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The Understanding of Chinese and Kurdish Emblematic Gestures by Dutch Subjects
Author(s) -
Poortinga Ype H.,
Schoots Netty H.,
Koppel Jan M. H.
Publication year - 1993
Publication title -
international journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.75
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 1464-066X
pISSN - 0020-7594
DOI - 10.1080/00207599308246916
Subject(s) - gesture , emblem , meaning (existential) , psychology , universalism , linguistics , epistemology , philosophy , literature , art , politics , political science , law , psychotherapist
The universality of meaning of codes in non‐verbal communication has been a topic of considerable controversy. In this debate, three theoretical perspectives can be distinguished: Behavioural absolutism, psychological universalism, and cultural relativism. In this study, emblematic gestures were elicited from young men from Kurdistan, China, and The Netherlands. A distinction was drawn between referential emblems (where meaning can be derived from the gestural action itself), and conventional emblems (where meaning is dependent on culture‐specific codes or conventions). For each culture, 25 emblems were selected that had an unambiguous meaning within the culture where they originated. In the first part of the study, it was investigated whether all gestures judged to be referential were present in The Netherlands, in the opinion of a sample of Dutch subjects. Allowing for a certain margin of error in the classification of the gestures, this hypothesis could not be rejected. In the second part, the specificity of meaning of eight conventional gestures was investigated for which none of the subjects in the first part of the study knew the correct meaning. The results indicated that codes can be entirely arbitrary, with no trace of a cross‐culturally shared referential basis. It is argued that the intermediate theoretical position of psychological universalism gives the best account of the findings.