In some high-context cultures, public display of emotion is a sign of immaturity and a potential cause of shame to the group. Japanese negotiators will close their eyes, look down, or rest their head against their hand and shade their eyes in order to conceal an emotion such as anger. Similarly Thais have learned to keep potentially disruptive emotions from showing in their faces. Koreans, Taiwanese, and other Asians along with Japanese and Thais have earned the descriptor inscrutable from Westerners because of their learned cultural practice of avoiding a facial display of strong and disruptive emotion. High-context cultures value harmony in human encounters and members avoid sending any nonverbal messages that could destroy harmony. Other high-context cultures, for example in the Middle East, put a high priority on displays of emotion to emphasize the sincerity of the position being put forward.
In low-context cultures, a deliberate concealment of emotion is considered to be insincere.
Members of low-context cultures have learned a large vocabulary of facial expression that signals the emotion a speaker feels. When they see none of the expected indicators of emotion on faces of negotiators on the opposite side of the table, they presume it is not present. If this assumption is discovered to be wrong, and the speaker indeed feeling an emotion such as anger, the member of the low-context culture feels deceived.
