UNIT 8

INTRODUCTION Research on Religion and Communication Adaptation Closure

Relevant Course Outcomes for Unit 8

1. To facilitate more effective communication episodes across gender, ethnicity, culture, and other barriers.

2. To examine the origins of personal beliefs and individual perception.

3. To provide opportunities for exploration of other cultures.

4. To develop strategies for improving communication across cultural boundaries.

5. To establish a philosophical foundation for the study of communication and culture.

Unit Outcomes

1. To develop rhetorical sensitivity related to communication with people of various faiths.

2. To reflect on course learning and success in meeting course goals.

Assignments for this week 8:
Read and work through unit/weekly content in eCollege.

Complete Discussion Board assignments.
Complete Proctored Final Exam.
 

Source: http://www.cultureresourcecentre.com.au/images/June07operatinginaglobalisedworld-small.jpg

 

 

ACTIVITY TO APPLY CONCEPTS

 

Research how religion may influence communication. Your research may be through interviews, Internet investigation, library work, for example. For example, you may interview a person with different religious beliefs from your own. You may want to attend a place of worship that is quite different from your own. You may want to attend a museum dedicated to a certain faith other than your own. Talk about how religion might affect communication. Discuss your findings in the Discussion Board.

 

DISCUSSION BOARD

Engage with other students by discussing (a.) concepts you learned in this week's reading, (b.) how you are applying what you learn, and (c.) ideas of other students. Please post on multiple days during the week.

 

PREREADING (Wednesday)

This week you will study the role of religion in intercultural communication. What do you want to know or need to learn about these topic?

 

ACTIVITY--APPLICATION (Friday)

See the Activity link and complete an Activity so you apply the principles from the reading. Discuss how you are improving your multicultural communication skills.

 

PROFESSOR'S CHOICE (Friday)
General discussion, alternative points of views, stories, videos to watch, and media links.  If the provided link doesn't work, conduct an Internet search to find your own choice for an interesting link about exemplary multicultural communication.

 

REFLECTION (Friday)

Discuss what you have learned in the courses. Be sure to explain progress you've made in your intercultural communication skills since you completed the core assessment project. What are your strengths and needs regarding intercultural communication? How will you improve your rhetorical sensitivity in different cultural contexts?

 

 

UNIT 8 LECTURE Religion, Belief Systems, and Intercultural Communication

Source http://www.majikalwishes.com/picts/religions_earth.jpg

Consider how an element of a person’s religion might affect communication.  As you may remember from your readings, religion may affect the expectations for nonverbal communication, modesty, gender roles, values from which a person operates, and attitudes toward health care, for example.  Knowing a little about different religions may help increase your rhetorical sensitivity.  Begin by considering this map of major religions of the world and where they are located.  You could spend a whole course--or a lifetime--studying each of these religions.  The information here is just a preliminary step to help you investigate and learn more so you can improve your intercultural communication.

 

Here is a map of major religions of the world. Source:

http://www.mapsorama.com/maps/world/map_world_religions.gif

 

Directly quoted from Neuliep, J. W. (2009). Intercultural communication: A contextual approach (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Acculturation: The process of cultural change that results from ongoing contact between two or more culturally different groups.

Acculturative Stress: The anxiety and tension associated with acculturation.

Adaptors: Mostly unconscious nonverbal actions that satisfy physiological or psychological needs such as scratching an itch.

Adjustment Phase: Third stage of culture shock characterized by where people actively seek out effective problem-solving and conflict resolution strategies.

Affect Displays: Nonverbal presentations of emotion, primarily communicated through facial expressions.

Affective Component: Approach-avoidance tendencies during intercultural communication. The extent to which one experiences intercultural communication apprehension and one's willingness to communicate.

African-Americans: Micro-cultural group in the United States whose ancestors were brought to the United States as slaves.

Amish: A micro-cultural religiously oriented group whose members practice simple and austere living.

Analogic Communication: Nonverbal communication, including vocal elements such as voice pitch.

Anxiety Uncertainty Management Theory: Theory that describes how individuals can manage (rather then reduce) uncertainty and anxiety during intercultural communication.

Arab-Americans: According to the Census Bureau, people with ancestries originating from Arabic speaking countries or areas of the world.

Arranged Marriage: Marriage that is initiated and negotiated by a third party, other than the bride and groom.

Assertiveness: An individual's ability to make requests, actively disagree, and express positive or negative personal rights and feelings.

Assimilation: The degree to which an individual takes on the behaviors and language habits and practices the basic rules and norms of the host culture while relinquishing ties with the native culture.

Avoiding communication style: The degree to which a person ignores both self-face need and other-face need.

Avoiding Facework: Behaviors that focus on an attempt to save the face of the other person.

Built Environment: Adaptations to the terrestrial environment, including architecture, housing, lighting, and landscaping.

Carpentered-World Hypothesis: Learned tendency by those living in industrialized cultures to interpret non-rectangular figures as rectangles in perspective.

Categorization: Classifying or sorting of perceived information into distinct groups.

Chronemics: The perception and use of time.

Cognition: Higher mental processes, such as perception and memory.

Collectivism: Cultural orientation that the group is the primary unit of culture. Group goals take precedence over individual goals.

Communication Apprehension: The fear or anxiety associated with either real or anticipated communication with another person or group of persons.

Communication: The simultaneous encoding, decoding, and interpretation of verbal and nonverbal messages between people.

Compromising communication style: The degree to which a person tries to balance both self-face and other-face needs.

Conflict Interaction Styles: The ways individuals manage actual conflict.

Context: The cultural, physical, social, and psychological environment.

Cultural Context: An accumulated pattern of values, beliefs, and behavior held by an identifiable group of people with a common verbal and nonverbal symbol system.

Cultural Transmutation: Mode of acculturation where the individual chooses to identify with a third cultural group (e.g., microculture) which materializes out of the native and host cultural groups.

Culture Shock: The effects associated with the tension and anxiety of entering into a new culture combined with the sensations of loss, confusion, and powerlessness resulting from the forfeiture of cultural norms and social rituals.

Culture: An accumulated pattern of values, beliefs, and behaviors, shared by an identifiable group of people with a common history and verbal and nonverbal symbol system.

Decay: Memory loss due to lack of use.

Denotative meaning: The literal meaning of a word; the dictionary meaning.

Digital communication: Verbal communication.

Dominating communication style: The degree to which a person asserts a high self-face need while simultaneously discounting the other-face need.

Dominating Facework: Behaviors that are characterized by an individual’s need to control the conflict situation and defend his or her self-face.

Dozens: A verbal battle of insults between speakers who are judged for their originality and creativity by a small group of listeners.  This is the highest form of verbal warfare and impromptu speaking in many African-American communities.

Dynamic: Something considered active and forceful.

Ebonics: From the terms ebony and phonics, a grammatically robust and rich African-American speech pattern whose roots are in West Africa.

Emblems: Primarily hand gestures that have a direct verbal translation. Can be used to repeat or substitute for verbal communication.

Emotional Expression: How one might use his or her emotions to guide conflict. This is demonstrated by the type of person who listens to his or her base feelings and proceeds accordingly.

Environmental Context: The geographical and psychological location of communication within some cultural context.

Environmental Context: The physical, geographical location of communication.

Episodic Memory: A component of long-term memory where private individual memories are stored.

Ethnicity: The group affiliation or ancestral origins of an individual. A more appropriate word than the social construct of "race," ethnicity may refer to religious, language-based, or geographic origins, according to an individual's genetic or self-definition.

Ethnocentric Attributional Bias: The tendency to make internal attributions for the positive behavior of the ingroup while making external attributions for its negative behavior.

Ethnocentrism: Tendency to place one's own group (cultural, ethnic, or religious) in a position of centrality and worth, and to create negative attitudes and behaviors toward other groups.

Ethnocentrism: Tendency to place one's own group or ethnicity in a position of centrality and worth while creating negative attitudes and behaviors towards other groups.

Face: A person’s sense of favorable self-worth or self-image experienced during communicative situations; an emotional extension of the self-concept; considered a universal concept; that is, people in all cultures have a sense of face, but the specific meanings of face may vary across cultures.

Facework: The communicative strategies employed to manage one’s own face or to support or challenge another’s face. Can be employed to initiate, manage, or terminate conflict.

Fixed-feature Space: Space bounded by immovable or permanent fixtures, such as walls.

Gender: A socially constructed and learned creation usually associated with one's sex; masculinity and femininity. People are born into a sex group, but learn to become masculine or feminine. The meaning of gender stems from the particular culture's value system.

GENE: Self-report instrument designed to measure generalized ethnocentrism

Haptics: Nonverbal communication via physical contact or touch.

High Context: Cultural orientation where meanings are gleaned from the physical, social, and psychological contexts.

High Load: Situation with a high information rate.

Hispanic: Defined by the U.S. Government as a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.

Hmong: Microculture belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family and are culturally similar to the Chinese. The Hmong, which means "free people" or "mountain people" fought for the United States during the Vietnam War and many have immigrated to the United States since the end of the war.

Horizontal Collectivism: Cultural orientation where the self is seen as a member of an ingroup whose members are similar to each other.

Horizontal Individualism: Cultural orientation where an autonomous self is valued but the self is more or less equal with others.

Illusory Correlation Principle: When two objects or persons are observed to be linked in some, people have a tendency to believe they are always linked (or correlated).

Illustrators: Primarily hand and arm movements that function to accent or complement speech.

Individualism: Cultural orientation that the individual is unique and emphasizing individual goals over group goals.

Informal Space: Space defined by the movement of the interactants.

Information Rate: The amount of information contained or perceived in the physical environment per some unit of time.

Ingroup: A membership group whose norms, goals, and values shape the behavior of the members. Extreme ingroups see the actions of an outgroup as threatening to the ingroup.

Integrating communication style: The degree to which a person assumes a high self-face need while also attending to the needs of the other-face.

Integrating Facework: Behaviors that allow for the shared concern for self- and other-face and strives for closure in the conflict

Integration: Mode of acculturation where the individual develops a kind of bicultural orientation which successfully blends and synthesizes cultural dimensions from both groups while maintaining an identity in each group.

Intentionality: During communication, the voluntary and conscious encoding and decoding of messages.

Interactive: A process between two people.

Intercultural Communication Apprehension (ICA): The fear or anxiety associated with either real or anticipated communication with a person from another culture or co-culture.

Intercultural Communication: Two persons from different cultures or co-cultures exchanging verbal and nonverbal messages.

Intercultural competence: The ability to adapt one’s verbal and nonverbal messages to the appropriate cultural context.

Intercultural Conflict: The experience of emotional frustration or mismatched expectations between individuals from different cultures who perceive an incompatibility between their values, norms, goals, scarce resources, or outcomes during an intercultural exchange.

Intercultural willingness to communicate: Predisposition to initiate intercultural interaction with persons from different cultures even when completely free to choose whether or not to communicate.

Interference: During recall, when new or old information blocks or obstructs the recall of other information.

Intermediary level: The actual location and context of the conflict.

Involuntary Membership Group: A group to which a person belongs and has no choice but to belong, such as a person's sex, race, and age group.

Involuntary Nonmembership Group: A group to which a person does not belong because of ineligibility.

Kinesics: General category of body motion, including emblems, illustrators, affect displays, and adaptors.

Knowledge Component: The extent of one's awareness of another's culture's values etc. Also the extent to which one is cognitively simple, rigid and ethnocentric.

Long-term Memory: Cognitive storage area where large amounts of information are held relatively permanently.

Low Context: Cultural orientation where meanings are encoded in the verbal code.

Low Load: Situation with a low information rate.

Macro or Societal level: Factors that are out of the control of the interactants. These conditions include any history of subjugation, ideological/ structural inequality, and minority group strength.

Membership Group: A group to which a person belongs where there is regular interaction among members who perceive of themselves as members.

Memory: The storage of information in the human brain over time.

Micro or Individual level: Each individual’s unique attitudes, dispositions, and beliefs that he or she brings to the conflict.

Microculture: An identifiable group of people coexisting within some dominant cultural context.

Microculture: An identifiable group of people who share a set of values, beliefs, and behaviors and who possess a common history and verbal and nonverbal symbol system that is similar to but systematically varies from the larger, often dominant cultural milieu.

Minority Group: Subordinate group whose members have significantly less power and control over their own lives than members of the dominant or majority group.

Monochronic Time Orientation: Cultural temporal orientation that stresses the compartmentalization and segmenting of measurable units of time.

Muted Groups: Microcultures who are forced to express themselves (e.g., speak, write) within the dominant mode of expression.

Mutual-face: The concern for both parties’ images or the image of the relationship

Neglect: The use of a passive–aggressive approach where one might ignore the conflict but attempt to elicit a response from the other via aggressive acts.

Nonmembership Group: A group to which a person does not belong.

Nonverbal Expectancy Violations Theory: Theory that posits that people hold expectations about the nonverbal behavior of others. When these expectations are violated, people evaluate the violation positively or negatively depending on the source of the violation.

Obliging communication style: The degree to which a person puts the other-face need ahead of self-face need.

Olfactics: The perception and use of smell, scent, and odor.

Organizational Culture: An organized pattern of values, beliefs, behaviors and communication channels held by the members of an organization

Other-face: The concern for another’s image.

Outgroup Homogeneity Effect: The tendency to see members of an outgroup as highly similar while seeing the members of the ingroup as unique and individual.

Outgroup: A group whose attributes are dissimilar from an ingroup's and who opposes the realization of ingroup goals.

Paralanguage: Characteristics of the voice such as pitch, rhythm, intensity, volume, and rate.

Perception: The mental interpretation of external stimuli via sensation.

Perceptual Context: The attitudes, emotions, and motivations of the persons engaged in communication and how they affect information-processing.

Perceptual Context: The cognitive process by which persons gather, store, and retrieve information.

Perceptual Filters: Physical, social, and psychological processes that screen and bias incoming stimuli.

Personal Report of Communication Apprehension (PRCA): Self-report instrument designed to measure communication apprehension.

Polyandry: The practice of having multiple husbands.

Polychronic Time Orientation: Cultural temporal orientation that stresses the involvement of people and the completion of tasks as opposed to strict adherence to schedules. Time is not seen as measurable.

Polygamy: The practice of having multiple spouses.

Polygyny: The practice of having multiple wives.

Power Distance: The extent to which less powerful members of a particular culture accept and expect that power within the culture will be distributed unequally.

Power Distance: The extent to which members of a culture expect and accept that power is unequally distributed.

Privacy: The degree to which an individual can control the visual, auditory, and olfactic interaction with others.

Process: Anything ongoing, ever-changing, and continuous.

Proxemics: The perception and use of space, including territoriality and personal space.

Psychomotor Features: The extent to which one can translate cultural knowledge into appropriate verbal and nonverbal performance and role enactment.

Race: A social construct based primarily on skin color. A more scientific term is ethnicity, which refers to places of ancestral origin.

Recall/Retrieval: To call to mind a recollection of stored information.

Re-Entry Shock: The effects associated with the tension and anxiety of returning to one's native culture after an extended stay in a foreign culture.

Reference Group: A group to which a person may or may not belong, but identifies in some way with the values and goals of the group.

Regulators: Nonverbal acts that manage and govern communication between people, such as stance, distance, eye contact, etc.

Relational Empathy: Shared meaning and harmonization that is the outcome or result of interaction of two people.

Responsiveness: An individual's ability to be sensitive to the communication of others, including providing feedback, comforting communication, and listening.

Rhetorical sensitivity: Selecting language and nonverbal communication with thought and care so that one adapts communication effectively to the other person and the context.

Role: One's relative hierarchical position or rank in a group. A role is a prescribed set of behaviors that are expected in order to fulfill the role. Roles prescribed with whom, about what, and how to interact with others.

Self-face: The concern for one’s own image.

Semantic Memory: A part of long-term memory where general information, such as how to read and write, and the meanings of words are stored.

Semi-fixed Featured Space: Space bounded by movable objects such as furniture.

Sensation: Gathering of visual, auditory, olfactic, haptic and taste stimuli/information.

Sensory Receptors: Eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin.

Sensory Register: Storage center for raw sense data.

Sex Role: A prescribed set of behaviors assigned to different sexes.

Sex: A designation of people based on biological genital differences.

Situational Features: The extent to which the environmental context, previous contact, status differential and third-party intervention affect one's competence during intercultural communication.

Social Identity: The total combination of one's group roles. A part of the individual's self-concept that is derived from the person's membership in groups.

Social Stratification: A culture's organization of roles into a hierarchical vertical status structure.

SocioCommunicative Style: Degree of assertiveness and responsiveness during communication.

Sociorelational Context: The role relationship between the interactants (i.e., brother/sister)

Socio-Relational Context: The roles that one assumes within a culture that are defined by verbal and nonverbal messages.

Spanglish: Hybrid language combining the phonological features (i.e., sounds) and syntactic structures (grammar) of English and Spanish.

Stereotypes: A subset of categorizing involving the attribution of characteristics of a group to an individual based on individual's membership in that group. Stereotypes are categories with an attitude.

Symbol: An arbitrarily selected and learned stimulus representing something else.

Terrestrial Environment: The physical geography of the earth.

Third Culture: That which is created when a dyad consisting of persons from different cultures come together and establish relational empathy.

Third-party help: The extent to which a person would engage an outsider to act as a go-between in the conflict.

Transactional: The simultaneous encoding and decoding process during communication.

Uncertainty Avoidance: The degree to which members of a particular culture feel threatened by unpredictable, uncertain, or unknown situations.

Uncertainty Reduction Theory: The major premise of this theory is that when strangers first meet, their primary goal is to reduce uncertainty.

Uncertainty: The amount of predictability in a communication situation.

Uncertainty: The amount of unpredictability during communication.

Values: Criteria for selecting and justifying behavior. Values have a cognitive, affective, and behavioral component.

Vertical Collectivism: Cultural orientation where the individual sees the self as an integral part of the ingroup but whose members are different than each other (e.g., status).

Vertical Individualism: Cultural orientation where an autonomous self is valued but the self is seen as different and perhaps unequal with others.

Voluntary Membership Group: A membership group to which a person belongs out of choice, like a political party or service organization.