Alle Publikationen
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2017
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(2017): Fight and flight. A multilevel analysis of facework strategies in intercultural face-threatening acts. In: INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTERCULTURAL RELATIONS 58, S. 69-81. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijintrel.2017.04.008
Abstract: This study investigates facework strategies of managing face-threatening acts in intercultural interactions where communicators' cultural backgrounds are different from each other. Based on a pre-study with U.S. (n = 89) and Chinese (n = 76) college students, four scenarios featuring intercultural face-threatening acts were developed, where a Chinese student communicated politely and appropriately according to the Chinese culture, but the exact same act was considered otherwise in U.S. culture. In the main study, U.S. college students (N = 217) were given these scenarios and asked to report the general level of face needs, perceived face threats, and facework strategies in each scenario. Multilevel analyses (i.e., Hierarchical Linear Modeling) were employed to parse out the different levels of influence in order to understand both separate and joint impacts of situational face threats and individual face needs on facework strategies. Results showed that: 1) intercultural communicators use both mitigating (i.e., fleeing) and aggravating (i.e., fighting) facework strategies, and a slight preference is given to mitigating strategies; 2) facework strategies are more sensitive to particular situational conditions than to individual dispositions; and 3) individuals' value for others' face moderates the relationship between situational conditions and facework strategies. The current study provides empirical evidence of challenges in establishing meaningful intercultural relationships by identifying the multiple levels of impact on facework strategies in intercultural communication. Further discussion and implications of the findings are also included.
2016
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(2016): Address practices in academic interactions in a pluricentric language. In: Pragmatics 26 (4), S. 631-652. DOI: 10.1075/prag.26.4.05for
Abstract: Following the recent development of address research in pluricentric languages (Clyne et al. 2006), the present study describes address practices in English-speaking academic settings and pursues two main objectives: (a) to provide a profile of address patterns in academic interactions in Australian English; and (b) to compare address practices in higher education across the three dominant varieties of English, namely American English, Australian English, and British English. The data on Australian English are drawn from 235 questionnaires completed by students, who reported on the address strategies adopted by students and teaching staff in classroom interactions in an Australian university. Data on American and British academic settings were retrieved from the research literature on the topic. The findings show a high degree of informality and familiarity in student-teacher relations in Australia, where reciprocal first names are the default pattern of address at all levels. By contrast, in American academia the hierarchical organization of roles and the different professional positions are foregrounded and reinforced through an asymmetrical use of titles, honorifics and first names. Finally, the British university setting displays a non-reciprocal usage of first names and titles between lecturer and students, which gradually evolves into a more generalised reciprocal use of first names, usually after extended contact and collaboration. We argue that the distinctive patterns of address observed in the three varieties of English reflect diverse social and cultural values systems at work in different speech communities.
2015
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(2015): How Product Attributes Influence Internationalization. A Framework of Domain- and Culture-Specificity. In: Management International Review 55 (1), S. 53-76. DOI: 10.1007/s11575-014-0229-0
Abstract: This paper introduces two dimensions of product attributes in the context of internationalization: domain- and culture-specificity. Products can be high or low in domain- or culture-specificity, thereby being one of four broad categories in a two-by-two matrix. This framework of product attributes helps explain a series of gradations on how cultural difference influences the difficulty of selling a product internationally. By examining four cases, one from each of these categories, this paper shows that different product attributes affected the difficulty or ease with which the products of these firms were internationalized. While all four cases were able to derive international sales, the domain- and culture-specificity of their products constrained the international markets these products could feasibly enter into, and how soon this could take place. In general, more culture-specific products face higher hurdles in a culturally dissimilar international market compared with the home market. However, given products of similar culture-specificities, highly domain-specific products tend to have less difficulty in selling to a culturally different international market than products that are not domain-specific.
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(2015): Intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, and the Primacy of Racism. In: Qualitative Inquiry 21 (3), S. 277-287. DOI: 10.1177/1077800414557827
Abstract: The article explores the utility of intersectionality as an aspect of critical race theory (CRT) in education. Drawing on research with Black middle-class parents in England, the article explores the intersecting roles of race, class, and gender in the construction and deployment of dis/ability in education. The author concludes that intersectionality is a vital aspect of understanding race inequity but that racism retains a primacy for critical race scholars in three key ways: namely, empirical primacy (as a central axis of oppression in the everyday reality of schools), personal/autobiographical primacy (as a vital component in how critical race scholars view themselves and their experience of the world), and political primacy (as a point of group coherence and activism).
2004
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(2004): Cultural scripts. What are they and what are they good for?. In: Intercultural Pragmatics 1 (2). DOI: 10.1515/iprg.2004.1.2.153
Abstract: The term cultural scripts refers to a powerful new technique for articulating cultural norms, values, and practices in terms which are clear, precise, and accessible to cultural insiders and to cultural outsiders alike. This result is only possible because cultural scripts are formulated in a tightly constrained, yet expressively flexible, metalanguage consisting of simple words and grammatical patterns which have equivalents in all languages. This is of course the metalanguage of semantic primes developed over the past 25 years of cross-linguistic research by the editors and colleagues in the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) approach. The present collection of studies demonstrates the productivity and versatility of the cultural scripts approach with case studies from five di¤erent parts of world—China, Colombia, Korea, Singapore, and West Africa—describing a widely di¤ering selection of culture-specific speech practices and interactional norms. One recurrent theme is that the di¤erent ways of speaking of di¤erent societies are linked with and make sense in terms of di¤erent local cultural values, or at least, di¤erent cultural priorities as far as values are concerned. Cultural scripts exist at di¤erent levels of generality, and may relate to di¤erent aspects of thinking, speaking, and behaviour. The present set of studies is mainly concerned with norms and practices of social interaction
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(2004): From Sounds To Music. The Contextualizations of Pitch. In: Music Perception 21 (3), S. 431-456. DOI: 10.1525/mp.2004.21.3.431
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2004.21.3.431 Abstract: In this chapter we present a new approach to research in music perception allowing one to investigate how musical sound representations are formed in the human brain. By studying subjects' brain responses to unattended stimuli we can determine, for instance, whether neural circuits are more readily activated by musical sounds implicitly learned than by unfamiliar sounds even in non-musicians. Indeed, neuronal populations seem to respond more efficiently to pitch deviations within sound patterns following the rules of Western scale structure, rather than to deviations inside patterns artificially created. Moreover, neural circuits are selectively activated by mistunings inside tonal melodies or by out-of-key chords inside harmonic cadences even when attention is not directed towards the sounds. These data together suggest that incoming sounds are more efficiently processed when they match the neural templates derived from our musical culture. The existence of 'musical memories' in the auditory cortex that are effortlessly activated enabling us, e.g., to identify and recognize speech vs. music sounds can thus be postulated.
1997
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(1997): Using Greetings to Teach Cultural Understanding. In: The Modern Language Journal 81 (3). DOI: 10.2307/329309
Abstract: Sociolinguistic journals and books are inundated with issues regarding greetings and forms of address. In these works, the major concern has been to analyze the word or wards used to refer to someone greeted. Others have also looked at issues of familiarity, reciprocity, politeness, gestures, and respect in regard to greetings. However, despite this sizable literature, little or nothing has been done with respect to cultural information provided in the language of greetings. This paper looks at the role Yoruba greetings play in understanding the culture of the speakers. It also illustrates that Yoruba greetings do more than establish an atmosphere of sociability; they also communicate cultural information and serve as value reinforcement for participants and observers. Therefore, teaching greetings in Yoruba goes beyond teaching the meanings of the greetings. It also involves teaching Yoruba learners the link between words and cultural content. Various examples of greetings and accounts of personal experience could be useful in methods courses to illustrate the interaction of words and actions in a cultural frame.
1996
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(1996): The representation of emotions in groups. The relative impact of social norms, positive–negative asymmetry and familiarity on the perception of emotions. In: European Journal of Social Psychology 26 (1), S. 43-59. DOI: 10.1002/(SICI)1099-0992(199601)26:1<43::AID-EJSP736>3.0.CO;2-6
Abstract: Research in several countries shows that people hold norms of emotion perception, so that socially desirable emotions are perceived as positive and moderate. Subjects also believe that positive and moderate emotions are dominant in their lives. Other research shows that increased familiarity with a social group allows a better differentiation among the members and the attributes of this group (e.g. wider variability of emotions). In the present study, we compare the relative impact of familiarity with pleasant and unpleasant groups and social norms on emotion perception. Subjects (N=150) were to rate imagined family groups, families that they did not know well, and families that they knew very well, on perceived differentiation and variability of emotional episodes, extremity of emotional events, and global family evaluations. Results indicated that familiarity is weakly associated with perceived emotional variability in target families, and that, regardless of their familiarity with the family, subjects viewed unpleasant families as more negative, as less familiar, and as having a larger range of emotions than pleasant families. Results are discussed in terms of the idea that perception of emotions in groups depends more strongly on social norms than either on positive–negative asymmetry or on direct experience with their members. Volume26, Issue1 January/February 1996 Pages 43-59 Figures References Related Information Metrics Details Copyright © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Publication History Issue Online: 04 December 1998
Keywords: Bekanntheitsgrad, Einfluss von sozialem Konsens / Anstand "Decorum", Emotionserkennung, familiarity, Gruppennorm, Kulturell codierte Merkmale, kulturelle Etiketten, Mensch-Technik-Relationen (MTR), Normen der Wahrnehmung von Emotionen, Realtechnik, Soziale Erwünschtheit von Emotionen, Sozialer Wandel der Emotionalität, Sozialpsychologie, Technik, Werte 1994
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(1994): The behavioural cues of familiarity during social interactions among human adults. A review of the literature and some observations in normal and demented elderly subjects. In: Behavioural Processes 33 (1-2), S. 189-211. DOI: 10.1016/0376-6357(94)90066-3
Abstract: The present paper deals with the non-verbal expression of individual recognition in normal and pathological populations. In the first part, the literature on non-verbal communication is surveyed with a selective attention given to observational studies comparing encounters between friends and between strangers in young adult subjects. To begin with, it is shown that in some cases external observers can discriminate above chance level silent films showing interactions between familiar and unfamiliar persons. Then, potential cues enabling such a performance are searched for by analysis of familiarity effects on interpersonal distance, touching gesture, visual and postural orientation, and facial or manual movements expressing affiliation or reticence. Finally, these observations are discussed in relation to several underlying processes: learning of interaction rules, involvement of an affiliative motivational system, and regulation of arousal. The problem of assessing the directionality of the familiarity effects is also raised. The second part of the paper addresses the issue of non-verbal expression of recognition in subjects who show impaired person recognition in the verbal modality. A pilot study compares the behaviour of older institutionalised women, either normal or suffering from senile dementia of the Alzheimer's type, during conversations with a member of the medical team and with another unfamiliar person. The methodological problems raised by the planning of the experimental situation are discussed.
1981
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(1981): Culture and the perception of social dominance from facial expression. In: Journal of personality and social psychology 40 (4), S. 615-626. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.40.4.615
Abstract: Eyebrow and mouth gestures, identified from nonhuman primate studies as potential human dominance gestures. were tested in a series of cross-cultural ex-periments. Pairs of human portrait photographs were shown to observers in 11 national/cultural settings. Some observers selected dominant-looking members from each pair, and others selected happier-looking members. When posed with lowered brows or nonsmiling mouths. portrait models were expected to look more dominant than when posed with raised brows or smiles, respectively. Models were expected to look happier when smiling than when not smiling. Results strongly supported a universal association between smiles and happiness and weakly sup- ported a universal nonsmiling/dominance association but restricted a lowered- brow/dorninance association to relatively more Westernized samples.
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