An experiment only possible at INSEAD

You can understand a lot about what a person is saying without actually understanding a single spoken word. In 'Social Psychology of Management' class today, we proved this with an experiment. The class broke up into pairs with each person paired with another who spoke a foreign language fluently. As one person told a story in their foreign language, the other person had to make out the emotions (e.g. frustrated, happy, angry, etc). Though identifying emotions was easier with some languages than with others, it was always possible to see what the person was feeling. In everyday conversations this seems harder probably because we are too distracted with the spoken words and not paying enough attention to the raw emotions.
For those who are curious, languages such as Russian and Finnish were harder to identify underlying emotions compared with Spanish, French, and Italian. No wonder they are called 'Romance' languages.