Page 18 - Effective Communication Skills by Dalton Kehoe

Europe), people tend
to talk ¿rst and maybe

shake a hand at the end.

The essential categories
of shared meaning are
words and nonverbals.
Words are essential
but slippery tools; they © Jupiterimages/Goodshoot/Thinkstock.
simply refer to or stand
for something else, so
we have to agree on
and memorize their Cultures differ in the amount of emphasis they
meanings. Words may place on the individual versus the group.
also carry personal
meanings (connotations) for you and members of your group that are not
widely shared. The multiplicity of denotative meanings plus the possibility
of uniqueness of connotative meanings are reasons for a good deal of the
uncertainty in our talk.
Lecture 3: The Social Context That Shapes Our Talk
Beyond words, we use the meanings of facial and body gestures. In
situations where we’re not sure what people are saying, we lean heavily on
how they look and sound. The impact of a message on the receiver is based
not on what was said but how it was said. Nonverbals seem to operate in
three ways in our face-to-face communication: They affect the meanings
conveyed verbally, they shape the type of relationship that we are creating
with another person, and they directly communicate our emotions before
and during talk. Ŷ

Suggested Reading

Aronson, Wilson, et al., Social Psychology.

Cohen and Nisbett, Culture of Honor.
Ekman, Emotions Revealed.
Finegan, Language.

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