Tag Archive for Appeasement

The Forehead Bow, Smiling And Childlike Playfulness

by  • March 6, 2013 • 0 Comments

This interest posture is hard to miss.

This interest posture is hard to miss.

The forehead bow is a posture done by artificially lowering the head, then looking up at a man from under the eyebrows in a “come hither” fashion. It has roots in the full bow done as a greeting gesture since it exposes the top of the head making it vulnerable to attack. Just like neck and wrist displays, it indicates that trust is present within courtship. It also comes off as a childlike gesture primarily because children are shorter than adults and habitually peer up at them. As we age, we recall these gestures and go back to them when wish to revive juvenile submissive feelings. The opposite to the forehead bow happens by tilting the head back and looking down one’s nose at someone, which is a judgment posture and is seen negatively.

Smiling frequently can sometimes be sexual, but accompanying signals must be cataloged to create certainty. Women will smile for a great variety of reasons and will smile regularly to appease men for no other reason besides habit. Smiling is a natural part of being a woman and while smiling alone is submissive, it doesn’t necessarily indicate sexual interest. Accompanying signals must adjoin smiling for it to be a true sexual signal. If smiling is done over a shoulder, with pouting lips and partly closed eyes, as in the sideways glance, it should be taken as a sexual cue, but absent, should be construed only as a regular appeasement gesture and nothing more.

Tickling and other play related actions habitually show up during courtship.

Tickling and other play related actions habitually show up during courtship.

The final most common type of submissive signal is childlike playfulness which isn’t a type of posture at all, but it is a form of nonverbal behaviour so it is included here. Stealing a hat, playful teasing, tickling, playing hide and seek or peek-a-boo around objects are forms of play and submission. Acting like a child shows that a person is ready to let their guard down and feel that no threat is present. Threat is a recurring theme as it relates to courtship because a big part of submission is trusting that a man will not abuse the power he is potentially about to be given by a woman. Women begin by providing submission is small doses to see exactly how it is handled. Should she trust him at great lengths without prior history, she will have set herself up for hurt or worse, either emotionally or physically. The act of sex is a risky undertaking for both sexes, but particularly for women, and while we have many ways to reduce the risks in our current society, we still hold the evolutionary hardwiring to fear all possible repercussions.

Above: The “forehead bow” or looking up through the forehead is a childhood throwback where little children would look up at their parents from beneath them. It is a submissive posture that is meant to arouse a caring and kind man, but more importantly, it serves to induce protective feelings from men. The childlike playfulness of the image it portrays is meant to create warm and fussy feelings in men so they are more willing to take care of women. Many more tips and information in the Ebook Body Language Project: Dating, Attraction and Sexual Body Language.

The Purpose Of Humour, Bonding And Laughing

by  • March 5, 2013 • 0 Comments

A 1988 study by researcher Holdaway followed British police officers over two years with respect to humour and how it helps maintain social norms within the workplace and build cohesion between officers. Stories and jokes between new recruits and existing members helped transfer attitudes and feelings that were appropriate for the work environment. In essence, humour was use to welcome people in and also instruct them about how things work and what are the office norms. The research found that delivering messages with humour helps do it in a nonthreatening way.

Smiles and laughter are often mentioned in the same breath, but their origins and purpose come from quite different places. The smile stems from an appeasement gesture rather than playfulness as we saw previously while laughter appears to stem from humour. Some recent research shows that this is only one facet of the laugh. Dr. Robert Provine a psychologist from the University of Maryland measured laughs in shopping malls and on sidewalks and found that laughing came at the expense of comments that were far from humorous. Comments such as “I see your point” and “put those cigarettes away” caused people to burst into laughter showing that laughter is more of a way to bond and formulate social relationships then purely as the result of jokes. In fact, only ten to twenty percent of laughter came from anything that even resembled something funny, showing that it is actually the person that is humorous rather than the actual comment. In other words, people were laughing to maintain bonds with the joke teller instead of as a response to the actual joke.

He also found that subordinate people will laugh simply to appease more dominant people, and that dominant people exclude themselves from the laugh so as to maintain their dominance. Controlling laughter therefore, can help control our dominance or submission to others, as well as show our acceptance or rejection of others. Therefore, a polite laugh shows that we are at least “onboard” with a person even though we might not totally agree that what they have said is in fact funny.

Laughter is a form of mirroring and communicates mutual liking and well-being. It can also be used to reduce the harshness of comments or even to take comments back. Humour is an innate vocalization that fosters a sense of community and can help in learning and in creativity. It helps break down walls between different people and can act like a social lubricant to bind people together. Laughter is thirty times more likely to happen in a social setting rather than alone and studies have shown that people don’t really seem to care if the laugh is fake or real, they still tend to like people more when they laugh versus doing nothing at all. Laughing helps us build bonds and even fake laughs help because at least it shows that we are trying.

Why Sometimes Eye Contact Is Bad

by  • March 5, 2013 • 0 Comments

A 2006 study by Stirling University psychologists found that children who were instructed to avoid eye contact while considering their response to a question had a seventy-two percent chance of answering correctly but only a fifty percent chance of answered correctly when they had not been told to look away. One of the theories advanced to explain this finding suggests that looking at human faces, which are complex and information rich, requires a lot of mental processing and that this might disrupt thinking. So next time you want a child (or anyone) to provide a correct answer, instead of forcing them to be polite and maintain eye contact, allow them the freedom to cast their gaze wherever it might fall so they can better process the information. The research shows that children were justified all along by avoiding eye contact when posed difficult questions.

Eye aversion during complex thought is just one example of why sometimes eye contact is bad. Another says that eye aversion controls hierarchy and many species of animals have evolved eye aversion as a function of appeasement gestures. Primates will use direct stares as part of their threat display which is a precursor to direct physical aggression. Averting the eyes altogether or looking down and away with brief glances in the direction of the aggressor can serve to eliminate an attack response. Eye aversion to reduce physical violence is to the benefit of both parties because it eliminates the chances of serious injury or even death. In most cases the aggressor, having received the signal that he is higher in the ranks, will stop in its tracks and turn away.

Eye aversion is a form of submission and submission is usually all that is desired from most attackers. Simply put, violence is often the byproduct of two individuals who refuse to heed each other’s dominance displays, and of which are naturally fairly evenly matched. When dominance displays include things like strutting, stretching, false charges, chest pounding and so forth can not definitively crown a winner, then the conflict is settled by physical contest. Obviously, the last description could apply to any one species of animals, but it could also apply to people. When neither person backs down, a fight ensues.

Children who avoid eye contact can also avoid being physically abused by other students, although it does nothing to eliminate the problem altogether. It has been said that the only true way to settle a bully down is to give them a bit of their own medicine. Bullies are always trying to pick easy fights to build up their dominance and so tend not to want to fight as much as one would be lead to think. Eye contact between humans and non-humans is also well documented. For example, young children who haven’t yet learned to avoid eye contact with dogs, tend to be attacked more often as the dog perceives the child as an aggressor. By most accounts it is recommended that people avoid direct eye contact when confronted by bears to avoid hostile encounters. Avoiding eye contact switches off the threat response and tells the bear that you do not wish to end the dispute with a physical contest.

In most animal species unwavering gaze is used to display dominance and aggression when it happens between members of the same species. When it happens across species it indicates that a prey has been centered out and the stalk has begun. Looking away and avoiding eye contact is a submissive cue and the least dominant is usually the first one to look away. Knowing this, you can easily test out your own dominance. Just pick a victim and stare directly into their eyes for an extended period of time. Whoever breaks first admits to lower rank. You will see that direct and piercing eye contact lasting any longer than five seconds will create an intense desire to look away. If you find it difficult to stare someone down like this then look at the area just above the eyes, as if the person had a third eye. While we know we aren’t making eye contact, the victim won’t realize the difference. Staring will evoke stress, they will feel prey-like and under attack. Keeping the eyes unblinking or even narrowing them is akin to a predator-prey interaction which will make the dominance display even more powerful. However you decide to experiment, do so at your own risk!

Faking Body Language And Microexpressions

by  • March 5, 2013 • 0 Comments

Is body language a “learnable skill” and can it therefore be faked? The answer is yes and no. The vast majority of the more prevalent body language can be learned. For example, keeping your hands out of your pockets or using the hands expressively to remain honest and open, or keeping the hands away from the face to come off as more confident as easily learned through conscious thought and repetition. However, a new area of study reveals that there is a whole new set of cues that are much more difficult to control, if not impossible.

A furrowed forehead can happen in a split second and reveal negative emotions.

A furrowed forehead can happen in a split second and reveal negative emotions.

These are called microexpressions or microsignals. These signals can be used to decipher liars from truth tellers. Microexpressions appear as furrows, smirks, frowns, smiles and wrinkles and can offer an accurate, though fleeting, window into emotions. These microexpressions are controlled by muscles such as the fontalis, corregator and risorius and they are provoked by underlying emotions that are nearly impossible to control consciously. One of these emotions is the fake smile to show appeasement in lieu of genuine joy or happiness. The fake smile is obvious, as will see later, because the lips are pulled across the mouth, but the muscles controlling the eyes, play no part.

With specialized computer software, researchers have been able to detect these signals. Computers were employed because the signals flash across the face in fractions of seconds making it hard for humans to pick the signals up consciously. Slowing down video on high speed video cameras and playing it back repeatedly to observers can also be used to detect the expressions. So part of the story is that microexpressions are difficult to detect and control but the rest of the story tells us that if they exist (and they do), that we must at some level have evolved the ability to read and detect them. Therefore, we must be cautious about assuming that just because they happen so fast, that they can’t be picked up and conversely that we can easily fake our way through the nonverbal channel. It just might be that the subconscious intuition is hard at work giving us that sixth sense feeling that can’t trust someone despite not quite being able to put to words. The reason, it seems, is a combination of microexpressions and our intuition.

Some researchers will tell us that the face is the easiest part of our bodies to control, but this isn’t entirely true and is a poor excuse for the full story. If our faces were so easily controlled, why have botox treatments to freeze up our faces with low level toxins in order to erase wrinkles? Why not just stop using the muscles altogether and therefore avoid suffering from facial wrinkles during the aging process? The simple answer is that it’s not the simple. While our faces are in fact under a large part under our control, we can’t always be focused on it, lest we not be able to focus on anything else. Not the least of which is controlling our speech. Can you imagine what it would be like to construct sentences free-form while trying to remain expressive but at the same time avoid contracting “inappropriate” facial muscles (whatever they might be)? When we talk or see, or do, our faces naturally respond to what is going on around us because they are closely tied to our mind and our emotions. It is a cause and effect relationship, or even an arms race, and it precisely because the face provides such a vast amount of information, that we are so tuned into reading it.

Other ways to spot a fake is with regards to incongruent body language. That is, language that is inconsistent with either, the words being spoken, and the nonverbal language that accompanies it. Women are particularly adept at reading the whole picture since they are naturally more perceptive, can usually pick up on the subtleties in others more quickly then men and have been shown by research to be able to perform multiples tasks at once. To women, something just won’t seem right, their sense will “tingle.” We call this the “female intuition”, but thankfully, with practice men can develop their skills just as readily and that is what this book is all about.