7.2.3 Personal space and gestures: Cultural influences in non-verbal communication.

All societies define some space around the individual as personal, and only those invited to enter that area can do so without causing discomfort to the other person. Culture is a determinant of the amount of personal space required when communicating with others. Citizens of countries in Latin America, southern Europe and Arabia require less personal space and people stand very close when conversing (Hall, 1966). People from northern Europe and the U.S. on the other hand need more personal distance and become uncomfortable when others invade uninvited the subjective personal space. The cultural reasons for these differences are not well documented, but are related perhaps to population density. When large families live together in a small physical space this environment demands close personal contact and that space requirement is habituated and translated to other relationships. Personal space varies between cultures, and within cultures depends on class differences that produce varying modes of habituation.

Emotions evolved to communicate important information (Fridlund, 1997). Gestures are forms of nonverbal communication and when used in bargaining can be considered a primitive form of language. Some gestures are universally understood, for example the gesture "to come here" is probably understood all over the world, as is the general wave of the hand as a form of friendly greeting, and the open-handed military salute that evolved to express non-hostile intentions. However, not all gestures are uniformly used or understood. As noted in Bulgaria the head movement indicating agreement is opposite to that of other countries supporting a cultural basis for that signal. Gestures can easily become a source of confusion and misunderstanding between different cultural representatives. For example, the gesture signifying OK in the U.S. means “money” in Japan, “zero” in France, and in Russia, Brazil and Greece it is vulgar and sexually insulting (Ting-Toomey, 1999).

However, there are universal gestures like the shrug suggesting that some expressions may have an innate foundation (Argyle, 1988). Common cross-cultural gestures are also based on our shared human physiology and the need to express motion within the restriction our bodies. We should remember however, that cultures that co-evolved can also be expected to share many symbolic gestures that derive from common cultural roots. Cultural differences in gestures are more likely discovered in the frequency of usage (Graham & Argyle, 1975). People living in countries like Italy support well established stereotypes that they gesture excitedly in conversation, whereas members of other cultures use gestures more modestly.

7.2.4 Cross-cultural differences in evaluating emotions in other people.

Although the respondents in the Ekman type model studies consistently recognized emotion in others none of the studies reported perfect agreement between cross-cultural respondents. Some studies have in fact yielded reliable cross-cultural differences in the recognition rates of different emotions. Matsumoto (1989) correlated the emotion recognition data from 15 cultures with the Hofstede cultural dimensions and found that individualism correlated significantly with the intensity ratings for fear and anger. These results support the idea that individualistic cultures are more open to negative emotions and therefore better at recognizing these compared to respondents from collectivistic cultures. Cross-cultural differences were also supported by the results of the Matsumoto (1969) study comparing Japanese with American respondents. In that study the U.S. respondents were more effective in identifying negative emotions like anger, fear and disgust, but did not differ from the Japanese in identifying positive emotions like happiness. A meta-analysis also found that emotion recognition was dependent on culture with some groups recognizing happiness better compared to other ethnic respondents (Schimmack, 1996).

Since members of all cultural groups experience emotion living with ingroup members it is not surprising to find an ingroup advantage in emotion recognition. People are somewhat better at recognizing emotions in members of their own cultural group compared to the expressions that occur among members of other groups. If these results are reliable it would suggest that culturally dependent but subtle signals are associated with emotion expression leading to better ingroup identification (Elfenbein, Mandal, Ambady, Harizka, & Kumar, 2004). These differences have been described as emotion dialects found in reliable differences in emotion recognition by members of specific cultures (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002).