Manners of a friend

I went out and shopping with a few of my friends, we tend to choose our own shirt and try it. One of my friend asked me that whether her shirt looked nice or not. I answered that :" It doesn't look good on you", she then replied:" OH ya!!! It only looks nice on you, is it?!!!"

She scolded me with high tune. She seems like so pissed off with me. I wander if she jealous with me? Oh my goodness, she is the one who asked my opinion. I did nothing wrong and I just tell her the truth. What kind of person is she, I wandered. How long have I been knowing her, and she thinks me like that way.

I have never talked to her since that day. This is because I was too disappointed with her.

By,
Choi Hui Lei

The Whats Of Distance

The study of distances between people and animals is called Proxemics. Proxemics was introduced by Eward T. Hall, an anthropologist. There are 4 types of distances which includes Intimate Distance, Personal Distance, Social Distance, and Public Distance.

• Intimate Distance (embracing, touching or whispering): This usually occurs when we're emotionally close to someone and mostly in private situations. However, this varies with culture differences as well as how we feel towards someone.
• Personal Distance (interactions among good friends): When an uninvited person intrudes our personal distances, we might feel uncomfortable. This especially applies to those who move into friendships too quickly and this action might scare the other person.
• Social Distance (interactions among acquaintances): This is very common in business situations. For example, social distance between a salesperson and a customer or between people who work together. This distance is for more formal and impersonal situations.
• Public Distance (public speaking ): The closer range is about 12ft - 25ft. This range of distance is usually used by teachers in the classroom. The farther range of public distance can go froom 25ft and more. This is when two-way communication won't work well.

When interacting, it is important for us to know which distance is best suited to a situation as it can affect our relationship with others. Hall notes that different cultures maintain different standards of personal space. For this reason, we must constantly note the differences between our culture and that of others in order to avoid misunderstandings. :D

Getting together

Olden days, people don't have the technology to communicate when a person is at far apart. On the other hand, nowadays, people can communicate in everywhere at anytime. No matter how far apart, we still can communicate through various ways.

Internet help us to communicate with each other using verbal and nonverbal communication. Therefore, the relationship of friends are easily getting closer to each other. When people communicate with each other through internet, there might be a lie. Therefore, we need to be very careful when communication with the person especially when we know each other through internet.

Male and female have different intimacy style. As we want to communicate with the person that is opposite sex, we need to be careful and know what are the style of them. This can prevent misunderstanding between both of the people. When the intimacy of two person is getting weaker, they need to do something to save the relationship and prevent terminating a relationship.

By,
Choi Hui Lei

What real friend are

Friendship are important for everyone and need to communicate in daily life. When we feel depressed, we wanted to find someone to talk to and to tell our secret. Some secret must be kept for whole life as we don't want people to know it. It is rational to find someone that close to oneself to tell a deep secret. Normally, we will find someone that is very close to us and tell out our secret so that they can help us and to share some opinion with us.

Finding a best friend is very important in life. We cannot simply choose someone to talk to when we don't know each other, especially when we talk about private matters. As a friend, we should not tell others people secret when people tell us not to tell everyone. When they believe us, they will tell their secret to you. Some people that choose a wrong person to tell with, will end up of everyone knowing their deep secret.

As the relationship goes closer, it is expected to get deeper into the social penetration model. When we communicate every day, our relation will automatically get closer. Friends sometimes will hurt each other, however, if not too serious, they will recover very soon. Maybe they will get closer too!

By,
Choi Hui Lei

Broking people's heart

Learning from non verbal communication, I like to do gestures when I was talking and presenting something. Nonverbal communication may cause a lot of misunderstanding, but I was still thinking that nonverbal communication maybe better than verbal communication. This is because non verbal communication does not hurt people easily as we can talk about different thing using same gestures.

That day, I meet my secondary school's friend. Then, she saw a fat guy wearing jeans that look unfit to him. She then point her finger at that fat guy, beside that fat guy is a pretty girl. I thought that she was jealous to that pretty girl. I said to her: “No need to jealous on people, everyone has its own good!” She then laughs at me and say: “Dude! I was talking about the fat guy beside!” I laugh out loudly and say that pointing your finger to there means many things and better to state it out clearly. We go back our own home after that. I was thinking that nonverbal communication really that important that it affects our daily life.

By,
Choi Hui Lei

Lying without a word

I believe that in every one of us need to communicate with people. When we communicating, our hand will move or our face will come out with an expression. Nonverbal communication comes in a way that our expression will tell us the truth and verbal communication can lie to people. In my opinion, I think that one’s will only lie if they had done something wrong and they don’t want people to know about it and admit what they had done the wrong thing. Worst still, they even think that they are right in doing anything and what other do is wrong.

Recently, I have found that some people will do gestures when they are lying. They don’t dare to admit it. When they feel guilty, they do gestures or some expression on their face to cover their lies. They hope they can feel better when they do so. Some people like to do eye contact with people when they lying together. This is also a form of nonverbal communication.

For me, when I feel my parent were so annoying, when they are talking the same thing repeatedly everyday when I was playing computer games. Then, I pretend them and act like them when they talk to me the same thing. I talk but no voice coming out from my mouth. My hand and expression act like them. I copy their gestures when I feel annoying. When I do so, I feel better because I think that I understand what they want me to do but I just don’t feel like doing so. Maybe they will think that I am rude to them and not respecting them. This will form a lot of misunderstanding.

By,
Choi Hui Lei

The Whats Of Paralanguage

Paralanguage is what social scientists use to describe nonverbla, vocal messages. You can understand vocal cues by considering how the meaning of a simple sentence can change just by shifting the emphasis from word to word. Here's a 20 minutes long video of an episode of comedy series 'Still Standing' but just skip to 10:00 to see how paralanguage is used between Judy and Bill's conversation over a lost ticket.



Here is how it went:
Judy: (unable to stand guilt any longer) Alright, alright! I lost the tickets!
Bill: (talking to Fitz) Hear that, Fitz? She lost them.
Judy: They were in my gym bag and they disappeared! Isn't that right, Marion?
Marion: (confused) This is making me very nervous.
Bill: So you're saying that you lost the tickets. (pointing at Judy) You lost the tickets. You lost the tickets.
Judy: You are just saying the same thing over and over again, emphasizing different words each time!

The tickets were for the Rolling Stones concert for their wedding anniversary (that's why it's such a big deal).
So from the example above, we can see that the first time Bill said that, he was emphasizing that Judy lost the tickets. Then he emphasized on 'lost', making her sound irresponsible. Last he emphasized on 'the' tickets, saying that it isn't just ANY ticket but Rolling Stones.


One can distinguish the following aspects of speech signals and perceived utterances:

• Perspectival aspects

Speech signals that arrive at a listener’s ears have acoustic properties that may allow listeners to localize the speaker (distance, direction). Sound localization functions in a similar way also for non-speech sounds. The perspectival aspects of lip reading are more obvious and have more drastic effects when head turning is involved.

• Organic aspects
  

The speech organs of different speakers differ in size. As children grow up, their organs of speech become larger and there are differences between male and female adults. The differences concern not only size, but also proportions. They affect the pitch of the voice and to a substantial extent also the format frequencies, which characterize the different speech sounds. The organic quality of speech has a communicative function in a restricted sense, since it is merely informative about the speaker. It will be expressed independently of the speaker’s intention.

• Expressive aspects

The properties of the voice and the way of speaking are affected by emotions and attitudes. Typically, attitudes are expressed intentionally and emotions without intention, but attempts to fake or to hide emotions are not unusual. Expressive variation is central to paralanguage. It affects loudness, speaking rate, pitch, pitch range and, to some extent, also the formant frequencies.

• Linguistic aspects

These aspects are the main concern of linguists. Ordinary phonetic transcriptions of utterances reflect only the linguistically informative quality. The problem of how listeners factor out the linguistically informative quality from speech signals is a topic of current research.

In text-only communication such as email, chatrooms and instant messaging, paralinguistic elements can be displayed by emotions, font and color choices, capitalization and the use of non-alphabetic or abstract characters. Nonetheless, paralanguage in written communication is limited in comparison with face-to-face conversation, sometimes leading to misunderstandings.

Source:

"Paralanguage" 2004. Wikipedia. Web. June 6th 2009.

By,

Yang Su Ying