Italians expect communication to carry feeling. Expressing enthusiasm, concern, frustration, or warmth is not a loss of control—it is a sign that you are genuinely engaged and that you mean what you say. Communication that is emotionally flat or deliberately detached is hard for Italians to trust because it conceals the person behind the words.
When your Italian counterpart expresses emotion, they are giving you real information about their position and their level of investment. When they see no emotion from you, they wonder what you are hiding.
This does not mean everything is dramatic—Italians calibrate emotional expression to the situation. But the baseline expectation is that communication should feel alive, warm, and human. Emotional neutrality signals disengagement, not professionalism.
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