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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.

Our Voice’s Emotions

Humintell tends to focus on nonverbal behavior and facial expressions, but our voices also convey a lot of subtle information.

This should not be a surprise to many of you who intuitively see different emotions and attitudes in pre-vocal utterances such as sighs, grunts, or yells.

In a 2015 study, a team of researchers sought to explore these sorts of pre-lingual vocalizations as expressions of raw emotions, perhaps even dating back to before humans developed language. Specifically, they wanted to know whether these sounds conveyed recognizable universal emotions.

Their incredibly wide-ranging study consisted of two main investigations. First, they took a series of 16 vocalizations and attempted to determine whether these would be matched to the same emotions by diverse participants from ten globalized and industrialized cultures. In addition to these globalized cultures, which included Western, Middle Eastern, and Asian nations, the researchers also sought to replicate their findings in a remote village in Bhutan.

The emotions under consideration included all of the universal basic emotions but with slight variations, such as dividing happiness into desire, awe, amusement, and contentment. After specifying these emotions, the researchers tied them to related vocalizations. For example, laughter was seen as representing amusement and screaming as signifying fear.

With this framework established, the first study involved asking online participants to match instances of these vocalizations with brief, one-sentence stories intended to express different emotions. They were highly accurate in identifying the intended emotion, doing so about 80 percent of the time. Still, some vocalizations were systematically misidentified by given cultures, such as surprise in India.

While these results certainly suggest a broad consensus matching universal emotions with non-linguistic verbalizations, the study authors pointed out that each of the participants were wealthy, well-educated, and generally assimilated into globalized norms, such as through access to the internet and mass media. Thus, the study may simply be measuring norms promoted via a globalized and interconnected world.

In order to correct for this possible error, the second study came into play. This involved the researchers asking similar questions to non-globalized villagers from Bhutan. These new participants engaged in a face to face context as they lacked internet and electricity. Importantly, they comprised an autonomous community with almost no contact from outsiders, including tourists.

They were asked to perform similar tasks as in the first study, identifying vocalizations with the same, translated stories. While the villagers were generally less accurate, they correctly identified nine of the vocalizations, including those intended to evoke amusement, disgust, fear, sadness, and surprise, i.e. many of the basic emotions.

Thus, the researchers were able to find strong evidence that non-linguistic vocalizations do convey universal emotions, and that globalized cultures tended to identify similar emotional meanings.

This makes a great deal of sense given Dr. David Matsumoto’s advice in a previous blog, where he contended that words are often less important than tone and expression in understanding cross cultural emotions. An understanding of the sounds people make is crucial to help read them, within our culture and outside of it, and Humintell is proud to offer courses in both contexts.

Greed or Gratitude?

In the midst of holiday season, it is easy to get caught up in the festivities and ignore something fundamental: your emotions.

As Dr. Catherine Franssen writes in the Huffington Post, the anticipation and receipt of gifts are both deeply tied with neural pathways that make us feel pleasure. This can be great, making us feel terrific, but it can also change our brain and outlook if we become disappointed. Instead of giving into this cycle, Dr. Franssen advocates the cultivation of another emotion: gratitude.

The desire to acquire pleasurable items is rooted in our hereditary need to obtain objects which might be crucial to survival. In Dr. Franssen’s view, humans evolved with this desire in order to drive them to more effectively search out food, shelter, or other necessary goals.

This resulted in greed, or the desire to possess something new, to become linked neurologically with the release of dopamine. This chemical, when released into the pleasure centers of our brain, quite simply makes us feel good. However, it also makes us want more and more to the point that modern humans often get addicted to the behaviors that reliably reward them with dopamine.

Unfortunately, reliance on these behaviors can change our brains as we adapt to the inevitable disappointment that arises when rewards do not materialize. This can lead to a deep level of stress, mistrust, and agitation, along with distinctly weakened immune systems.

With this in mind, take a look at the way people often behave around holiday season, especially given the crucial role of presents in most major winter holidays. The anticipation of being given a present or of eating rich food releases dopamine just as reliably as the achievement of those desires. At the same time, it is easy to be disappointed if the reality doesn’t quite meet those expectations.

This puts great pressure on everyone who is expected to give great gifts or host fantastic parties, converting what could be a pleasant time with family and friends to a stressful neurological nightmare. This is even exacerbated by advertisers who take the chance to barrage you with progressively higher expectations.

But Dr. Franssen doesn’t denounce or dismiss the holidays! On the contrary, she sees this time of the year as a perfect opportunity to practice gratitude. This involves affirming the positive impact of other people and showing thanks for it. She encourages each of us to cultivate feelings of gratitude, especially around the holidays, by affirming the positive support of other people in our lives and focusing on those relationships over material items.

Humintell has previously emphasized this very same point by describing the positive effects of gratitude on the mind and also on your health! We recognize that it isn’t as simple as this blog might make it sound, but there are many ways to improve your holiday experience either through mindfulness and meditation or by simply shifting your focus away from material consumption.

Either way, we wish you the happiest of holiday seasons!