Causes of Report and Rapport Conversational Style

The culture indicates the lifestyle of the people within a group and denotes the values, beliefs, artefacts, behaviour and communication. Culture is learned being passed down from generation to generation, providing guidance for ethical and moral behaviour. Gender communication can be considered to be a sub-culture since it is passed down from generation in the interactions that children have with their parents and other adults. This idea appears to validate the theory of nurture and its effect on communication. Tannen (2001) has shown that the role of culture is critical to the understating of the communication skills of a person. Tone, aggressive speech, and interruption of the speaker all depend on cultural background. In Asian culture, aggression is not considered to be appropriate behaviour, with both men and women showing politeness in their conversation with others. Depending on status, tone is used to indicate displeasure.

Recent studies on structural differences in the brain of men and women account for the greater verbal fluency by showing that the corpus callosum (the huge crescent-shaped band of nerve fibres connecting the brain hemispheres) is larger in women than in men (Lippa, 2002). Since parts of the corpus callosum as well as the anterior commissure, another connector, appear to be larger in women they are thought to permit better communication between hemispheres. Anne Campbell's (1989) work on brain lateralization supports the theory of brain structure differences accounting for differences in gender communication. The planum temporale, a region of the brain involved in verbal ability has been shown to have greater symmetry in females (Allen and Gorksi, 2002). Campbell concluded that the female brain is therefore better organized for communication being less lateralized with functions spread over both sides of their brains. This she states explains the reason why women use words more expressively than men. Based on brain differences women are better communicators than men, a difference that probably existed at birth.

Here are some pictures that show the differences in the structures of male and female brain which affect in the conversational style in the gender communication.