Tag Archive for Fear Response

Comfort and Discomfort In Detecting Deception

by  • March 6, 2013 • 1 Comment

By keeping a "subject" relaxed, we can measure lying more accurately. Instead of creating lying-language through suspicion, we can uncover lying.

By keeping a “subject” relaxed, we can measure lying more accurately. Instead of creating lying-language through suspicion, we can find out which facts create discomfort – it is discomfort body language that helps uncover the truth.

Ex-FBI agent Joe Navarro explain in his book What everybody is saying that nonverbal cues put out by the limbic mind are paramount to detecting deception. He says that it is the displays of comfort versus discomfort that tells body language readers when someone is telling the truth or lying. When people lie they experience discomfort and “guilt knowledge” which leaks through the body through a person’s fear response, but when they tell the truth they “have no worries.” This approach says that a person uses more emphatic gestures with their hands and arms when they tell the truth, but when they lie they tend to freeze up and lock themselves down. If you see half-hazard attempts to describe events using lack of emphasis and gesturing, or in other words, remain uncommitted, than you can be pretty sure their story is fabricated. Truth tellers try their best to set facts straight and will go on at lengths to accomplish this.

The theory says that someone that is guilty carries negative thoughts with them because by nature, people are honest and think that they are good people. When they harbour bad thoughts though, they find it difficult to achieve comfort. The technique to reading lying as outlined states that a person must be read in low stress environments so that it is possible to measure changes from their baseline to catch stress related discomfort. Grilling someone for the truth has been show to produce “false positives”, meaning people who are actually innocent will actually plead guilty. Innocent suspects have been shown to confess to very serious crimes such as murder simply because they were put under very intense pressure. This is why it is important to establish comfort during all interactions, yet use appropriate questions to uncover the truth.

Overlooking someone suspiciously or presenting leading or accusatory questions will create discomfort, however it won’t show you which information presented leads to changes in nonverbal body language. It is by using relaxed and rapport building body language that allows someone to relax leaving only the information or question to be the variable by which all body language is measured. When scientists conduct research they do their best to keep all factors the same except for one. They call this the dependent variable, and it is by definition what is measured, or in other words what is affected during the experiment. The independent variable is what is manipulated in an experiment. When conducting a “lying experiment”, like all experiments, you want to keep all other variables constant so you can measure one variable against another variable.

Therefore, when we want to uncover lies, we should keep our body language neutral and remain calm while working to present information, details, asking for clarification, and so forth to uncover discomfort. This is why torture techniques don’t work to uncover the truth, they just pull information that the suspect believes the interviewer desires so they will stop badgering them. Just by using suspicious body language or leading questions can put someone on edge and influence their nonverbal communication. Saying things like “I don’t believe you” or “I think you are lying” will create anxious body language which can be misconstrued to be the result of actually being dishonest, when in actual fact is likely due to stress from being mislabeled. To body language reader will gain no useful information from creating anxiety. The rule of thumb therefore is to create and maintain comfort at all times, remain neutral in expression and measure signals of discomfort to uncover information that creates stress.

Remaining Uncommitted

by  • March 6, 2013 • 0 Comments

When people tell the truth they will usually show extra enthusiasm and commit to their story. Liars often start off the same way, but quickly trail off.

When people tell the truth they will usually show extra enthusiasm and commit to their story. Liars often start off the same way, but quickly trail off.

Liars have been noted to be uncommitted to lies. That is, because they have nothing vested in the lie, they remain less than exuberant in their convictions. In other words, the subconscious mind of liars doesn’t allow them to carry forward with enthusiasm. Instead of smashing a fist against a table and raising a voice saying “I didn’t do it!”, liars will instead make much duller motions and use less commitment to them. It is not as if they want to lie, it is the limbic mind that won’t allow them to.

Liars will motion without emphasis, or describe events by trailing off or use weak statements. They might limit arm and hand movement by clasping them together or locking them down on an armrest with such force they turn their knuckles white. The hands might be put out of sight in pockets or under a table where they can’t be read. Reduced movement can be seen throughout the body, not just in the hands. The entire body including the head, arms, feet, and torso can seem to lock in place. People that are telling the truth spend a lot of time and energy in efforts to make the facts known which comes across in their body language and gesturing. Truth tellers are happy to spend as much time as necessary to get everything right. They will often add more detail than required and go over it again and again if necessary. Not emphasizing is linked to the freeze response where the mind clams the body shut and reduces movement so as to draw less attention to it. What is important in lie detection is to compare cues from a baseline. That is, if someone suddenly drops emphasis then you know they’ve lost interest in the topic or are lying. In either case, it will have provided useful information to the body language reader.

In writing this passage, I had just reviewed a video (see bottom posted on the web of a baseball game in which a player leaped head-over-feet clear over the catcher as he came to homeplate to score a run. The catcher, stuck in a fear response, failed to tag the runner. Baseball has an interesting tradition where it is customary for the runner to body-check the catcher at homeplate as he tries to tag for an out. While the catcher braced and ducked with his elbow up to make the tag, the runner jumped over the catcher landing on home plate. The catcher stuck with his elbow up in defense could only convince his mind to bring his arm just close enough to miss the tag! Because his mind feared the body check, he wasn’t able to follow through with what he intended. While this is an interesting fear based response what follows is even more interesting since it helps us read liars. The catcher, realizing he failed to get the out, quickly turns to pursue the runner. One must ask why he would track the runner down if he made the tag? Obviously he hadn’t! But more important that this, is that we know that he knows that he didn’t make the tag! This means that any nonverbal language following the lack of tag, should he dispute it, is read as lying language. To state his case, the catcher chats with the umpire by raising his arms showing how he made the tag. What is revealing, however, is that the catcher only slightly raises his arms instead of doing it with emphasis. Instead of showing the gesture over and over again, the catcher just raises his arms once as if to make a casual rainbow motion with his arms. When his coach shows up with arms flaying and talking with enthusiasm, the catcher quietly exits! The catcher knows that he can’t make a case and so doesn’t put any effort into trying. The difference between the coach and the catcher, is that the catcher knows he’s lying, while the coach isn’t sure. Once more, the coach isn’t actually lying anyway, since he wasn’t there to feel the contact or lack thereof of the catchers mitt and the runner, he’s just acting out an inherent bias – he’s playing the role he was hired to do. Lack of commitment is an important cue to watch for when detecting lies so be careful to watch for it.

Nervous Hands

by  • March 6, 2013 • 1 Comment

Nervous hands clasp to steady.

Nervous hands clasp to steady.

A telltale clue to nervousness is when the hands begin to shake. Since the hands are designed for fine motor control, they are easily affected by a surge of adrenaline stimulated from stress from nervousness or excitement. Any stimulus, good or bad, can stimulating the muscles in the hands to fire out of control creating quivering. The limbic mind driven by fight or flight response is what causes hand shaking which makes the nonverbal cue particularly honest and predictive.

As mentioned even positive events can create shaking, such as an excellent hand in poker or seeing someone we have a deep crush on. Hands more often than not however, will quiver when bad things happen that send us into a fear response such as preparing to take the stage to present in front of an audience, being in a serious car crash or swerving to avoid one at the last minute. When in any sort of confrontation, we can also experience hand shaking. To decide what sort of stimulus, be it fear or excitement that it causing the quivering one doesn’t have to go much further than context. From there, it should be obvious why someone is shaking.

A hand-to-mouth gesture used to placate nervous hands.

A hand-to-mouth gesture used to placate nervous hands.

To disguise handshaking, some people will grasp at objects such as drinking glasses, will clasp their hands together or occupy them with “busy work.” Other times people will steady their uneasy hands by grabbing the hand of a relative, cupped them hand-in-hand at the chest, or thrust them underneath the armpits or in pockets. People who suffer from pronounced handshaking will develop elaborate ritualized gestures to keep their hands from being noticed. They will play with the arms of eye glasses, twirl pencils, or fidget with clothing. To others it will go unnoticed because they will appear as a normal part of their repertoire – their baseline.

Does he always sit on his hands or is he hiding something?

Does he always sit on his hands or is he hiding something?

Teenage girls meeting a celebrity pop singer are often seen fidgeting with their hands as they defy gravity by bouncing up and down. Their hands will often be flung sky-high and they clasp together in excitement. This is nervous energy personified and the hands show the limbic system in overdrive. Watch for this “tell” in a poker game as hands might come together underneath the table to steady each other. Hand shaking in poker, however, can be due to either fear of getting caught bluffing or the excitement good hand. In this case, it is a person’s baseline that helps predict which of the two is really happening. Hand quivering is important only when it deviates from a person’s normal repertoire of actions. For example, if hand quivering suddenly starts up or stops when discussing a particular event, we know that event is the root. It will then be our job to decide why the event caused nervousness or excitement. The same goes for any other cue, be it a new person added to a social gathering, nearing the edge of a cliff (fear of heights), being asked a question that is difficult to answer and so forth.

Origins Of Laughs And Why Laughing Is Addictive

by  • March 5, 2013 • 0 Comments

Some researchers conclude that laughs are a modification of the fear response which they theorize grew out of an historical warning that danger was near. By this theory, the laugh occurs because our brains are scared or frightened into laughing. This helps to explain why we often come to tears when laughing for prolonged periods, why we sometimes laugh when scared, or when we deal with horrific events such as a death by suddenly laughing, instead of a seemingly more appropriate response.

Strangely as it might sound, laughing is usual for people during periods of stress and uncertainty. We just laugh it off. Other theories say that laugh came about through a relaxed open play face which is similarly observed in other primates. Chimpanzees and Barbary macaques, for example, show a similar breathing sound “ahh ahh ahh.” Laughing in other primates comes from mock fighting, and social play and in humans, it first appears at one to two months of age and happens during tickling or sudden appearance of novel stimuli as in the peek-a-boo game. My son’s first laughs came about through fear. It was the only way we could get him to laugh. Even now, he laughs when startled such as in the peek-a-boo game.

Researcher Robert Provine describes the laugh as a series of short vowel-like notes or syllables, each being about seventy-five milliseconds in duration that repeat at regular intervals separated by about two hundred ten milliseconds. Laughs go something like “ha-ha-ha” or “ho-ho-ho” but never “ha-ho-ha-ho”. We can see other variations though like “cha-ha-ha” or “ha-ha-ho”. Laughs also tend to punctuate points or sentences and rarely find themselves mid sentence. His research outlines even more complexities in the laugh and if you are particularly interested in laugh structure I urge you to seek out his research, it is quite fascinating.

Laughing can become addictive too, since it releases natural pain killers called endorphins which give us a natural high. Thrill seekers such as sky divers, or race car drivers and even runners, and those who exercise regularly, also reap the rewards of the natural endorphin rushes. Endorphins have been shown to be stronger then morphine as a pain killer so activities like mentioned above can become habit forming. Being around people that make us laugh and smile gives us a positive outlook on the world. Similarly, being around people that are consistently frustrated, bring us down, as we empathize with their emotions. Our autonomic nervous system responds to our environments and the people in it which is why it is important to surround ourselves with people that make us feel good. Conversely, we can become the person others seek to initiate positive feelings, so taking the time to make someone laugh can have a huge payoff.

Introduction – Chapter 6

by  • March 5, 2013 • 0 Comments

Laughing is a primitive fear response - so to elicit laughter just surprise people with wit.

Laughing is a primitive fear response – so to elicit laughter just surprise people with wit.

The word humour comes from the Greek humoral referring to medicine (humours) that was thought to control human health and emotion whereas a sense of humour is the ability to experience humour. Humour depends on culture, education, intelligence and also context. Humour also has many variations such as slapstick thought to be a rudimentary form, and satire which was thought to be a more educated version. Laughter, on the other hand, is what results from humour and helps clarify emotional context (by defining amusement) between people.

Humour is deeply rooted in human evolution and is thought to be centered in two regions of the brain containing von Economo neurons which help us move though a complex social environment. Since laughter is universal it is thought to be a tool used to break down boundaries between people and cultures and create bonds. Laughter, as we shall see, is contagious and releases a host of pleasurable hormones throughout the body. An entire branch of therapy exists devoted to laughter as medicine.

In this chapter we will examine the different types of smiles including the Duchenne smile, the tight lipped smile (high and low intensity), uneven smile, the upper smile, the grin or smirk and the broad smile. We also cover the origination of smiles and laughter, their contagion, how they generate leniency and who smiles more, men or women. We will also hit on laughing cycles, the theory of jokes and when to avoid telling dirty jokes, why women should not grunt when they laugh and how laughter is linked to health.

Extended Eye Blinking

by  • March 5, 2013 • 0 Comments

The opposite to the high blinker is the extended blinker, and whether by accident or by purpose, the extended blinker puts other’s off by showing disinterest and a smug attitude. A normal blink lasts only about a tenth of a second and at a rate of about six to eight blinks per minute. An extended blink can last from two to three seconds or even longer. Try one right now just as an experiment. Close your eyes at a normal rate but hold them closed momentarily and then quickly reopen them. Now try extending the time they remain closed. And finally, image this is done either while speaking or listening to someone else. Naturally, the longer the blink the more salient the message, with several seconds not being out of the question. The extended eye blink will be perceived by others as arrogant and pompous since it comes across as temporarily shutting out the outside world, especially the immediate company. The extended blinker is sending the message to others that what others are doing or saying isn’t worth their energy and thought.

There are two main ways to thwart the extended blinker. The first is to reduce your blink rate or widen your eyes as if staring, and hold more eye contact to try to have them mirror you or put them on edge. The second method is a tiny bit underhanded, but sends a much stronger message. When your partner has their eyes closed, quickly jump to the right or left or move closer. This will have the effect of startling them as they reopen their eyes and found that you have slightly moved! If done well enough, you should expect to have achieved a fear response in them which will naturally create a need for them to hold better eye contact.