This article made me again think about how complex cultures are, also made me ponder on my behavior. I have noticed all these aspects (facial expressions, proxemics, gestures, eye contact, paralinguistics, voice quality, silence, and chronemics) across cultures, but never knew the terminology it was given, the importance it had and that there were actual studies made.<\/p>\n
Something that I had trouble with was greetings, I come from a non-contact culture, in Russia we shake hands as a greeting, kiss and hug are only with very close friends or family, whereas coming to Portugal which is a contact culture I found it difficult to give kisses on the cheek of people I don\u2019t know as a form of greeting, it made me uncomfortable since I grow up avoiding contact with people I don\u2019t know. This later brought confusion on how to great people in different countries, do you hug, handshake, bent your head, just say \u201cHello\u201d with a smile, kiss, if kiss, then how many times?<\/p>\n
Other more general non-verbal communications I came across with, in Russia it\u2019s considered very impolite to point at something or someone with your index finger, and therefore I found it troublesome when people would point at me or at something next to me. Regarding eye contact, in Russia if you are walking on the street and make eye contact with someone you don\u2019t know, you would usually just look away, in other countries I\u2019ve been people would either smile to me or say \u201cHey\u201d. It is also not common to sit on the floor in Russia, also put the legs on the table or sit on the table is rude.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This article made me again think about how complex cultures are, also made me ponder on my behavior. I have noticed all these aspects (facial expressions, proxemics, gestures, eye contact, paralinguistics, voice quality, silence, and chronemics) across cultures, but never knew the terminology it was given, the importance it had and that there were actual […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1321,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1321"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=510"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":511,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510\/revisions\/511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}