Page 33 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

Editors’ introduction 11

issue of intercultural adjustment and the role that emotions play in this process.
They see emotions as transient reactions to events or situations, involving cog-
nitive, physiological, expressive and behavioural components. They argue that
adjustments to new cultures often involve negative outcomes (e.g. emotional
distress, dysfunctional communication, depression, anxiety, diminished school
and work performance, and difficulties in relationships) and that an important
goal of intercultural adaptation should be to minimize these negative outcomes
and to maximize positive ones. The authors maintain that there are four psycho-
logical skills that can help this process and lead to personal growth: emotion
regulation, critical thinking, openness and flexibility. They identify emotion
regulation as the gatekeeper of this growth process. They then present a tool for
assessing and predicting people’s potential for intercultural adjustment – the
intercultural adjustment potential scale (ICAPS) – and empirical evidence for its
validity. They report findings from several studies which show that people who
score high on emotion regulation have high positive social skills, more success
in life, and are less likely to withdraw from active involvement with the social
world. The authors conclude by arguing that emotion regulation is one of the
most important psychological skills in our lives, and that it is vital for combat-
ing ethnocentric and stereotypic ways of dealing with people and for handling
more effectively the increasing cultural diversity of our world.
The last chapter in this section, chapter 6, also deals with a specific topic.
Nathalie van Meurs and Helen Spencer-Oatey take a multidisciplinary approach
in exploring the issue of intercultural conflict. They incorporate frameworks,
models and research findings from management studies, cross-cultural psychol-
ogy, communication studies, and applied linguistics/social pragmatics. The
authors start by discussing two classic frameworks for analyzing conflict: Tho-
mas’ ‘grid’ framework of conflict management orientations, and Brown and
Levinson’s face model of politeness. They consider the relative strengths and
weaknesses of these two models, and the extent to which they can be syn-
thesized. The authors then turn to the impact of culture on conflict. They de-
scribe the widely reported links between conflict and cultural values, but point
out that one of the weaknesses of this macro level research is that it ignores a
lot of contextual variation. Next, van Meurs and Spencer-Oatey explore the
interconnection between conflict and communication. They critically discuss the
widely cited link between directness–indirectness and the instigation and man-
agement of conflict, and point out that most research within the fields of man-
agement, cross-cultural psychology and communication studies use self-report
data. They maintain that there is a great need for more discourse-based research
into intercultural conflict, and they briefly review some applied linguistic
studies on this topic. Throughout the chapter, the authors point out how little
interchange there has been so far between applied linguistic researchers of
conflict, and those working within organizational behaviour, communication