Intercultural Emotions

How do emotions influence the development of intercultural encounters?

Introduction

In the recent years, there has been an increase in foreign travels, multinational businesses, and migration of people between countries, which led to a greater emphasis on the importance of intercultural encounters and communication. (Murray, Sondhi, Lallie, & Apitzsch, 1987) Intercultural communication can be defined as “the situation, in which a message is encoded in one culture for consumption in another culture”. (Samovar, 1997, p. 451) Cultural diversity may lead to difficulties regarding the understanding of one’s message, as our communication is often dependent of our culture. To interpret the right meaning behind messages, training in cross-cultural

However, the perception of emotions during the process is highly influenced by one’s own culture. (Samovar, 1997) To fully understand one’s emotional expressions, different social norms, values and traditions have to be taken into consideration. (Eid, & Diener, 2001) Yet, culture’s effect on emotions has been often overlooked in academic research, and systematic approaches to understand the differences in exhibitions of emotions of various cultures are almost non-existent. (Mesquita, Frijda, & Scherer, 1997)

The aim of this paper is to examine, how emotions influence the development of intercultural encounters. To answer our research question, we first define intercultural communication, and examine its effect on the communication process. We describe how culture affects emotional regulations using McCrae’s five factor model, and the differences in emotional recognition. Subsequently, we observe how emotions play into various phases of encounters, such as first impressions, face-to-face negotiations and the maintaining of business

They presented pictures to people of different ethnicities and age groups, who then were asked to match the pictures with the appropriate emotions. They concluded that there are 6 basic emotions that are widely recognized across cultures. These six emotions are happiness, surprise, disgust, anger, fear, and sadness. (Ekman, & Keltner, 1997) Admittedly, Ekman’s work revolutionized research on emotion; some of his findings have been either disproved or expanded. Even though the existence of universal emotions seemed to be proven, their recognition rates differ across cultures. (Elfenbein, & Ambady, 2003) Research suggests that cultures that are more open to displaying emotions, such as American, were more successful in recognizing facial expressions, than those were cultural display rules were stricter, such as the Japanese. (Elfenbein, & Ambady,