WORDS ARE OVERRATED
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GREETINGS AND BECKONINGS ACROSS THE WORLD
Greeting people from different cultural backgrounds typically gives people slight anxiety because they do not know the proper way to greet them. Do they greet the way their personal culture greets each other? Do they chance offending someone by attempting to greet them how their culture would? I witnessed and experienced this two separate times this past week.
My friend who grew up in Japan slightly bowed while shaking hands with someone new
I greeted someone in the traditional "abrazo" in Latino culture without them expecting it
Both times it created slight awkwardness as one party was at a disadvantage because expectations of understood ways of greeting were violated.
WOMEN'S APPEARANCE AND CLOTHING WITHIN ORGANIZATIONS
For the corporate world attire is very important when wanting to make a statement. People usually have a dress code they are required to abide by when working in certain settings.
My friend Danielle is changing professions and is encountering this firsthand. Previously she had a rather bright/colorful wardrobe but has now switched back to professional/corporate attire. Danielle is needing clothes for interviews that can easily switch over to everyday use in a corporate environment dominated by men.
Dark colors
High heels
Classic silhouettes
Appropriate skirt length
EYE CONTACT - THE CORE OF INTERPERSONAL RELATEDNESS
Eye contact is one of the most important ways to connect interpersonally. However there are many forms of eye contact, some more effective (and appropriate) than others. For this section two experiments were conducted with two different settings however similar results.
Both situation created distance but for separate reasons.
Lessening eye contact with students - This experiment had an interesting result. Most of the time my students are highly engaged offering answers and different perspectives to the material, however when I lessened/stopped eye contact with them the atmosphere of the classroom changed and was not conducive to learning anymore.
Excessive staring at strangers at the mall - For this experiment I sat in the mall food court and openly stared/observed people while they were shopping/eating. This is a highly aggressive act and very taboo in American culture. Most people become agitated and finished quickly.
Each one of the situations created an atmosphere of uncertainty but for opposing reasons. Eye contact is one of the greatest tools we have for nonverbal communication; however, if used incorrectly could have unforeseeable consequences.
COMMUNICATING WITH COLOR
According to Shifra Stein, color has the ability to influence our mood and health on a day to day basis. Whether it is tricking our minds that we are hungry to calming us while looking up at a clear blue sky. We associate color with different moods and emotions and can tell us a lot about a person by what color they affiliate with.
Seeing this play out in my father's business was an interesting experience. He went through color by color and either put them in a "maybe" category or a "no" category."
Colors he did not like: red, purple, yellow, orange
Colors he liked: blue, green, and grey (with accents of blue)
He thoroughly analyzed all of them before deciding upon one.
Red - in the data analysis world red is a negative color and associated with trouble
Purple: did not believe his clients would connect with it
Yellow/Orange: too aggressive/bold of a color
Green: associated positively in the data world, also seen as trustworthy
Grey: modern crisp color with a neutral feeling
Blue: confident, trustworthy, and calming
For each color he did not choose he had a specific reason for the elimination of that one; as well as the colors he seriously considered. He finally decided up on a specific shade of blue (cerulean) to show confidence, reliability, and trustworthiness. By desiging his card with a strik8ing blue it is also eye catcing and intrigues the possible clientele.
PILOT STUDY - VOCAL ATTRACTIVENESS AND CREDIBILITY
Over the course of this semester there have been many questions that have presented themselves as intriguing research questions but one stuck out more than the others. Vocal attractiveness is an interesting concept in that it endears the listener into a sort of lull, but this study looks at the relationship between having an attractive voice and having vocal credibility.
Current Scholarship
• Vocal attractiveness has been studied mostly in the context of persuasion. The major element that needed to be determined was “what is vocal attractiveness?” As the review of literature progressed many of the articles consistently looked at pitch, rate, volume, and tone as the primary components.
• Credibility usually encompasses most immediacy behaviors so no studies were found on perceiving credibility solely through the voice. Building credibility has multiple steps and techniques that are dependent upon the situation.
• None of the literature focused singularly on vocal credibility or what makes a voice credible but credibility as a whole.
• There was no definition for vocal credibility and no common definition for vocal attractiveness; both of these ideas have an element of individualism (or specific to the receiver).
Gap
• Many studies research how nonverbal cues affect credibility of speakers but most have not been studied separately; this study proposes to see if there is a correlation between vocal attractiveness and credibility of the speaker.
o Hypothesis – There is a positive correlation between vocal attractiveness and vocal credibility.
Method
• For this study a survey was method for collecting data. The survey had two sections: one to measure vocal attractiveness defined by the literature, and the other was credibility of the speaker. The opposite description words were put on a Likert scale with reversed polarity. It was distributed among a COM 114 class at a Midwestern university with 26 students (10 females, 16 males), age range from 18-22. Even though 26 surveys were taken one was discarded due to incompletion. The results were calculated by running a correlation in an excel spreadsheet.
Results
• The results from this survey is r(23)=.23; p=ns.
Discussion
• The results of this survey showed that the hypothesis was not supported and shows no correlation between vocal attractiveness and vocal credibility. A scale for vocal attractiveness is difficult to create because attractiveness is specific to every person and multiple factors could distract from the voice. Having a negative correlation in this study would have shown that the most attractive voices would be aligned down the middle (not too loud, soft, fast, slow, high, or low) and the credibility would be more associated with the positive descriptor words.
Limitations/Implications
• Because this was a pilot study there were some areas that could use improvement. Some of the limitations to this study would be: only used one tape of a male voice, Midwestern accent, new scale, distracting verbal message, and a very small sample.
• Nonverbal Communication has many channels and thus more variables need to be considered when looking at this type of study. More variables are necessary to conduct this research on vocal attractiveness and credibility.
WORDS ARE OVERRATED
COM 508 - Olivia Schumacher
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