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Traveling to a foreign country, we will have trouble communicating with the locals if we don’t speak their language.  We may also have trouble reading their facial expressions.

Hillary Elfenbein of the University of California at Berkeley has done a study looking at local “facial dialects.”  As a management consultant, she used to notice that her colleagues were having a hard time with signals coming from people from different backgrounds–signals as basic as whether it was their turn to speak in a meeting.

In a recent paper in Emotion, she put her “facial dialect” theory to the test by comparing French speakers in Quebec to those from the African nation of Gabon.  Reflexive responses such as fear and disgust showed the least regional variation, while serenity, contempt, sadness, happiness, shame, and anger showed the most.

And in tests of recognition–on average, in-group members have about a 10 percent accuracy advantage–the expressions with the greatest cross-cultural differences proved the hardest for outsiders to interpret.

Now the U.S. Department of Defense has picked up on her work, and seeks ways to train soldiers to read expressions and gestures specific to Middle Eastern cultures.

Says Elfenbein, “This is something that can really help as our society becomes increasingly diverse.”

It can also help those of us who work in large, diverse business settings.  And when presenting, we must also be mindful of our facial dialect.

I have rarely seen a presenter in the business world whose facial dialect needs to be reined in.  Most of us need to be more expressive.  After all, there are people in the back row who want to see on your face what the information means to you.