body language

Cross-cultural awareness

IS SMILE CULTURE-RELATED?

Last week I was on a plane from Chisinau to Rome. A lady from Southern Italy said Eastern-European women were beautiful, but they never seemed to smile. They looked as if they had an icicle inside. This is a recurrent observation of westerners traveling east. It happens because our culture influences our way of smiling.   Why is smile culture-related? Smiling is one of the basic acts of non-verbal communication....