Higher Context Research Articles

The relationship between Japanese adults' age and self-reported verbal strategies when lying.

We examined the relationship between age and self-reported verbal deception strategies in Japanese adults. Japanese participants (N = 153) aged 18 to 73 years took part in this study. We requested the participants to state their age and freely describe how they structure their speech to appear convincing when lying during their daily interactions. We extracted 13 verbal strategies from the participants' open-ended descriptions. Japan is a high-context culture. The results indicated that 11 categories corresponded to the verbal strategies reported in previous studies on lying conducted in low-context cultures. However, two strategies mentioned in the current study, making ambiguous statements and adding irrelevant details to the lie, were not reported in low-context cultures. As expected, age was significantly and negatively correlated with the number of verbal strategies used when lying. Moreover, verbal strategies that seem relatively cognitive demanding were used less as the age of the participants increased. We concluded that these results reflected the age-related decline of cognitive abilities.

Haitian Immigrants' Information Needs and Behaviors: Libraries, Information Professionals and Haitians in the United States

Haitian immigrants are a socially excluded growing demographic in the United States that deals with racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-Haiti rhetoric, and language barriers. Information professionals need to understand Haitian information behavior, their cultural preferences, and barriers in order to successfully fulfill their information needs. This article examines other disciplines’ relevant and scholarly research literature on Haitian immigrants in the United States to discover their trends of information behavior and barriers so that the Library and Information Science field can create effective information pathways to support their community. Haitian immigrants turn to their families and trusted individuals for their information needs, due to their high-context oral culture. They utilize the radio and ICT networks to connect transnationally. The challenges to their information needs include information overload, language barriers, a bias for face-to-face communication, racism, and culture clash issues. Information professionals can mitigate these barriers by providing outreach, access, excellent programming, bilingual resources and reference, and culturally competent staff. Keywords: Haitian immigrants, libraries, Haiti, information needs, information behaviors, social inclusion, United States

Interpretation of Cultural Conflict in The Joy Luck Club from Perspective of High-context and Low-context Cultures

The Joy Luck Club, a masterpiece by Amy Tan, tells the story of the mother-daughter conflicts, focusing on the differences between Chinese culture and American culture. According to the theory of high-context and low-context cultures put forward by Eward T. Hall, Chinese culture can be classified as a high-context culture, while American culture is classified as a low-context culture. In light of high-context and low-context cultures theory, this paper deeply analyzes mother-daughter conflicts in The Joy Luck Club, aiming to provide reference for exploring the right way to resolve cultural conflict. In this paper, the author introduces the main differences of high and low-context cultures, on the basis of which the cultural conflict between Chinese and American reflected in The Joy Luck Club were summarized and analyzed. The conflicts can be divided into three aspects: different ways of language expression, different understandings of the relationship between parents and children and different ways of emotional expression.

КИТАЙСЬКИЙ І ЯПОНСЬКИЙ НЕЧІТКИЙ МОВЛЕННЄВИЙ АКТ: ПОДІБНЕ ТА ВІДМІННЕ

Any language is not only a part of the culture but also its carrier. Different national languages embody their unique traditional culture and at the same time are a reflection of the national way of thinking of their speakers, national customs, social values, etc. According to the division into "high-context" and "low-context" cultures, which was proposed by Hall E. T. (1959), China and Japan appear to be the representatives of high-context culture. In a high-context culture, the main transmission of information depends on the context. A large amount of information strongly depends on the context, while only a small part of the information is conveyed with the help of lingual forms. High-context cultures emphasize indirect ways of expression. That is, in Chinese and Japanese languages, only a small part of the information is transmitted verbally, while the main part of it is provided through the context and circumstances of communication. Meanwhile under the influence of the ideology of Confucianism, the avocation of "propriety" is reflected in the demand for people's polite behavior in both China and Japan. Therefore, when interacting with people, one has to pay more attention to preserving the face of others and minimizing the threat to others' faces, in particular with the help of euphemistic and subtle language expressions. Refusal is such a speech act that threatens the face of all communication participants. Therefore, in Chinese and Japanese lingual cultures, the vague speech act of refusal is usually exercised in order to avoid expressing the intention of "rejection" directly with the help of vague and unclear expressions, so as to leave a buffer zone for both parties. On the one hand, to reduce the threat of losing face by both counterparties; on the other hand, to maintain good interpersonal relations. However, each of the two languages has its own typological and cultural characteristics, and in this article, the author sets the main goal ̶ to find out the similarities and differences between the Chinese and Japanese vague refusal speech acts based on the grammatical and cultural peculiarities of the languages in focus.

A Study on the Red Film Subtitle Translation from the Perspective of High and Low Context

A Study on the Red Film Subtitle Translation from the Perspective of High and Low Context

Use of Cultulings in Business Communication: A Case of Flattery

Since business without appropriate language use is impossible and language is an inseparable ‎part of a culture, knowing about the cultural patterns of communities can also be valuable. ‎Considering language as an essential component of any given culture, studying linguistic ‎expressions can reveal a society’s hidden cultural patterns, a concept known as cultuling ‎analysis. The current study looked at the “flattery” cultuling demonstrated in Persian and ‎English films. To achieve this, excerpts of dialogues from 100 Persian and 100 English films ‎were taken and analyzed by means of cultuling analysis (CLA) methodology from linguistic, ‎cultural, and psychological angles. The result showed that flattery can happen in formal and ‎informal situations among people from both equal and unequal status. Moreover, Iranian ‎people’s use of flattery displayed cultural patterns of overstating, high context, power ‎distance, low trust, and collectivism, while English people’s use of this cultuling revealed ‎their hidden culture, including low-context, high-trust, understanding, individualism, and ‎power distance.‎

ДИНАМИКА КОНЦЕПТУАЛЬНОГО ПРОСТРАНСТВА НЕМЕЦКОЙ ЛИНГВОКУЛЬТУРЫ В ПЕРИОД ПАНДЕМИИ

In the paper the author regards the conceptual space as a totality of basic concepts of some culture. The research is based on the analysis of new words that appeared in the time of two pandemic years. The author uses an integrative methodology, that combines characteristics of different culturetypes to characterize German culture as a part of low context cultures; principles of speech act theory to explain new words building; syntactic principles of new words composition that implicate pragmatic sense; description of German culture basic concepts as a semantic and functional field that changes its structure at different times. The comparison of its structure before pandemic and during pandemic shows the changes of basic conceptual fields. The findings are as follows. The main basic concepts of German culture ORDER and its derivate SECURITY form the core of conceptual space. The concepts WORK, EDUCATION and MOBILITY are regarded as instruments for their realization, they round the core. But in pandemic the emotional concept FEAR (ANGST) becomes a big value and moves into conceptual core. It influences rational concepts and their fields change the structure. In the concept ORDER the attention shifts to security and SOCIAL DISTANCING. In the concept SECURITY, nominations of defense means become the core. In instrumental concepts, the FEAR is indicated by some new words that separate some sub concepts. These sub concepts are: in the concept WORK LOCK DOWN, in the concept EDUCATION HOMESCHOOLING, in the concept MOBILITY COCOONING. The findings show the mechanism of conceptual adaptation in crisis situations which is important for peaceful settlement of different conflicts.

Advertising intensity and firm performance: the influences of firm age and cultural communication styles

PurposeAdvertising intensity is treated either as a resource that allows firms to create competitive advantages (intangible asset view) or as an investment to build advertising resource (investment expense view). This current research supports the investment expense view. The authors do so by examining the moderating role of firm age (a proxy for knowledge) in the relationship between advertising intensity and performance as well as the influence of cultural communication styles on this moderation.Design/methodology/approachSecondary data were collected from multiple sources. With a sample of 262 companies from 10 countries (149 firms from high-context cultures and 113 firms from low-context cultures), ordinary least squares was used to estimate the regression coefficients to test the hypotheses. An instrumental variable approach with two-stage least squares estimates was used to address an endogeneity bias. Average industry advertising intensity excluding the focal firm was used as an instrumental variable.FindingsThe findings demonstrate that firm age significantly moderates the advertising intensity/performance relationship, but this moderation is only significant in high-context cultures. These findings imply that firms within high-context cultures must continually invest in advertising expenditures, while firms in low-context cultures may not need to do so to increase performance.Practical implicationsThe results of this study provide insight into the debate of whether advertising expenditures boost performance, as well as provide international marketing managers with a clearer picture on how to invest in advertising within their respective markets.Originality/valueA majority of the studies that examine the advertising intensity/performance link rely solely on the resource-based view. The authors utilize a multi-theoretical perspective to provide a fine-grained understanding of this relationship. Moreover, the authors apply the investment expense view to examine advertising intensity as an investment to build advertising resources, rather than a resource. This investment must be incorporated with the knowledge to properly employ the investment to develop advertising resources. Further, the authors find that firms expanding into high-context cultures must devote more effort into developing advertising capabilities to properly employ advertising resources than firms in low-context cultures.

The consequences of social category faultlines in high- and low-context cultures: A comparative study of Brazil and Germany.

The present study sheds light on how differences between high- and low-context cultures influence the consequences of social category faultlines. To develop our theoretical arguments, we integrate ideas from faultline theory and Hall's theory on cultural contexts. We test our hypotheses using survey data from 54 teams in the banking industry in Germany, a nation with a low-context culture, and in Brazil, a country with a high-context culture. In line with our theorizing, the study results reveal that whether social category faultline strength stimulates task conflict and is thus detrimental to team performance depends on the societal culture in which teams operate. Specifically, we observe that social category faultlines stimulate task conflict and thus have a negative indirect effect on team performance in Germany's low-context culture, while we find no such effects in the high-context culture of Brazil. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our study and close with some suggestions for future research.

Intercultural Adjustment in High Context Communication: The Mediating Role of Intercultural Willingness to Communicate on AUM Theory

Intercultural Adjustment in High Context Communication: The Mediating Role of Intercultural Willingness to Communicate on AUM Theory

Assistierende Gesundheitstechnologien und intelligente Umgebungen in der Rehabilitation

The increasing digitalization of society is having an impact on medicine. People increasingly use digital devices and services for various purposes (e.g., sports, security, convenience). Ubiquity, astrong degree of connectivity and high context sensitivity are creating intelligent environments that generate data about individuals. Suitable evaluation algorithms can extract information about the personal health status that can be used for diagnostics and treatment. Gamification methods allow patients to be more actively involved in their recovery, which can have apositive effect on adherence. Particularly in the field of rehabilitation medicine, which often affects and interacts with the personal living environment, the use of this information can make adifference. Using specific examples of the application of assistive health technologies and intelligent environments in rehabilitation medicine, the current state of development is presented and the possible future research directions and needs for action in this field are presented in apractical way. Three exemplary research projects introduce the topic, are embedded in the current state of research and allow aprojection into the future against the background of many years of experience. The reported projects show not only the technical feasibility but also individually the medical effectiveness of interventions. Finally, an analysis of the barriers that have so far prevented amore intensive use of the technologies and how these might be countered is carried out.

Exploring the Effect of a Cultural Gap on the Process of Absorbing Business Knowledge

This study explores the implications of the difference between Japanese and Anglo-American cultures when Japanese organizations try to absorb business knowledge generated in Anglo-American culture. It relies on Todorova & Durisin’s model of Absorptive Capacity (2007) which allows for multi-level, individual, group, and organizational levels of absorption in the process of incorporating external knowledge. It compares four cases of Japanese organizations, who sought to absorb business knowledge that could change conventional Japanese management style by introducing one of two alternative Anglo-American developmental learning methods. The study identifies some specific cultural impediments and enablers for Japanese people trying to absorbing Anglo-American business knowledge, and suggests how the impediments can be overcome, by making structural and leadership changes during the introduction of the learning activities. The research explores whether and how 43 participants who experienced one or the other learning method transformed from a mind-set dominated by Japanese cultural norms and values to one that can both recognise the benefits of Anglo-American management thinking and translate it into changed practice. Whilst Todorova and Durisin’s model does not capture the way cultural difference affects the absorbing process, the results show that the differences between Japanese and Anglo-American cultural values, in terms of collectivism vs individualism, high-context vs low-context cultures, and power relationships affect progress through the phases of absorption. Thus, the study discusses the gradual process how Japanese individuals and organizations absorbed the Anglo-American knowledge by overcoming cultural differences.

Exploring the Effect of a Cultural Gap on the Process of Absorbing Business Knowledge

This study explores the implications of the difference between Japanese and Anglo-American cultures when Japanese organizations try to absorb business knowledge generated in Anglo-American culture. It relies on Todorova & Durisin’s model of Absorptive Capacity (2007) which allows for multi-level, individual, group, and organizational levels of absorption in the process of incorporating external knowledge. It compares four cases of Japanese organizations, who sought to absorb business knowledge that could change conventional Japanese management style by introducing one of two alternative Anglo-American developmental learning methods. The study identifies some specific cultural impediments and enablers for Japanese people trying to absorbing Anglo-American business knowledge, and suggests how the impediments can be overcome, by making structural and leadership changes during the introduction of the learning activities. The research explores whether and how 43 participants who experienced one or the other learning method transformed from a mind-set dominated by Japanese cultural norms and values to one that can both recognise the benefits of Anglo-American management thinking and translate it into changed practice. Whilst Todorova and Durisin’s model does not capture the way cultural difference affects the absorbing process, the results show that the differences between Japanese and Anglo-American cultural values, in terms of collectivism vs individualism, high-context vs low-context cultures, and power relationships affect progress through the phases of absorption. Thus, the study discusses the gradual process how Japanese individuals and organizations absorbed the Anglo-American knowledge by overcoming cultural differences.

Multimodal Assessment of Smoking cue Reactivity During a Smoking Cue Exposure Task.

Background. Cue-reactivity as a characteristic symptom of substance use disorders (SUD) is highly context dependent. Paradigms with high context validity need to be established for the investigation of underlying neurobiological mechanisms. While craving can be assessed by self-report as one aspect of cue-reactivity (CR), the assessment of biological measures such as the autonomous response and EEG promises a holistic perspective including CR at an automatized level. In a multimodal approach, smoking cue exposure (CE) effects on heart rate variability (HRV), EEG frequency power, and craving as well as their interrelation were assessed. This pilot study focused on the validity of CR measurements in a naturalistic CE paradigm. Methods. EEG frequency power, HRV, and craving were assessed during resting state (RS) and smoking CE in smokers (n = 14) and nonsmoking controls (n = 10) to investigate the psychophysiological and subjective reactions to CE. Results. Increased beta power was found only in smokers during CE compared to the control condition. There was an inverse correlation of beta power and maximum craving. Likewise, HRV correlated negatively with maximum smoking urges in smokers immediately after the measurements, without differentiation between CE and control condition. Conclusion. The increased beta power in smokers during CE is discussed as increased inhibitory control related to reduced craving in smokers. Furthermore, increased craving during CE seems to be associated to decreased vagal activity. The multimodal measurements during the CE showed ecological validity to be fundamental for CE assessment in clinical populations to evaluate its predictive value.

Arabic Culture and Disagreements in Political TV Conversation

In intercultural studies, Arabic society has been described as high-context culture that rely more on indirect message and little room is provided within verbalized articulations. This study attempts to prove out this basic insight relating to communication pattern of a culture in other settings, by analyzing Arabic disagreements in TV interaction. Little investigation about disagreements have been done in Arabic context. The current study will fill this gap and seeks to explore the realization of speech act of disagreement within the context of televised political discourse by analyzing and comparing direct and mitigated disagreement strategies in Arabic political TV talks. In order to achieve these research objectives, a total of twelve Arabic recorded TV programs were transcribed and analyzed through qualitative and quantitative methods. Disagreement responses in the corpus were classified and adjusted based on application framework suggested by some previous studies. The procedures for conducting this study involve data collection, transcription and analysis, using Conversation Analysis (CA) technique. This study reveales that the general percentage of direct disagreements were obviously higher and preferred to that of alleviated disagreements (64.9%-35.0%) which challenges the generalizations about cultural distinctions. Arabic disagreement features such as negation particle, explicit oppositional phrases and disagreement with apology were identified. When the Arab interactants engage in conflict, employing vocative particle with calling the name of the other speaker is one of the unique features found in this research. For future studies, researchers should be mindful of integrating polite and conflict framework for more comprehensive interpretation of human communication.

DEVELOPING INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE OF FUTURE NAVIGATORS AS A BACKGROUND OF EFFECTIVE INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION

The article aims to study the resources that can be used by foreign language teachers of universities to achieve standards of higher education and the development of intercultural competence as an integral part of the professional education of modern experts and background for effective intercultural communication. This leads to the importance of developing respect for other cultures, tolerance, empathy, desire to learn about foreign cultures, etc. And thus, it enables the development of a global expert who easily adapts to the modern requirements of society in an intercultural environment. The article analyses relevant scientific papers and the requirements for modern experts in the development of intercultural competence. This makes it possible to say that an important task of teaching intercultural competence is to develop students’ ability to participate in intercultural dialogue, taking into account the principles of cooperation and mutual respect, forming a sense of belonging to their own culture. Based on the theory of high-context and low-context cultures, the authors made a comparative description of the representatives of Ukrainian, Philipino, Indian and Greek cultures, because Ukrainian sailors work mostly in this international crew. The features of the cultures presented in the table make it easier to adapt to the intercultural environment and understand and tolerate intercultural differences. The article offers practical assignments for the development of intercultural competence at foreign language classes in higher education institutions, including maritime English.

Local Knowledge in American Archaeology: A Study in High Context Communication

Over the course of twenty five years, approximately 1990 to 2015, American archaeologists grew to accept the regular use of local knowledge, in the form of Native American and local community knowledge, in their development of archaeological knowledge and in cultural resource management. This change mostly pushed archaeologists to engage with groups of people that would have been ignored previously. This transformation is part of a larger process of Modernism becoming Post Modernism via the expanded use of high context communication, a concept from Communications Studies, throughout American culture. This paper briefly describes the use of local knowledge and summarizes structural changes in cultural resource management, especially consultation practices, that highlight a wider usage of high context communication.

Cultural code-switching in high context global virtual team members: A qualitative study

Global virtual teams (GVTs) are a prevalent work structure that enable people to accomplish tasks across time, space, and cultural boundaries and perform cross-culturally. However, few studies have highlighted what exact behaviors enable GVTs to share knowledge effectively. Based on a qualitative study using semi-structured interviews with 22 respondents from various multinational corporations (MNCs) in Malaysia, we answer the following overarching research question: Why do high context members switch their communicative behaviors amongst foreign team members within global virtual teams? Our study provides detailed narratives of high-context team members becoming the behavioral “switchers” to collaborate and share knowledge with their foreign team members effectively. Our study defines and clarifies the concept of cross-cultural code-switching as a key behavior reflecting effective cross-cultural performance when accommodating foreign team members’ communicative behaviours by adopting (1) directness in speech, (2) openness during knowledge sharing, and (3) task-oriented aims. This study addresses several gaps in the field of cross-cultural management by extending Hall’s (1976) theoretical lens on high-context and low-context cultures, Molinsky’s (2007) cross-cultural code-switching concept in the context of the virtual work structure, and the criterion space surrounding cross cultural performance.

A Comparative Analysis of Pragmatics in the Perspective of Intercultural Communication

As an international Chinese language teacher who will go overseas for internship, it is very necessary to master the discourse rules in different cultural backgrounds, which plays a crucial role in the smooth implementation of intercultural communication. In this paper, through the author's four personal experiences of cross-cultural communication, as four cases of analyzing the discourse rules of cross-cultural communication, we will combine the relevant discourse rules and authoritative communication theories, such as Grice's principle of conversational cooperation, Edward-T-Hall's theory of high-context and low-context culture, Leech's principle of politeness, Brown and Levinson's theory of face, and so on, to analyze the discourse rules of appellative speech, introduction speech, greeting speech, etc. The differences in language terms such as appellative speech, introductory speech, greeting speech, invitation speech, request speech, compliment speech, and thank you speech are compared and explained, and the cultural conflicts and cultural communication phenomena involved are specifically analyzed.

End-to-End Data Quality Assessment Using Trust for Data Shared IoT Deployments

Continued development of communication technologies has led to widespread Internet-of-Things (IoT) integration into various domains, including health, manufacturing, automotive, and precision agriculture. This has further led to the increased sharing of data among such domains to foster innovation. Most of these IoT deployments, however, are based on heterogeneous, pervasive sensors, which can lead to quality issues in the recorded data. This can lead to sharing of inaccurate or inconsistent data. There is a significant need to assess the quality of the collected data, should it be shared with multiple application domains, as inconsistencies in the data could have financial or health ramifications. This article builds on the recent research on trust metrics and presents a framework to integrate such metrics into the IoT data cycle for real-time data quality assessment. Critically, this article adopts a mechanism to facilitate end-user parameterization of a trust metric tailoring its use in the framework. Trust is a well-established metric that has been used to determine the validity of a piece or source of data in crowd-sourced or other unreliable data collection techniques such as that in IoT. The article further discusses how the trust-based framework eliminates the requirement for a gold standard and provides visibility into data quality assessment throughout the big data model. To qualify the use of trust as a measure of quality, an experiment is conducted using data collected from an IoT deployment of sensors to measure air quality in which low-cost sensors were colocated with a gold standard reference sensor. The calculated trust metric is compared with two well-understood metrics for data quality, root mean square error (RMSE), and mean absolute error (MAE). A strong correlation between the trust metric and the comparison metrics shows that trust may be used as an indicative quality metric for data quality. The metric incorporates the additional benefit of its ability for use in low context scenarios, as opposed to RMSE and MAE, which require a reference for comparison.