Chapter 6 delves deeply into the subject of communications in groups. We discuss the factors that hamper effective communications. We also explore the effects that gender and more broadly, member diversity can have on the nature of our communications. We include a section on factors and techniques that improve the quality of member communication in a diverse society.

The best public speakers use a series of tricks to enchant an audience. They are revealed in this chapter and include: incorporating interactions to make a crowd feel part of the performance, signposting to continually refresh interest, the showbusiness of magic moments for truly memorable talks, the use of commanding body language, how to deal with nerves and preparing for the question and answer session.

Emotion information conveyed by the aging face and body provides essential cues that guide our impressions of older individuals. The way we interpret older adults’ emotions is not only influenced by age-related emotional stereotypes and phenotypic changes, but also varies as a function of race and gender/sex. The majority of previous work has investigated emotion perception by researching the effects of age, gender/sex, and race separately. Throughout this chapter, we review past work that examines emotion perception for various combinations of these identities, particularly age as a function of gender/sex and of race. Accordingly, we highlight the need for an intersectional perspective in research investigating emotion in the aging face and body, specifically one that considers the role of multiple identities in the expression of emotions.

Through a careful examination of all aspects of the experience of hearing or reading a declamation, this chapter explores how in practice the audience could move from the declamatory past to the extra-declamatory present. The framing of declamations, whether by prefaces (prolalia, protheoria) or in Philostratus’ Vitae sophistarum, blurred the line between text and context. The location of a performance was also often suggestive: declamations were texts to a significant degree experienced by audiences in the same physical spaces that its fictions traversed. A declaimer’s language was another way in which the fiction remained tethered in reality: declaimers had distinct personal styles and often partook in the ‘Asian’ style so different from that of their historical subjects. Finally, by means of their body language and by means of a running ‘metarhetorical’ commentary declaimers frequently ‘dropped the mask’ in the course of their performances. In short, this was a genre that far from shutting out the world beyond its fiction, repeatedly included it in the performance.

This chapter examines what it meant to perform translation in Cavalleria rusticana. It examines: 1) the original novella written by Giovanni Verga in 1880; 2) the 1884 stage version adapted by the author and interpreted by a variety of star actors, including Eleonora Duse and the Sicilian dialect players; and 3) the 1890 operatic version composed by Pietro Mascagni and performed by celebrity sopranos, such as Emma Calvé. Through close examination of newspaper reviews and early accounts, it is argued that performing translation meant generating and circulating an exoticized ‘brand’ of Sicilian-ness in and outside the Italian peninsula shortly after political unification in 1861. This chapter thus offers new perspectives into questions of racial stereotypes, and a provides basis for new insights into the Sicilian dialect players, in particular, who, pioneering a physical and bodily form of communication, transcended language barriers and mediated the foreign text through a kind of translation that went beyond the written word.

Our appearance, gestures, body language, and other types of nonverbal communication convey tremendous amounts of information about who we are, our status, attitudes, and even our goals in an interaction. Nonverbal communication is perceived quickly and mostly subconsciously, drawing on culturally patterned expectations. Since there are few commonalities across cultures in nonverbal cues, there are ample opportunities for miscommunication, such as when and how we touch others, how we relate to time, or what clothes we wear. This chapter explores various types of nonverbal communication, such as facial expressions, gaze, gestures and bodily movements, posture, contact, spatial behavior, clothes and appearance, and nonverbal aspects of speech. At the end of the chapter, these concepts are connected to an intercultural communication-oriented pedagogy, with sample language teaching activities.