Body Language: Cultural or Universal?

Body language and various other nonverbal cues have long been recognized as being of great importance to the facilitation of communication. There has been a long running debate as to whether body language signals and their meanings are culturally determined or whether such cues are innate and thus universal. The nature versus nurture dichotomy inherent in this debate is false; one does not preclude the other’s influence. Rather researchers should seek to address the question how much of nonverbal communication is innate and how much is culturally defined? Are there any true universal nonverbal cues or just universal tendencies modified to suit cultural ideals and constraints? It is my proposal that of all forms of nonverbal communication the most universal is the communication of emotions through facial expression.

Other channels of nonverbal communication are also of great importance in many cultures. However which channels are emphasized, what cues are considered acceptable and the symbolic meaning of the cues may vary from culture to culture. Ekman and Friesen (3) undertook an important cross-cultural study to determine how easily and accurately people from various literate Western and non-Western cultures could identify the appropriate emotion term to match photographs they were shown. The photographs were of Caucasian faces posed in certain facial expressions. The terms the subjects were given to choose from were happiness, surprise, disgust, contempt, anger, fear and sadness. The result was consistent evidence of agreement across all cultures examined. In order to rule out the possibility that exposure to mass-media had taught the subjects to recognize Caucasian facial expressions Ekman and Friesen undertook a similar study among a visually isolated culture in New Guinea (1). A different methodology was used; people were shown the photographs of posed Caucasian facial expressions and were asked to make up a story about the person and the moments leading up to that image. From these stories Ekman and Friesen concluded that these subjects were able to identify the emotions accurately. The one exception was that there seemed to be some confusion between expressions of surprise and fear.

A similar experiment compared the perception of the emotions of English, Italian and Japanese performers by people from these three countries. The results were as ...

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