Stella Ting-Toomey

• Professor at California State University, Fullerton

This research article used a controversial in‐progress conflict case story, namely the Citizenship Amendment Act in India, to illustrate the benefit of using a combined socioecological framework and integrative identity negotiation theory in explaining intergroup conflict complexity. The essay is structured in four sections. First, we present a hig...

Identity negotiation theory (INT) concerns the importance of negotiating sociocultural membership identity and personal identity issues in intergroup communication situations. The term identity refers to an individual's multifaceted identities of cultural, ethnic, spiritual/religious, social class, gender, age, sexual orientation, professional, fam...

The conflict face negotiation theory (FNT) explains the culture-based, individual-based, and situational-based factors that shape communicators' tendencies in managing problematic face-sensitive situations. The researching of face and facework can be found in a wide range of disciplines such as anthropology, psychology, sociology, linguistics/ESL,...

Background Context The conflict Face Negotiation Theory (FNT) explains the culture-based, situational-based, and individual-based factors that shape communicators' tendencies in managing problematic face-sensitive situations. The anatomy of FNT holds seven theoretical assumptions, five boundary conditions, and twenty-four testable research proposit...

Multiple identity facets are intimately related to the study of cross-cultural communication styles because the preferred use of verbal and nonverbal communication styles are tied distinctively to situated sociocultural membership and personal identity issues. While past cross-cultural communication style research studies have focused primarily on...

This study explored the identity management processes in interfaith marital communication in a United States setting. Sixteen marital partners participated in this interview study. Interviews were transcribed verbatim, interpreted, and analyzed. Guided by identity management theory, the interview data analysis revealed three general themes: develop...

Honor killing is a crime and a social and intercultural moral dilemma in terms of understanding its motivations and possible prevention. This article presents multiple perspectives to illuminate the multifaceted dimensions of honor killing. Various contemporary ethical and theoretical perspectives on honor killing are addressed. The article is orga...

Identity negotiation theory concerns the importance of negotiating sociocultural membership identity and personal identity issues in intercultural and interpersonal communication settings. The entry is organized in five sections. First, the historical background of the identity negotiation theory (INT) is introduced. Second, the 10 core assumptions...

Communication competence or effectiveness has been investigated in multiple intercultural communication contexts. Interestingly, while intercultural competence scholars have borrowed ideas heavily from the interpersonal competence field, they appeared to have glossed over some essential constructs such as social identity membership phenomenon, inte...

The purpose of this study was to integrate the central constructs in the face-negotiation theory in the examination of the antecedents and behavioral consequences of forgiveness in relational transgressions in U.S. and Chinese cultures. Results indicated that in both cultures, transgression victims’ independent self-construal and self-face concern...

This study examined the dynamic interplays between emotions (i.e., anger and compassion), face threat, forgiveness, and reconciliation in relational transgressions in U.S. and Chinese cultures. Results indicated that Chinese participants reported more relationship-oriented forgiveness than U.S. participants, but no distinction was uncovered in self...

In any tugs-and-pulls intercultural ethical decision-making situation, we often have to make difficult choices between upholding our own cultural beliefs and values and considering the values of the other culture. We also have to ponder about intention, behavior/process, outcome, and larger consequence issues on the individual, community, and globa...

MINDFULNESS The roots of mindfulness practice are in the contemplative practices common to both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. It is, at once, a spiritual, meditative, reflective, psychological, and an applied way of intentional living and communicating. As indicated in the 1999 text, Communicating Across Cultures by Stella Ting-Toomey,...

IDENTITY NEGOTIATION THEORY The term identity in the Identity Negotiation Theory (INT) refers to an individual's multifaceted identities of cultural, ethnic, religious, social class, gender, sexual orientation, professional, family/relational role, and personal image(s) based on self-reflection and other-categorization social construction processes...

FACEWORK/FACE NEGOTIATION THEORY The meaning of face is generally conceptualized as how we want others to see us and treat us and how we actually treat others in association with their social self-conception expectations. In everyday interactions, individuals are constantly making conscious or unconscious choices concerning face-saving and face-hon...

This study investigates the meaning construction of the South Asian Indian term izzat or face in intergenerational contexts. Interpretive thematic analysis revealed six themes. Key findings indicate: (1) for both older and younger South Asian Indian American (SAIA) generations, family izzat is of primary importance; (2) the motif of “respect” is ce...

To extend face-negotiation theory (FNT) to romantic relationship contexts, we examined the patterns of responses to six survey instruments among five countries. We intend this initial paper to serve as a tutorial of testing measurement invariance—specifically by elaborating on: (a) how to establish measurement equivalence and (b) how to test measur...

This study linked emotion to the theoretical assumptions of the face-negotiation theory and probed the critical role of anger, compassion, and guilt in understanding the complex pathways of their relationships with self-construal, face concerns, and conflict styles in U.S. and Chinese cultures. Results showed that anger was associated positively wi...

The root of the face-negotiation (FN) conflict theory was influenced anthropological essay “The Chinese Concept of ‘Face’, ” sociological article “On Face-Work,” and Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson's linguistics monograph “Politeness.” The face-negotiation conflict theory, developed by Stella Ting-Toomey in the human communication studies disci...

This qualitative study explores the significant yet understudied topic of bicultural identity and intergroup-intercultural communication. Ting-Toomey’s identity negotiation theory and Giles’ communication accommodation theory guide this investigation into the meaning construction of “bicultural identity” of Asian/Caucasian individuals and their int...

This paper focuses on killing in the name of honor that has received scant attention from intercultural communication scholars. Incompatible moral value sets are often expressed through the complexity of intercultural or intergroup communication at various institutional and community reaction levels. While we do not condone honor killing, the socia...

This second edition of the award-winning The SAGE Handbook of Conflict Communication emphasizes constructive conflict management from a communication perspective, identifying the message as the focus of conflict research and practice. Editors John G. Oetzel and Stella Ting-Toomey, along with expert researchers in the discipline, have assembled in o...

This research examined how American and Chinese participants differ when they respond to situations involving the emotional infidelity of their dating partners. It also assessed how different self-construal types influence relational response strategies. Four of the six culture-level hypotheses were supported. Overall, US respondents tend to prefer...

There exist multiple approaches in the theorizing of the relationship between culture and communication. This article will focus on the benefits of utilizing the dimensional value framework in explaining cross-cultural or intercultural communication processes. The essay is organized in three sections. First, core ideas of the interpretive, critical...

This study develops a new interaction coding system, the Intimate Negotiation Coding System, for assessing verbal negotiation behaviors used by persons in intimate relationships. It seeks reliability and validity measures for the coding system when applied to the verbal interaction of married couples. Results indicated that the intercoder and acros...

Purpose Prior research demonstrates the importance of face in conflict situations. However, the direct relationship of face concerns to facework behaviors has limited empirical support. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships among self‐, other‐, and mutual‐face concern and 11 facework strategies within Chinese, Jap...

Competent intercultural conflict management depends on many factors. One of the key factors is to increase our awareness and knowledge concerning diverse conflict styles and facework issues. Intercultural conflict can be defined as any implicit or explicit antagonistic struggle between persons of different cultures due, in part, to cultural or ethn...

Intercultural conflict training is a fertile ground to test the pragmatic implications of particular intercultural conflict theories. Thus, the objective of this article is twofold: First, to review major theory-practice approaches in intercultural conflict training. The intercultural conflict approaches that will be reviewed are: the conflict face...

A 12-category coding system, the Intimate Negotiation Coding System (INCS), was used to analyze the verbal sequential processes of high marital adjustment couples and low marital adjustment couples. The results of Markov chain and Lag sequential analyses indicated that high marital adjustment interaction is primarily characterized by significant se...

The SAGE Handbook of Conflict Communication: Integrating Theory, Research, and Practice is the first resource to synthesize key theories, research, and practices of conflict communication in a variety of contexts. Editors John Oetzel and Stella Ting-Toomey, as well as expert researchers in the field, emphasize constructive conflict management from...

This study sought to test the underlying assumption of the face-negotiation theory that face is an explanatory mechanism for culture’s influence on conflict behavior. A questionnaire was administered to 768 participants in 4 national cultures (China, Germany, Japan, and the United States) asking them to describe interpersonal conflict. The major fi...

The study examined the effects of national culture, self-construals, and power distance on face concerns and facework behaviors during conflicts with parents and siblings. A total of 449 participants of 4 national cultures completed a questionnaire in their respective languages: Germany, Japan, Mexico, and the United States. The questionnaire measu...

This study explores dialectical contradictions in marriage and identifies the communication strategies used to manage the dialectical tensions. Qualitative analysis of transcripts from separate semi‐structured interviews with husbands and wives focused on two dialectical contradictions: autonomy‐connection and openness‐closedness. Themes of the aut...

The purpose of the current study was to investigate face and facework during conflicts across four national cultures: China, Germany, Japan, and the United States. A questionnaire was administered to 768 participants in the 4 national cultures, in their respective languages, to measure 3 face concerns and 11 facework behaviors. The major findings o...

The purpose of the current study was to explore the effects of ethnic background, sex, and self‐construal types on conflict styles among African Americans, Asian Americans, European Americans, and Latina(o) Americans. Self‐construal, or self‐image, is composed of two aspects: an independent self and an interdependent self (Markus & Kitayama, 1991,...

This study examined the influence of ethnic background, ethnic identity, and cultural identity on conflict styles among African Americans, Asian Americans, European Americans, and Latino(a) Americans. Panethnic factor analysis yielded four dimensions of ethnic identity: ethnic belonging, fringe, intergroup interaction, and assimilation. A second-or...

This study explores how ethnic identity influences communication expectations among Asian Americans. The results of this study indicate two ethnic identity dimensions: ethnic pride and ethnic exclusivity. Ethnic exclusivity interacted with the ethnicity of potential dating partners to influence relational expectations. Overall, the findings indicat...

Face influences conflict behavior, because, in any conflict situation, conflict parties have to consider protecting self-interest conflict goals and\or honoring or attacking another person’s conflict goals. Conflict is an ideal forum for face-threatening and face-saving behaviors. The objective of this article is three-fold: first, to provide an up...

Individualism-collectivism has a direct effect on communication styles and an indirect effect that is mediated through self construals and values. It was hypothesized that cultural individualism-collectivism, self construals, and values would have separate effects on individuals’use of low- and high-context communication styles. As predicted, the r...

describe the rules and norms which guide Chinese communication / [define] communication and conceptualizing the process of communication in Chinese culture / examine the characteristics of Chinese communication: implicit communication, listening-centeredness, politeness, the insider effect on communication, and face-directed communication strategie...

The present study examined the relationship between cultural variability and facework strategies. Responses to the individualism-collectivism items, strategy items, and face concern items were factor analyzed. Data were collected from university students in Japan and the United States. Results indicated that there are two dimensions regarding indiv...

The goal of this book is to provide a forum for theorists and researchers to engage in an open dialogue concerning face and facework interaction. More specifically, the book serves a dual purpose: (1) to raise issues and to extend some of the current ideas in face and facework research in the cross-cultural and interpersonal settings, and (2) to il...

The purpose of the study was to examine the influence of cultural variability and self-monitoring on conflict communication styles. Specifically, the cultural variability dimension of individualism-collectivism was used as the key theoretical dimension in explaining conflict style differences between Taiwan and the United States. In addition, the p...

The purpose of this study was to examine cultural variability influence on intimacy expressions of love commitment, disclosure maintenance, ambivalence, and conflict in France, Japan, and the United States. The MANOVA analyses revealed significant main effects for culture type (France. Japan, and the United States) and for gender type (male versus...

The objective of this study was to test Ting-Toomey's (1988a) theory on conflict face-negotiation. More specifically, the study examined the relationship between face maintenance dimensions and conflict styles in Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States. The results were summarized as follows: (1) Cultural variability of individuali...

The purpose of this study was to examine relational themes, patterns of discourse which focus on partners' interpretations of their interaction, in intercultural relationships. More specifically, two research questions were addressed: What themes emerge in intercultural relationships? and How do specific themes relate to intercultural relationship...

Inspired by trends towards increasing attention to peace studies and an emphasis in international relations on placing communication at the center of diplomacy and negotiation, this book presents 13 papers divided into three main sections. The first section contains conceptual selections that address general theory. The second section more clearly...

Dealing with the relationships among language, communication, and culture, the 12 papers in this collection are divided into three parts. The first part deals with the critical issues related to language acquisition, context, and cognition. The second part presents an array of perspectives in analyzing the role of language in comparative cross-cult...

Hypotheses were generated regarding the relationship among communication openness, satisfaction, and length of employment in Japanese organizations. A questionnaire was administered to employees of Japanese organizations in the Tokyo area. The data revealed that upward, downward, and lateral communication openness were associated positively with bo...

Explores cross-cultural attitudinal differences toward rhetorical sensitivity style. Finds that French subjects preferred a direct rhetorical sensitivity style; Japanese subjects expressed a moderate orientation towards the use of rhetorical sensitivity style; and United States subjects preferred an indirect rhetorical sensitivity style of communic...

Our purpose in writing this book is to examine the theoretical influence of culture on interpersonal communication. The book is an attempt to summarize the work we have conducted on culture and communication over the past six or seven years, as well as to provide a theoretical framework for guiding future research and the interpretation of past res...

NATURAL AUDIENCES: QUALITATIVE RESEARCH OF MEDIA USES AND EFFECTS edited by Thomas R. Lindlof (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1987—$37.50) COMMUNICATION, GENDER, AND SEX ROLES IN DIVERSE INTERACTION CONTEXTS edited by Lea P. Stewart and Stella Ting-Toomey (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1987—$35.00) QUESTIONNAIRES: DESIGN AND USE by Doug R. Berdie, et al. (Metuchen, NJ:...

call attention to the central role that culture plays in our assumptions of intimate conflict in cross-cultural and intercultural personal relationship development / [introduce] intimate conflict assumptions and intimate conflict processes / [draw] practical implications for engaging in effective management of intercultural intimate conflict / [pro...

The guiding principle in preparing for this volume was to bring together current theoretical and research studies that compare interpersonal communication across cultures. This volume includes both refereed chapters and invited chapters. The volume is divided into two sections. Part I presents recent conceptualizations and research findings in co...

Contenido: Cultura y Comunicación en Contexto Organizacionales; Estereotipo y Esquemas; Teoría del Conflicto; Conflictos Administrativos; Culturas Nacionales y Organizacionales en la Solución de Conflictos: Japón, E.U.A. y Mediación; Poder Normativo y Potencial Conflictivo en Relaciones Intergrupales; Toma de Decisiones; Cultura Subjetiva y Toma Or...

A study was conducted to examine core Japanese communication patterns, as viewed from insider and outsider perspectives. Using a semistructured interview method and a theme analysis method, four Japanese cultural communication themes were uncovered during the four month study: (1) communication style--concealment versus revelation, (2) communicatio...