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Question 1: Do you have the experience of misunderstandings caused by different nonverbal communication? How did you resolve it?

Question 2: Have you noticed that your nonverbal communication various in different relationships? (e.g. families, friends or strangers)

🔎Please add your responses and comments here!

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Nonverbal communication plays an important role in people's lives, it is different from person to person, and especially from one culture to another. A greater amount of human behavior is emphasized through nonverbal signals, and almost 65% of all communication is non-verbal. Although novels or movies frequently highlight misunderstandings in transcultural communication, academic coverage of the topic is unsatisfactory. If anything can be found in the area of nonverbal communication, findings are mostly anecdotal and some specific research is scarce and superficial.

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1. Nonverbal misunderstandings in intercultural communication

Nonverbal communication is not uniform in interpretation but rather culturally biased (Jain & Choudary, 2011). Messages with specific meanings in one society may have completely different meanings in another (Matsumoto, 2006).
Therefore, when people find that their culture is different from the indigenous culture, they may notice there exist a possible incoherent communication. This can be supported by the theory of anxiety/uncertainty management that when strangers do not focus on the culture differences in communication, a high degree of uncertainty and anxiety can lead to greater misunderstandings (Griffin,2012).

Example 1 & 2: Kinesics
In the video, the Dutch girl uses the gesture ‘👍’ to express “the food is excellent”, while this gesture offends the African since this gesture contains an insult meaning in their culture. Another example is that the American girl uses her index finger to call her Asian neighbour to come, while this gesture is used to beckon dog in Asian cultures.

Example 3: Paralinguistic
Paralinguistic communication can convey an emotional tone, meaning, or grammatical concepts (Yana & James,2013).  In the video, the American notices every time she uses 'heng', the Chinese may feel dismissive. It is because in China when someone was angry or look down at someone, they will make this sound. Things like this often cause misunderstanding between them.

Example 4: Proxemics
There appear cultural differences in the actual objective distances, which provide a basis for intercultural misunderstanding. A distance that is excessively close for one person of one culture is far away for people in another culture. In the video, when the Asian people fall asleep on the shoulder of an American, the gaze and body movement of the American shows a sense of dislike. Although it is acceptable for a commuter to fall asleep on the shoulder of a stranger in a close distance in some cities of Japan, this may not be accepted in the United States.

2.Managing interpersonal relationship by nonverbal

Nonverbal are frequent to indicate friendliness, liking and hating, such as gaze, distance, and touch. People of different cultures interact at different distances, and nonverbal can convey intimacy between individuals (Hall, 1959).

Besides, it is evident that the treatment of strangers is different from close friends in many cultures, and this can be expressed nonverbally through closer distance and touch (Mehrabian, 1972). In Example 4, when the Asian rests his head on the shoulder of an American, the gaze of the American illustrates the resist emotion which can reflect a strange relationship between them.

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There are lots of differences in the meaning of nonverbal communication, misunderstanding may occur when intercultural people communicate. As it shown in the table, the nonverbal difference is a significant reason for communication difficulties, account for more than 20%. 📊

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It is reasonable to believe that the pitfall of nonverbal communication is inherent in its dependence on the cultural interpretation, this may cause misunderstanding in intercultural communication (Adler,1991). Also, it is the primary means for communicating emotion, forming impressions, and relationships (Guo,2013).

When we encounter what we think are inappropriate or impolite nonverbal behaviors, avoid making any negative judgments about others' intentions and feelings first. We need to observe the way how they behave in their culture. Finally, we can put what we learned about the culture into practice to improve our ability in intercultural nonverbal communication.

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Nonverbal communication is messages expressed by nonlinguistic means (Adler, 2011). It can through face to face, or emojis and messages appear online (Childers and Jass, 2002). On our padlet, we will focus on face-to-face nonverbal communication, here are the three crucial areas:

Kinesics is often called body language, composed not only of gestures and posture but also of facial expressions and eye contacts (Zhang, 2008).

Paralinguistics also called Paralanguage, is the message that you send with your voice. It includes differences in emphasis, volume, pitch, inflection, nasality and articulation (John Wiley & Sons, 2012).

Proxemics is also regarded as physical environments which refer to the available space, distance, or distance from other people in communication scenarios (Verderber et al., 2009).

There are another four aspects of nonverbal communication as following: