reply with ‘LOL’ or ‘hahaha’ while your German friend might reply with ‘g’ because it stands for the German word Grinsen — which means grinning. The Western communication style, prevalent in North America and parts of Europe, prioritizes individualism, directness, and assertiveness. This style values forthrightness and encourages open expressions of opinions and desires, even if they diverge from others’.

Media often portrays nonverbal cues through film, television, and even advertisements, reflecting how different cultures express emotions and social cues without words. Understanding these representations requires careful interpretation of gestures, facial expressions, and body language. Nonverbal communication plays a crucial role in intercultural interactions, impacting everything from establishing trust and understanding to conveying respect and emotion in cross-cultural settings. By using nonverbal cues such as body language, facial expressions, gestures, and tone of voice, individuals can navigate communication barriers and bridge cultural gaps, enhancing mutual understanding and effective interaction. Nonverbal communication plays a crucial role in intercultural interactions, shaping our understanding and connection with one another. Through nonverbal cues such as facial expressions, gestures, and body language, we are able to express emotions, convey attitudes, regulate conversations, and enhance speech production.

Similarly, Latin American cultures are considered high contact while Middle Eastern cultures can be considered low-contact or non-contact cultures. Such assertions could lead to overgeneralizations as well, and due to globalization, they might not be valid as well. In addition to this, an individual’s personal boundaries might also stem from their upbringing as well. This post in Psychology Today discusses why some people don’t like to be touched as a product of their attachment style. Regardless, keeping abreast of cultural differences might make interactions with people from different cultures smoother.

Although we are never explicitly taught how to use illustrative gestures, we do it automatically. “Psychological context includes the mental and emotional factors in a communication encounter. Stress, anxiety, and emotions are just some examples of psychological influences that can affect our communication” (Communication in the Real World, 2016). While living in Cambodia, worrying about aging parents, the dog, and even whether or not the water pipes would freeze back in Minnesota provided stress that became exasperating.

Nonverbal Communication Affects Relationships

A gay or lesbian couple doesn’t necessarily constitute an intercultural relationship, but as we have already discussed, sexuality is an important part of an individual’s identity and connects to larger social and cultural systems. Keeping in mind that identity and culture are complex, we can see that gay and lesbian relationships can also be intercultural if the partners are of different racial or ethnic backgrounds. Nonverbal communication is https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lovingfeel-review-user-experience-expert-advice-2025-catherine-pass-uzo4e/ the foundation of understanding, collaboration, and trust. By interpreting nonverbal cues with precision and using them purposefully, individuals and organizations can build stronger connections and achieve their goals. Employees who are adept at interpreting and using these subtle nonverbal behaviors can navigate social interactions more effectively, contributing to a positive workplace culture.

To understand this dialectic, we must view culture and identity through a lens of intersectionality, which asks us to acknowledge that we each have multiple cultures and identities that intersect with each other. Because our identities are complex, no one is completely privileged and no one is completely disadvantaged. For example, while we may think of a White, heterosexual male as being very privileged, he may also have a disability that leaves him without the able-bodied privilege that a Latina woman has. This is often a difficult dialectic for my students to understand, because they are quick to point out exceptions that they think challenge this notion. For example, many people like to point out Oprah Winfrey as a powerful African American woman.

Similarly, 32 explored the clinical, measurable effectiveness of touch intervention, rather than exploring subjective benefits highlighted by patients and practitioners. Routasalo 33 instead focused on cataloguing how touch has been conceptualised, and the extent to which different types of touches are used, with little interest in the benefits and communicative aims of said touches. Similarly, 34 collated studies understanding touch as a medical tool, in order to better understand how touch is conceptualised and learnt, with the aim of advocating for more and better training. Ingham 35 reviewed contextual factors shaping and affecting the use of touch, with little concern over the actual touches being performed and the aims of said touches. Furthermore, two reviews in the occupational therapy literature 37, 38 focused solely on instrumental manipulations to provide scoping guidelines for practitioners (i.e., meta-aggregation approach), rather than stimulating new research streams on the topic. The cultural-individual dialectic captures the interplay between patterned behaviors learned from a cultural group and individual behaviors that may be variations on or counter to those of the larger culture.

Developing Cultural Awareness

This positive power of touch is countered by the potential for touch to be threatening because of its connection to sex and violence. To learn about the power of touch, we turn to haptics, which refers to the study of communication by touch. We probably get more explicit advice and instruction on how to use touch than any other form of nonverbal communication. A lack of competence could have more dire negative consequences, including legal punishment, if we touch someone sexually inappropriately (intentionally or unintentionally). Touch is necessary for human social development, and it can be welcoming, threatening, or persuasive.

While the studies above focused on observations from the practitioners’ perspective, similar results also come from an interview study with patients undergoing chemotherapy 104. Patients describe feeling gentleness, care and respect in the touch when the nurse accommodates patients’ tempo, because it signals to them that they are active participants in the engagement. They further described how, when the provider is solely focused on the task—acting in a ‘robotic manner’, as described by patients in another study 99—, and excludes the patient as a co-participant, interactions become alienating, isolating and uncertain. There has been much research on interracial couples that counters the popular notion that partners may be less satisfied in their relationships due to cultural differences. In fact, relational satisfaction isn’t significantly different for interracial partners, although the challenges they may face in finding acceptance from other people could lead to stressors that are not as strong for intracultural partners (Gaines & Brennan, 2011). Although partners in interracial relationships certainly face challenges, there are positives.

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In Greece, for example, the mountza (μούντζα) or moutza (μούτζα) is a commonly seen insult gesture. It consists of spreading the fingers (one hand or both) and trusting them outwards, towards the other person (as if flinging something unpleasant). In other cultures, the arm-thrust (bras d’honneur) is used, forging a fist and slapping it upwards under the biceps of the arm.

It helps bridge cultural differences and facilitates effective communication between individuals from different backgrounds. For Chinese raters, the proportion of gaze aversion and reply duration were significant predictors of the proportion of indirect categorization for both British and Chinese models. Additionally, there was a significant interaction between model culture and facial shrug, indicating that facial shrug was used as a cue for indirect replies when Chinese raters categorized indirect replies from British models but not from Chinese models. The experiment comprised two blocks of video clips, one featuring Chinese models and the other featuring British models. Two practice trials were given at the beginning of each block to ensure the participants were familiar with the task. After the experiment, the participants completed a questionnaire regarding their everyday use of indirect replies and the nonverbal cues they used to categorize different types of replies.

Intercultural communication is communication between people with differing cultural identities. One reason we should study intercultural communication is to foster greater self-awareness (Martin & Nakayama, 2010). Our thought process regarding culture is often “other focused,” meaning that the culture of the other person or group is what stands out in our perception. However, the old adage “know thyself” is appropriate, as we become more aware of our own culture by better understanding other cultures and perspectives.

Students in an intercultural communication class frequently hope to gain a checklist of what to do or not do when in a new country. As there are more countries to write about than time in a semester, that goal often must be narrowed. The intercultural communication interview assignment helps students to narrow focus upon cultures they are most interested in making such a “checklist.” Nonverbal communication is both intentional and unintentional.

• As we learned earlier, we often perceive nonverbal communication to be more credible than verbal communication.
• Routasalo 75 and Mononen 68 further build on this power dynamic regulated by touch, observing how nurses and carers often use touch in connection to statements they make to create a framework of empathetic encouragement.
• Their results showed that collectivist societies generally exhibit lower levels of overall emotional expressiveness compared to individualistic ones.
• This positive power of touch is countered by the potential for touch to be threatening because of its connection to sex and violence.

As was noted earlier, technology has created for some a global village where vast distances are now much shorter due to new technology that make travel and communication more accessible and convenient (McLuhan, 1967). However, as the following “Getting Plugged In” box indicates, there is also a digital divide, which refers to the unequal access to technology and related skills that exists in much of the world. People in most fields will be more successful if they are prepared to work in a globalized world. Obviously, the global market sets up the need to have intercultural competence for employees who travel between locations of a multinational corporation. Perhaps less obvious may be the need for teachers to work with students who do not speak English as their first language and for police officers, lawyers, managers, and medical personnel to be able to work with people who have various cultural identities. It is through intercultural communication that we come to create, understand, and transform culture and identity.

All these macroscopic interactional dimensions might contribute to the emergence of specific affective atmospheres 124 radically shaping the contours of the touch dance. While this line of enquiry has been brilliantly carried out in different contexts, from industrial robotics (e.g., 8, 139) to Aikido martial arts (e.g., 140), social studies of medicine and healthcare have been slower in integrating such insights. Lastly, a number of studies rooted in conversation analysis (CA) appeared in the initial search but were excluded for different reasons. For example, 58 and 59 develop interesting conceptual descriptors to understand the role of touch in social interactions, but do so in contexts outside of the remit of this review (i.e. interpersonal relations among friends, and parent–child dyads, respectively). On the other hand, work such as 60,61,62 remain within the context of healthcare, but analyse touch only in passing, as one of many resources across the ‘body language’ conceptual spectrum, without enquiring regarding the specificities of touch.