what is ‘non-verbal communication’?（打印版）

Callum: Hello, today in Talk about English we have the fifth programme in our series on culture and communication. Today Marc Beeby looks at the topic of non-verbal communication – communication without language. People from different cultures speak different languages but also use non-verbal communication in different ways. Here’s Marc.

Marc: Human beings have a tendency（趋势，倾向） to react positively to sameness and negatively to difference. So if people use non-verbal communication in ways we recognise we tend to think of them as people we can get on with. When people use non-verbal communication in a way that is different from what we’re used to, there can be problems. And non-verbal communication can vary enormously from culture to culture. But what is ‘non-verbal communication’? Well, I suppose the first thing most of us would think of when we hear that phrase is how we communicate using our bodies - our body language -the way we use our hands, our faces, our eyes. Here’s Rebecca Fong again with comments from Dionne Charmaine from Jamaica, Kyung-ja Yoo from Japan, and Eilidh Hamilton, who spent several years in Syria.

The degree to which we use our bodies to accompany our verbal messages varies a lot from culture to culture so that some cultures, African Americans for example or Mediterranean cultures will throw their arms around and move around a lot when they're speaking.

Jamaicans do that a lot they have a lot of gestures -lot of hand movements. The hand movements indicate that you've kind of lost control in terms of what you're putting across

Scandinavians on the other hand are much cooler and don't really move their bodies so much when they're talking. Japanese, for example, think that it's a violation of social harmony to print your individuality and your ideas on the world with your arms as you're speaking.

We don't use body language. I wouldn't say not at all but we don't use our hands or arms when we are talking. And in Japan, especially women, really doesn’t stare at the people.

Eye contact is another form of non-verbal communication that can vary quite a lot between cultures. In England we consider that it's a sign of your honesty to look someone in the eye when you're talking to them and we believe that we can tell what someone is really thinking when we're looking in their eyes and interpreting what they're saying. However, some cultures consider direct eye contact to be disrespectful and they can feel very uncomfortable at staring someone directly in the eye. And this idea of different use of eye contact can lead to a lot of misunderstanding

Eye contact with people when you’re talking is definitely something that Westerners would put a high value on and if someone broke eye contact with them they might feel that the listener was bored, uninterested in what they were saying or rude. In the Middle East, especially because of the different interactions between men and women, a man would never maintain eye contact with a woman when he was talking to her, he would feel that that was an invasion（侵入，侵略） of her privacy, I guess, so they would tend to look away, look over your shoulder, look down at the ground, move about. And even girls when they are talking to each other, men talking to each other, holding eye contact is not so important as we would think it is.

Marc: Eilidh Hamilton. Non-verbal communication is interesting because you can be using different forms in many different ways at once. So, you can be using your eyes in some way, you can be smiling, or frowning, or even keeping your face completely free of expression. At the same time you might be doing something with your hands. Now, unlike speech which you're either using consciously or you're not using, a lot of these non-verbal signals are difficult for us to control. What’s more, they contain a lot of information about how we really feel and think.

As we’ve heard in previous programmes, the way people in a culture use their language - the language itself - often reflects the values of that culture. So, for example, a culture that values hierarchy（等级制度）, authority, the old, will tend to have lots of ways of expressing ‘respect’. Exactly the same sort of thing is true of non-verbal communication.

Imagine you're meeting someone in your culture - what do you do. Do you shake hands, or kiss, or bow, or perhaps even rub your noses together? Something as simple as a greeting can require quite different forms of non-verbal communication in different societies. The form of the greeting will depend on how you think about social distance - by which I mean levels of formality, rank, seniority and so on - and, as we’ll hear later, your attitude to physical distance, or space. Here are two very different ways of meeting people, described by Emma Kambangula from Namibia and, first, Kyung-ja Yoo from Japan

We don't shake hands when we first introduce somebody we just bow each other politely. We are not supposed to touch the people - even parents and children. It's embarrassing, touching somebody. We don't do that.

Touching is very important, shaking hands. We have one thing that we say in Namibia: “when you are sad the whole community is sad with you; when you're happy the community share your happiness with you” - and this is all through communication too. And one important thing in communication is whenever you are greeting someone on the street you have to stand and look at the person and smile, and our greetings take up to five minutes. And it have to be a genuine（真实的，诚恳的）smile so, that’s part of the communication and in most cases shaking hands, it's very important.

Societies and cultures establish rules about how close you can stand to people in various different situations. There are rules about how close you can stand to someone if you're very familiar with them or how far it's polite to stand away from them if you need to keep a respectful distance. And these are very, very different rules again from culture to culture. So Middle Eastern and Hispanic cultures tend to stand the smallest distance apart when they're having conversations, whereas Scandinavians or Scottish people stand relatively far apart. Some research shows that English people usually stand or sit about six to ten inches further apart than Dutch people do and in the Netherlands English people are seen by Dutch people to be quite distant whereas the English apparently see the Dutch as pushy and aggressive.

I do feel that in tropical climates the body and emotions are more expressive When I used to return to Pakistan after having lived in London for a while I used to suddenly emotionally open up I noticed that people were much closer -they'd hold your hand, they'd touch you, you'd sit very close to each other, you are not afraid to talk in an emotional way, so you are alive you are emotionally alive. And when I used to come back to Heathrow I had to shut down all those systems and kind of put myself in that kind of straightjacket of being very calm, not being too close to somebody, standing too close to them and not talking too loudly.

The use of touch accompanies this idea of personal space. The amount to which you can touch someone or not may seem either aggressive and dominating or friendly depending on your culture's idea of space and touch. If someone gets too close to you or if they touch you and you're not expecting it, you can feel threatened and very uncomfortable.

In the Middle East someone might take your wrist in their hand while they are talking to you to keep your attention and show their emphasis whereas we would usually find that an invasion of our space if somebody grabbed hold of us while they were talking. Similarly girls are much more likely to hold hands or link arms in the street and men would do so with other men, which is always something shocking to Westerners, Western men especially, they don't want to hold the hand of their Arab friend. But there's nothing in it, it's just an expression of friendliness of showing their desire to be with these people.

Also the frequency with which we touch each other varies from culture to culture. Some research was done in cafes around the world and what it measured was how many times couples touched each other within the space of an hour and they discovered that in Brazil couples would touch each other an average of 180 times an hour whereas in France it was 120 times and hour whereas in Great Britain couples didn't touch at all - not one single time for the whole hour, sad really isn't it.

I think Brazil is very different from the European countries because apart from using lots of body language to communicate we are very touchy. I have a friend and he was visiting another friend in London and he was going onto the escalator（自动扶梯） in the tube station and he realised that the only way that people would touch him would be if he stand in the wrong side of the escalator and then, it happened - someone just touched him and he was so pleased because he said it's the only way this can happen here if you don't know this person. And it may seem strange that this guy wanted people to touch him, but it is because he seems to miss this sort of relation we had in Brazil.

Callum:Ana Balthazar from Brazil, with an unusual way of fulfilling the Brazilian need to touch and be touched, while overcoming the British need for personal space. That’s all we’ve got time for this week. But when I say that, perhaps I’m just being Western. Cultural attitudes to time - and space - are the subjects of the next programme with Marc Beeby.

what is ‘non-verbal communication’?（在线收听）