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The Challenges of Cross Cultural Communication

You may be great about reading some people, but there are still a lot of people whose distinct outlook and culture may elude you.

One of the most important parts of learning how to read people is accepting that this process varies considerably across different cultures, despite the presence of universal basic emotions. In a recent study, Humintell’s Drs. David Matsumoto and Hyisung Hwang seek to investigate the main methodological barriers that confront those of us who want to learn to accurately read the facial expressions of those outside our own culture.

Hopefully, by better understanding these challenges future research can be effectively guided to help all of us fine tune our emotional recognition skills. But how do you as a follower of this blog gain anything from this? Try keeping these points in mind as you read future articles or peruse previous blogs and see if any of these hold for the research that we have reported. Not only will this make all of us a better scholar, but it will enrich your own abilities to read people.

The first of these methodological critiques is the way in which actual experiments are conducted. While Matsumoto and Hwang applaud the efforts of researchers to point out similarities and differences between those of various cultures, they caution us against jumping to any conclusions about the source of any differences.

Many differences, they point out, are just the result of the specific group selected and need not be reflective of an entire culture. This may be especially true in culturally diverse nations or regions where people who live just down the street approach the world from different cultural or social backgrounds.

Their second point is similar in focusing on the potentially biased nature of sampling, i.e. who is brought into the study. Often these experiments are conducted on international students at a university, where they are taken as representative of their home culture. Certainly, this can be seen as flawed as these participants may not be reflective of that culture, either due to a similar flaw as in the last critique or because of their more specific nature as an international student.

In a third argument, Matsumoto and Hwang make a point relevant to all aspects of emotional recognition, namely that many facial expressions also closely resemble other purposeful nonverbal behavior. For instance, raised eyebrows may be a sign of surprise, or it may be a gesture indicating greeting. This problem is even more relevant to cross cultural communication where gestures vary drastically between groups and may not be known to the researcher.

Finally, they question the traditionally bounded nature of many of the questions asked. We may want to test what factors lead to successful emotional recognition, but what exactly does recognition consist of? In doing research, this has to get simplified in order to test it, but especially with complex cross cultural considerations, this simplification may obscure the very real complexities.

This last point is especially salient when conducting advanced statistical analyses. While these are certainly useful, Matsumoto and Hwang also caution that it may be best to ask participants more open-ended questions.

Many of these points reflect broader methodological problems in other fields of social science, and they are not easy to wrestle with. However, they are important to keep in mind both for researchers and people like yourself that are just trying to learn about these fascinating topics.

We definitely recommend that you use these to review other research an, in the meantime, check out some of our official resources on cross-cultural communication! Maybe you’ll develop your own method-based critiques.

Searching for Universal Gestures

If there are universal emotions and expressions, does that mean there are universal gestures?

This is exactly what Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto and Dr. Hyisung C. Hwang sought to answer in a 2012 study which sought to conduct a groundbreaking and comprehensive analysis on international differences in gestures.

In order to answer this, they compiled a list of verbal expressions, such as “good luck”, that would be relevant to many cultures and brought people from around the world to examine this list. These individuals then sought to derive a series of gestures, otherwise known as emblems, from this list in order to compare and contrast them between cultures.

But why had such a fascinating question not been suitably investigated? This is partially because their question is a difficult one to answer as many gestures or nonverbal behaviors are culturally specific and drawn from traditional historical contexts. For example, the common Western sign of “good luck” with crossed fingers is derived from older Christian traditions. Thus, the etymology of many gestures becomes complicated to trace.

After examining a wide variety of cultural gestures as identified and performed by representatives of those cultures, Dr. Matsumoto and Dr. Hwang managed to derive a series of loose categories with which to conceptualize cultural similarities and differences.

One of these categories were evaluative gestures, like the Western “thumbs up” but other categories conveyed more nuanced social norms. Perhaps unsurprisingly, gestures fitting into the category of insults seemed to be quite common across many cultures. Other categories included the act of indicating something or of articulating inner physical or mental states, such as being in pain.

Overall, while many gestures were the same across cultures, some similar gestures had radically different meanings depending on where they were used. Moreover, certain gestures appeared to be culturally unique and had no correlates in other cultures, such as South Asian gestures for apology or East Asian messages concerning hunger.

The most consistently universal of these gestures sought to convey very basic messages that tied to universal physical forms. For instance, this manifested in common insults that referred to gross parts of the human body. Most cultures associate human excrement with disgust, so tying this to obscene gestures seems intuitive. Moreover, it would connect profoundly with evidence that ties basic emotions to facial expressions.

As the study authors concluded, this is not the end of a search for universally similar or different gestures. Instead, it was an attempt to reach across cultures and derive categories that can be helpful in both everyday understanding and for future research.

For more information on the role of nonverbal communication across cultures and basic emotions, check out our past few blogs here and here!

Basic Emotions and Cultural Differences

Despite the universal nature of many expressions, it is pretty clear that cultural differences exist, but why?

It certainly would be simplistic to think that all emotional expressions are the exact same around the world, despite the existence of basic emotional expressions across cultures. In fact, a major 2015 study sought to trace the development of different expressions based on historical and cultural trends. This study found that historical migration patterns were powerful explanatory factors for cultural attitudes to emotional expressions.

We have previously written on the evolutionary basis of basic emotions as theorized by Charles Darwin, himself. Our fundamental way of interacting with the world helped to develop certain connections between expression and emotion, such as the narrowing of eyes when perceiving something disgusting.

This has led a team of scholars, including Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto, to track the historical migration patterns in different cultures as explanations for differing emotional expressions.

Essentially, they categorized numerous nations based on the extent to which the current population of each country descends from either a variety or a small number of “source countries.”

They found that diverse source populations, which they termed “historical heterogeneity,” accounted for variations in norms of emotional expressivity. For instance, historically diverse nations like Canada saw more varied expressions and an increased reliance on nonverbal behavior to convey individual differences.

On the other hand, more homogenous nations, like Pakistan or Austria, observed more predefined practices for guiding emotional expectations. Based on these norms, rules of etiquette and language use allowed for more predictable emotional expressions.

The study authors also sought to more specifically trace back the development of the use of smiles. While a smile of joy is one of the basic emotions, the particular expression of the smile is employed in diverse ways, such as to provide an emotional reward, maintain social bonds, or negotiate status.

After studying the use of smiles in homogenous nations, such as Japan, they concluded that smiling was rarely used to negotiate status given fixed hierarchies in those nations. Instead, it often pointed out transgressions or designated efforts to maintain existing statuses.

In contrast, heterogenous nations saw less predictable social hierarchies and structures, so smiles were often used to clarify positive intentions, such as the desire to share resources.

This all underscores what we told you last week about how better reading people can help facilitate cross-cultural communication. The study authors emphasized the importance of this research in promoting human interaction given the vast cross-cultural contact we experience in a globalized society.

While it can be overwhelming to try to keep both the universality of expressions and the different circumstances in which these emotions are applied straight, Humintell is here to help. Try checking out some past blogs for more information! Or even sign up for our cross-cultural training program!