Tag Archive for Body Language

Summary – Chapter 1

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In this opening chapter we have looked at some body language primers. Hopefully you have grabbed a hold of the frame of mind necessary to read body language. Not all reading comes naturally, but then again, reading people is not as difficult as it can be made out to be. We have looked at how to use this book; as not only a guide, but as a tool, an encyclopedia. It might not flow exactly in your ideal, but of which, can be used in varying sequences and be revisited from time to time as a refresher. In fact, this book should be revisited again and again. You will be surprised just how much you pick up the second and third time around!

We have learned that it is the first four minutes that often dictate life-long impression we have with others, how fortune tellers are like horses, how to read someone cold, how the mind mirrors through its neurons and the body and brain are linked, the vital importance of the limbic systems and how it is paramount in creating honest body language, and what it really means to read people. We also covered the difference between “OK” types and “Not OK” types as well as introverted versus extroverted, and how this can affect body language. From there it became more obvious to understand how to get the desired results with our new tools and how it can be difficult to fake body language due to microexpressions. Finally, we advanced a ‘fail safe’ technique which implied that looking at people as if they were nude can tell us a lot about body language and helps make reading a more common sense practice.

Using Body Language To Get The Results You Want!

by  • March 5, 2013 • 3 Comments

A confident posture includes having the shoulders back and upright, head up and level and a well balances body. Confident people move freely without hesitation, make appropriate gestures, and hold smiles often. People that lack confidence will walk with a hunched back, they will be careless with their arm gestures, will sulk and frown, and their head will droop. They often appear sad or tired and the frown lines in their face will depend with time producing permanent wrinkles. Often they aren’t much fun to be around and seem to be taking every chance to drag you others around them down. However, far from acting consciously, people who lack confidence are acting out of habit and routine.

Subconscious facial expressions can make people think you don't like them which might be opposite to what you intend. In this case, we see scorn when perhaps what was intended was deep thought.

Subconscious facial expressions can make people think you don’t like them which might be opposite to what you intend. In this case, we see ‘scorn.’

Part of the power behind body language stems from its direct connection to someone’s overall disposition, how life has treated them, and also how they treat life in return. Since all people face challenges confident body language tells others if a person actively takes control of their life or lets life push them around.

If you meet a “Not OK” person you will subconsciously feel uneasy or suspicious. Sometimes people put on a good temporary show but within a few minutes their bodies relax only to revert back to their natural dispositions. We instinctively know this and read it, but don’t always bring it to our active consciousness to process it. Have you ever asked others what your body language portrays? Do you hold certain gestures that make you look unapproachable or negative?

One of my wife’s friends consistently receives negative comments about her scowls despite being an extremely kind hearted person. However her natural face appears ‘bitchy’, so much so that it’s her defining feature and one that is joked about by those that really know her. This example raises an important point. Our bodies leak information without our consent and when we aren’t receiving the results we want, we should do something proactive about it. From an outside perspective, people think that her face really shows inner turmoil and then discount her kindheartedness even on a first impression. It is her facial expressions that set the tone with others, even before she has the chance to speak. She then must work extra diligently to reverse the first impression she creates. People naturally perceive those that hold negative facial expressions and body language to be holding a grudge. This story outlines the importance of monitoring our gestures and facial expressions to convey the types of feelings we wish to show the world and achieve the results we desire. Thus, while I don’t know this person well enough to explain this trait to her without offending her, others have, but with only mediocre results. At least now she is aware of what impression she makes, so she can resolve matters more quickly if she senses negativity from others. With just a modest change she could reap immense results.

The point here is that if you hold negative body language, it’s not yet too late to fix things so hold your head up high and watch people around you begin to treat you better. Sit more upright, swing your arms, smile more and despite inner feelings, start acting happy. Body language is a great way to ‘fake it until you make it’. Holding confident body language makes us feel confident so let’s use our bodies to change the patterns in our brains.

OK vs. Not Ok Personality Traits

by  • March 5, 2013 • 6 Comments

Dr. Eric Berne, the founder of the psychological school of Transactional Analysis (abbreviated TA) coined the terms “OK” and “Not OK” to describe two essential types of people. The “OK” types are secure and confident in who they are and carry little emotional “baggage” whereas the “Not OK” types are insecure about themselves and often feel inferior. Dr. Berne also helped to define certain terms that were important in studying social interaction. When two people meet eventually one of the persons will acknowledge the presence of the other person. He called this the “transactional stimulus” where a “transaction” refers to a conversation between people. When people interact to each other, they talk or express nonverbal body communication, they issue a “transactional response”. Those that are (obsessively) interested in social dynamics often begin to think of interactions down to the unit. These definitions, however, are merely presented for interest sake, since for our purpose they aren’t terribly important.

Berne’s approach was much different from that of Freud who though perhaps too simplistically, that he could learn everything about someone just by asking them, and then listening to their response. Berne felt that therapists could learn more about people by watching their body language and facial expressions instead of words by themselves.

Eric Berne published a very popular and interesting book called Games People Play in 1964. To date it has sold over five million copies. The book describes the function and dysfunction that happens in human interactions. Without getting into too much detail, let’s look at one example of a game.

The example I wanted to bring forward makes light of how we control our interactions with people by the tone and words we choose. As a boss, if we attack an employee by taking up a controlling “parental” role we will normally elicit a childish tantrum in return. The real way to deal with adult situations is to attack them from a constructive integrity based position where we act like “adults”. Adult actions normally yield adult responses, but as we see in Berne’s book, not everyone uses the best framework to work through life. As he sees it, some people get stuck between three ego states, the “Parent”, “Child” and “Adult”. Berne outlines well over ninety games that people play, some good, but mostly bad. He defines games as social interactions that are counterproductive. Today, there are few ardent followers that use the TA approach in any rigid way, even the ego states have been scrutinized, however, the principles of the method do help us look at how we run our lives and the ways we hold ourselves back through games we play with ourselves and others. He also ran a results-based framework which was new to psychiatry at the time and says that if it’s not working for you and you aren’t getting the results you want, change it!

The Types Of People You Will Read – Introverts Vs. Extroverts

by  • March 5, 2013 • 5 Comments

There are essentially two types of personalities that exist in the world around us. They are introverted and extroverted each type have a subset called “OK” and “Not OK” (which is discussed next). Introverted describes a personality that is inward thinking, they recover from life by being with themselves and reflecting. The will normally enjoy nature or a good book, prefer quiet areas where not a lot of people distract them. These people will often be found alone and prefer jobs that don’t involve a lot of people and that they can do independently. Being introverted doesn’t mean that a person is antisocial and it’s not a personality deficiency, it only means that someone is more comfortable being alone with their own thoughts than being in the spotlight. Extroverted people are the very opposite. They find social situations necessary and stimulating and “recharge” by hanging out with friends or going out. The like being in busy places like malls or city cores, in acting outwardly and garnering attention through telling jokes or acting funny.

Physiologists now believe that there is an actual physical difference between the nervous system of introverts and extroverts. Introverts are more easily stimulated by social interactions and quickly become oversaturated to the point where they become agitated and feel a need to withdraw. Extroverts can’t find enough stimulation and constantly need to find people to be around, and socialize with, and use social contact to feel satisfied. How you use your time most often will tell you which of the two personality types you are. With every classification, there are variants however, and people can be a mix of the two or can fall in at the extremities.

The body language of introverts in public places will be rigid; they will zone out more quickly or find quiet places and park themselves. They are at ease being alone even when at parties and might even take breaks away from the noise to ‘chill out’. They’ll spend more time at home and less time in nightclubs. The nonverbal language of the introvert will show more closed body positions. Their shoulders will pull in, they will orient their bodies away from others, they might be less animated and they will often be the first to stop speaking and resort to listening or observing others instead. They might even keep their distance more frequently, be soft spoken, initiate touch on others less and avoid eye contact. Extroverts are the opposite and tend to spontaneously turn toward people, they will start up conversations with random people, they will touch more in conversation and talk more frequently to keep the conversation going. They’ll use more gestures in speech in attempts to draw attention to themselves and generally take up more space. They will also tend to move about a room more and jump from person to person trying to get as much stimulation from others as possible. A quick test to verify extroversion from introversion is to watch how people break gaze. Generally speaking an introvert will break their gaze by looking to the right whereas extroverts will break their gaze to the left. This fact alone suggests that the differences we see between these two personality types has less to do with environment and more to do with how the brains are hardwired.

To work productively with the introverted, formulate groups as small as possible. For the introverted one on one represents the best scenario. Set up meetings in quiet areas with little distraction. Maintain as much space as possible, talk quietly, reduce eye contact, use touch infrequently or not at all. To work with the extroverted do the exact opposite. Talk louder with more expressions, touch frequently, be dynamic, move in closer, and give plenty of eye contact. Extreme extroverts and extreme introverts will be happiest at the end of their respective spectrum.

Above: Susan Cain on the power of introverts in TED talks.

Virtual Body Language

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The original emoticon for happiness. It's called a SMILE! :)

The original emoticon for happiness. It’s called a SMILE! 🙂

Dr. Yee and his colleagues conducted research out of Stanford University in 2007 into the online gaming industry. He revealed some interesting findings as they apply to massive role playing games such as “Second Life.” In these games, users create personalized characters and interact with other players in a rule-free environment. Characters are free to interact as they please, have houses, automobiles, jobs and attend social gatherings. There are no set parameters to these interactive games yet Dr. Yee found that users still followed set non-verbal rules. That is, male characters tended to hold larger distances between other males and females tended to hold less distance between themselves and other females. Male characters also maintained less eye contact with other males whereas females did not. His research also draws attention to other social norms such as avoiding interactions with more eccentric characters. In one case, it was a naked character in a city park setting.

It seems therefore that non-verbal body language norms are so engrained in us through our culture and genetics that we bring these into environments that aren’t even real showing that body language is potent and ubiquitous!

The Benefits Of Subconscious Mirroring

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If you haven't yawned yet, you've at least had to suppress it!

If you haven’t yawned yet, you’re active mind is working hard to suppress it!

The more attention we give to an action during observation, the more likely we are to copy the behaviour. Take traveling abroad, for example, where a constant exposure to accents eventually sees us adopting it presumably to fit in better. It’s been shown too, that the more we imitate other people, the more we tend to like them and presumably the more they like us. It works in reverse as well since the more we like them the more we imitate them. Mirroring and imitation therefore is a salient characteristic in our nonverbal communication and shows others that we like and are connecting with them.

In 2000 Swedish researcher Dr. Ulf Dimberg exposed volunteers to frowning, smiling and expressionless faces. They were then told to react to them in various ways. When they saw a smiling face, they were sometimes asked to smile back and other times to frown back. The researchers found that it was difficult for the subjects to remain expressionless to a face that appeared happy or angry and even more difficult to smile at sad faces or make sad faces at laughing faces. The theory was advanced that our unconscious minds exerts much more control over our faces then we think. While it was somewhat possible to control the subject’s reactions, it required a great deal of mental power to reverse their natural tendencies. The study showed that even when we could control our emotions, minute spontaneous twitches still revealed true responses, and in every case, mirroring was the natural tendency.

The research on the reasoning behind the mirror reflex remains obscure for the moment, but this doesn’t mean we should ignore it. In fact, we should be very careful about our facial expressions and gestures since they will necessarily have a profound effect on others. Our expressions and body gestures illicit similar responses from others, so if we want to make people happy, we should smile more and use more expressive body language. In turn, others around us will naturally mimic our gestures.

Faking Body Language And Microexpressions

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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.

How And Why The Body Reveals Emotions: The Brain-Body Interplay

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BodyLanguageProjectCom - AmygdalaMany theories exist about the human emotional brain. They range from more inward brain centered origins to more reflex or environmental oriented origins. That is, one theory says that emotions come from the inside whereas others say that emotions are created by reacting to what happens in the outside world. Which of the two is correct? Where do our emotions actually come from? How do these related to our body language? We cover these next.

Our amygdala is a part of the brain that has been shown to be the core structure of our emotions and it is closely tied to our body function. The amygdala decodes the information received from our senses and initiates adaptive behaviours through connections to the motor system (our body). Plenty of research shows how this area of the brain is particularly adept at reading facial emotions and decoding them. Other research has identified a structure called the “mirror neuron” found in the brain that triggers a mirror response and causes us to imitate facial expressions. Mirror neurons work regardless of our consciously awareness and in so doing induces us to imitate other people’s expressions. This partially explains why we are negatively affected by people in our company whom persistently scowl or frown. In the long term, negativity usually grates on us to the extent that we often feel a need to actively address others who hold these positions, and if that address proves impossible, we resort to isolating ourselves from them. We do so to protect ourselves from negative and destructive emotions that can permeate our thoughts. Attitudes exempted, even facial expressions of the people we surround ourselves with play a big role on how we tend to see the world. The contagion of negative emotions, thoughts and body language is probably a large player in the recent success of the positive thinking movement. Here, a reverse tact is used to “think” positive, and so be positive, and promises that success and riches will follow.

The brain and body are closely linked and it is difficult to “untie” them from one another. Telling a lie is difficult when holding honest gestures, such as palms exposed, and similarly, it is difficult to have a negative attitude while dancing spryly. The actions the body performs tends to bleed through into the mind and create positive or negative feelings. Even laughing, done for no good reason, can put someone in a good mood because it helps release all sorts of positive hormones.

Body language, for this reason, is very powerful. As we learn the gestures associated with opened and closed minds, we can create positive changes in ourselves. We can even induce emotional changes in others through the use of mirroring, as we shall see in a later chapter. Just by uncrossing the arms, or unfurrowing the brow, can make us not only appear more open and happy, but also make us feel that way. Smiling, even if one is not in the mood, can be particularly effective because it can set the framework by which an interaction might take place. So to provide a quick answer to our initial question, emotions likely have inward and outward forces with varying strengths. With some practice we can either resist outward stimuli, or adopt them, or can induce inward stimuli and emit them. Having the ability to spot reasons for bad moods and body language can allow us to replace them with more positive body language helping us feel happier.

How Fortune Tellers Are Like Hans The Horse

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There's an entire subtext of information just waiting to be read!

There’s an entire subtext of information just waiting to be read!

Fortune tellers are particularly adept at intuitively reading other people’s body language, even if they aren’t consciously aware of their talent. In fact, most fortune tellers will probably deny that they use any body language at all in their predictions. However, after reading this book, follow along with them and you will see that it’s fairly easy to read along with them, or at least follow their train of thought as they pull at straws. You can often tell when the person being read gives off certain clues to indicate (perhaps subconsciously) when they are on the right track. A large part of telling fortunes relies on people’s natural desires to please others, and in this respect, willing participants are fairly generous.

In the late 1800’s a German based high school teacher Von Osten was studying phrenology which is a now discredited theory that intelligence, character and personality traits are based on the shapes and bumps on someone’s head. Van Osten was also interested in the study of animal intelligence and believed that people had underestimated the reasoning skills of animals. That’s when he began tutoring a cat, horse and a bear in the ways of mathematics. Predictably, the cat was aloof to his teachings and the bear was downright hostile, but the stallion named Hans showed promise. With more focused lessons, Hans was able to learn to use his hoof to tap out numbers written on a blackboard. With practice, Hans was reliably able to perform this ‘feet’ for any number under ten.

The Curious Case of Clever Hans. Credit: Public Domain.

“Unconscious cuing” has been reported in more than just a horse. ‘The Curious Case of Clever Hans’ has lead psychologists and animal communication experts to look for the phenomenon in dogs who follow their owners’ facial expressions. Photo credit: Public Domain.

Von Osten steeped things up a notch by drawing out basic arithmetic problems such as square roots, and fractions. To Van Osten’s delight, Hans was able to keep up with the new teachings and proved to be a very clever horse which helped to maintain Von Osten’s original assertions about animal intelligence. Happy with his progress, Von Osten began to tour Germany with Hans so that others could enjoy his talents.

Han’s could answer simple questions such as “What is the square root of sixteen?” by following up with four taps, “What is the sum of two and three?” with five taps coming from Hans. Hans was also capable of spelling out words with each tap representing a letter of the alphabet in sequence. Thus, an “a” would be one tape and a “b” would be two taps. While Hans wasn’t always one hundred percent accurate he was on par with an average highschooler’s scores, which impressed his crowds.

Naturally, skeptics grew larger and larger. Germany’s board of education then requested an investigation into Hans’ abilities. Von Osten agreed as he had nothing to hide and knew there was no fraud to expose. The ‘Hans Commission’ was assembled including zoologists, psychologist, a horse trainer, several school teachers and a circus manger. After extensive testing, however, they concluded that there was no trickery involved and that Hans’ responses where genuine.

Having found no trickery the Commission passed the investigation onto Oskar Pfungst, a psychologist. He had some unique ideas on how to get to the bottom of things. As usual, Hans answered all the questions posed by Von Osten well under normal conditions but when asked to step further away however, Hans’s success rate dropped inexplicably. The success rate also dropped to close to zero when the questioner wasn’t himself aware of the answer. The same result came when the questioner was hidden from view. Hans’ success therefore, was severely tied to his ability to see the person who knew the correct answer.

Pfungst continued the research but turned his focus onto the people that were interacting with Hans. He noticed that there were differences in breathing, posture and facial expressions as Hans tapped out his answer. As Hans neared to correct answer, the handlers would increase the tension they held in their body language which would tip off Hans. Once the final tap had been made, the tension suddenly disappeared from the person and so Hans took this cue to mean it was time to stop tapping.

While Hans was discredited from being able to do math, he was very learned at reading human body language. It revealed that horses had a keen ability to read non verbal cues perhaps as part of their social interactions with other horses throughout their evolution. Hans’ ability to read body language might also help explain why horse whisperers are able to “talk” to horses. Von Osten never fully accepted this explanation and continued to tour Germany with his show and remained quite successful even though Hans never really had any comprehension of math.

What fortune tellers do isn’t much different from what Hans’ the horse did. Tellers are able to pick up on subtle body language clues and navigate these cues throughout a reading. They pick up on small gestures that indicate they are on the right track which further fuels them and induces the person being read to loosen up. They also rely on probability statistics to make educated guesses and knowledge of human nature and psychology. What makes them even more believable is the fact that some aren’t even consciously aware of their ability to read body language which helps them keep their techniques a secret. This gives them an advantage in fooling the gullible since it’s much easier to deceive others when you first have yourself convinced. People being read also have a positive expectation that they will be read correctly and play into readers more readily often being quite charitable even when their predictions are only remotely accurate. It would be much harder for a reader to accurately read a skeptic, but any good teller will avoid reading these people. Fortune tellers have also been accused of being vague and general which could be accurate for just about anyone. Fortune tellers hit on many different subjects often contradicting themselves until they hit on information that sticks.

So before you get taken by a fortune teller remember how Hans and his owner where able to amaze so many. Even after the tests showed that Hans was reading his master’s body language his show continued to go on for years un-deterred and even grew more in popularity as time passed.

What Does It Mean To Read People?

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Reading people involves connecting all their signals, both verbal and nonverbal, throwing out the junk and connecting the rest to create meaning. The full story can only be told when all or most the factors about your target are connected. Research has shown that it is far easier to get away with a written lie over one told over the phone. From those facts you might guess that telling a lie in person is the hardest. Each additional communication channel that is added gives us more clues as to what is really going on.

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If we could adding information, such as a person’s heart rate and sweat gland activity which is the primary channels using in lie detector machines we could be even more accurate. Therefore, just using one channel, and ignoring others, won’t allow us to do our jobs as accurately as using all the available channels.

A classic boredom cue cluster, fingers tapping, blank face looking away.

A classic boredom cue cluster, fingers tapping, blank face looking away.

When we say that a person is “perceptive” what we really mean is that they are able to read the contradictions between what someone is saying and their body language. For example, someone might fidget, avoid eye contact and touch their nose but still be delivering a true statement. The reason is that, at times, these conflicting signals come from ambivalence, or outright uncertainty. Other times body language leaks through fatigue or other anomalous stimuli. The expert body language reader will intuitively understand the roots of nonverbal signals primarily by examining people through context and then relate the body language seen to actual meaning. For example, a good body language reader will properly connect fidgeting, tapping toes, and scratching the side of the nose with being tired, which is the right conclusion, rather than lying, one that is fabricated, because they will note the right circumstances surrounding the nonverbal language.
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To accurately read body language we need to connect the perception we have of the situation with the body language present, then use context, coupled with our know history of the person we are reading (i.e. their disposition and habits, or their “baseline”) to determine what is really going on. Advanced reading of body language is not simple, the process happens quickly and continuously.