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.
Interpersonal Communication
Communication between people at an individual level.
Intragroup Communication
Communication within a group.
Looking Glass Theory
The idea that we base views of ourself on how we thing others are perceiving us and judging us.
Mirror Self
The tendency for us to see ourselves through a reflection of how others see us.
Occulesics
Eye movement, length and direction of gaze, changes in pupil size.
Olfactics
Smell, odour.
Orientation
The way we position ourselves physically in relation to others.
Phatic Communication
Aspects of language which serve to reinforce social relationships rather than to communicate information. (e.g. ‘Have a nice day.’)
Pitch
The intonation of speech, the way in which our voices may rise and fall.
Performance
Communicative behaviour.
Received Pronunciation (RP)
Deals solely with the sounds of words (accent) and
can be described as the prestigious speech of educated people. It is usually
associated with London and the south-east and with the middle and upper classes. It
is sometimes known as the Queen’s English, Oxford English or BBC English.
Reflexivity
Describes what it is to be self-conscious, to be self-aware and to reflect
on who you are, what you’re doing and how you present yourself in the world. It is a
feature of much of contemporary communication that it is similarly conscious and
aware. It is self-reflexive. In this way, for example, we are used to seeing films about
the making of films, advertisements that play with the conventions of advertisements,
and comedies that refer to the ‘rules’ of comedy.
Skin
A significant code of NVC.
Smell
A significant code of NVC.
Sociolect
A social dialect.
Staging
The way in which we manipulate the contexts of interpersonal communication (the physical locations, the props, the costume)
Style Shifting
Refers to the way in which we may modify our use of the same
dialect within different situations. For example, we may use more formal language at
an interview than we would use at home.
Teams
Those we communicate ‘alongside’.
Touch
A significant code of NVC.
Tone
The way somebody says something as an indicator of what that person is feeling or thinking.
Timbre
The quality of a speech sound that comes from it’s tone rather than it’s pitch or volume.
Transactional Analysis
An approach to understanding and ultimately improving
interpersonal communication introduced by Eric Berne in his book Games People
Play (1968). The essence of Eric Berne’s theories of personality is that each of us at
any one time has the option of adopting one of three ego states: ‘the child’, ‘the
parent’ and ‘the adult’. These are not stages of maturity, they are options within all of
us; a 6-year-old can adopt a parent ego state in conversation with a 30-year-old in
‘child’ ego state.
Uses and Gratifications Theory
This is an approach to understanding the role of
mass communication in society. The basic premise runs as follows. We all have
various needs and desires, such as needs for information, entertainment and social
interaction which media texts (such as television programmes, video games,
magazines and newspapers) help us to fulfil. Hence use the mass media to gratify
our needs.
