Cultural Codes: Useful Flashcards
Adapters
Almost unconscious gestures used to relieve stress or boredom; for
example, drumming fingers on a desk or scratching the back of your head. Often,
adapters signal nervousness or anxiety in situations such as giving a talk or being interviewed, so we do our best to control them.
Affective Function
Refers to the important role non-verbal communication has to play in establishing and maintaining relationships.
Assertiveness Training
Courses in assertiveness training seek to build
confidence through the development of communication skills, which include the
recognition and ability to resist manipulative non-verbal controls.
Bardic Function
Bards were the poets and minstrels of their day. They translated
the everyday cultural concerns of the Middle Ages into verse. In their book Reading
Television (1990), Fiske and Hartley argue that television plays a similar role today.
Television has its own specialised language and it helps to define reality for us,
reinforcing the dominant myths of our culture. The idea of the bardic function
stresses continuity; television is playing a role that has always been played.
Body Language
Bodily mannerisms, postures and facial expressions that can be interpreted as unconsciously communicating somebody’s feelings or psychological state.
Code Switching
Refers to the way in which we may change between languages or dialects depending on who we are talking to.
Communicative Competence
The capacity to communicate; usually refers to the ability to use various communicative codes, verbal and non-verbal, appropriately in a variety of contexts.
Convergence
The way in which we adjust our language to make it more like the
language style of the person we are addressing if we want to convey warmth,
friendliness and empathy.
Divergence
Moving language style away from the other person’s way of speaking can signal status or the desire to avoid intimacy.
Emblems
Gestures with the specific cultural meanings attached, often used as direct substitutes for words.
Gaze
Looking, eye contact; a code of NVC
Group Dynamic
How the individuals of a group relate to one another and the group.
Hair/Hairstyle
A significant code of NVC.
Illustrators
These gestures reinforce the words of a speaker; for example, by
pointing to something in a shop while saying ‘I’ll have one of those’.
Intergroup Communication
Communication between groups.