10/18/21; Week 6: "Differences in Emotional Expressivity"


Context...

    It is a beautiful day and you decide to go outside, you are looking around, how are the people around you acting? Are people shouting and making wild gestures, living the moment? Or are they more resaved and collected of how they feel, waiting until they get home to show how they truly feel?
    One of the many aspects influenced by culture is emotional expressivity, the tolerance each place has can vary from high to low or any point in the middle. This can create misunderstandings between cultures, passion can be confused as wildness or rudeness, and reservation can be confused as dullness or pride, when is nothing of the sort, just a difference in paradigms.
    In what part of the spectrum do you consider yourself in? How can you be more understanding of those who find themselves in another part?

Introverts Actually Understand People Way Better Than Extroverts Do, Yale Study Shows | Inc.com

Personal experience...

    I have a friend with binational culture, his mom is Mexican and his dad is Japanese. When I went to his house for vacation it would be interesting the different interactions I would have with his parents. Her expressions and gestures would be so vivid all the time, while his  expressions and gestures would be calmer and reserved, it was unusual to see his reactions compared to the rest of the family but I understood that it was an outcome of his cultural upbringing. If I didn't understand that I would probably assume that he didn't like me.

Experience at school...

    I live in a country with a high tolerance for emotional expressivity, so it is not unusual to listen to a student complain out loud or the whole group starting to argue with the teacher if they feel like something is unfair. It was interesting to live in that environment because I consider myself with a medium tolerance of emotional expressivity while all the others seemed to have a high tolerance.
    I remember that in my last year of middle school my friends confessed that they didn't like me in our first year together, they thought I was prideful and thought of myself too highly to hang out with our group, and all this misunderstanding was because I was shocked when one of them grabbed and praised my hair the first day of school. I was raised to be very respectful of others space and things, so I was surprised seeing them act so freely in that way when we didn't know each other, but they took it the wrong way and I was labeled as the "stuck-up" of the group until I got used to their mannerisms and we got to know each other better.
    TESOL teachers are prone to have multicultural students, being aware of how to act because of this cultural factor is a great thing, but it would be even better if they could also encourage their students to recognize this factor and accept the differences so they can act respectfully and friendly to one another.

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