Smiling and teasing as strategies masking anger among French and Australian cultural groups

Abstract

This paper reports on an ongoing project that is concerned with the interpretation and processing of emotion in communication, particularly anger, within an interactional dynamics perspective (Holtgraves, 1990). In a previous publication (Strambi & Mrowa 2007), we presented an analytical model and some preliminary analyses of ‘processing’ strategies for managing the communication of anger among friends across three cultural groups: Anglo-Australian, French and Italian. In this paper, we are presenting further elaborations on this model, and analyses from a non-verbal perspective of how smiling and teasing function in the construction and negotiation of anger scenarios among French and Anglo-Australian groups.