Paralinguistic cues can indicate

For example, workers in an individualist culture are more likely to value their own well-being over the good of the group. All three types of intercultural communication — verbal, nonverbal and paraverbal — are closely related to each other. Besides physical and technical barriers, there are six barriers to effective communication every employee and manager should strive to eradicate. Barriers to communication are things that get in the way of a message being received. They could be physical, such as loud music playing, or emotional, such as when a person is too angry or fearful to listen to what another individual is saying.

The communication process involves understanding, sharing, and meaning, and it consists of eight essential elements: source, message, channel, receiver, feedback, environment, context, and interference. Skip to content World languages. What can Paralinguistic cues indicate? For example, one study that examined provaccination public health campaigns found that some types of factual information actually made parents less likely to say they would vaccinate their children in the future.

In general, people do not like to think others are attempting to persuade them. Most research on persuasion has focused on what is said. But a recent paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology takes a different approach.

In a series of four experiments, the authors focused not on what people say in order to be persuasive but rather on how they say it—the acoustic properties of their speech. The authors set out to test two distinct possibilities for how paralinguistic aspects of speech might influence persuasion: confidence and detectability. First, the researchers set up an explicit persuasion attempt to test the confidence hypothesis.

Participants listened to one of two product reviews for a television. The wording was identical in both situations, but in one, the speakers simply read the review as they normally would, while in the other, they were told to try to persuade the listener to buy the TV. Both in this study and those that followed, the speakers were incentivized by the possibility of a gift card if their pitch worked.

The paralinguistic cues turned out to have an influence: listeners who heard the enhanced message reported a more positive view of the TV. And the disclosure statement did not reduce this effect even when it should have seemed obvious to participants that they were being pitched to. The third experiment was designed to more specifically rule out the detectability account and, importantly, create a situation closer to real life.

To set up recordings for this experiment, a group of participants performed a set of emotion-recognition tasks—the point was to get them to do something they could then talk about, persuasively or not. Each participant wrote and recorded a review about the task for future research subjects, with half explicitly instructed to write a persuasive one. As in the previous experiments, participants recorded reviews with and without paralinguistic cues.

They were also asked to rate their attempt to appear confident. A new group of participants then listened to one of the four different types of recordings. They rated how favorably they viewed the task, how confident the speaker seemed and whether they believed the speaker was trying to persuade them. The results supported the confidence hypothesis and provided evidence against the detectability account. And by probing if the speakers were trying to convey confidence, the researchers found that they were and that this came across to the listeners.

To dig deeper into the reasons behind these effects, the team used a specialized software program to analyze the recordings from each study for how speakers altered their voice when they were trying to persuade.

The researchers looked at factors such as intonation, speech rate, pausing, volume and pitch. They found that when speakers were trying to use paralinguistic cues, the properties of their speech were different. For example, they spoke more loudly and in a higher pitch—more results suggesting a leading role for confidence in the success of paralinguistic cues, because these factors are related to confident speech in general.

In the final experiment, the researchers first replicated these findings with better controls for example, by incentivizing both conditions and using clip-on microphones for improved measurement of voice volume.