Chapter 1 – Why The Study Of Body Language Is Important

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.

What Is Cold Reading?

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Cold reading is a technique fortune tellers use to convince their audience that they know much more then they really do and that they know it from scratch, no prewritten cue cards here. Rather they read their cues on the fly such as clothing or fashion, gender, age, race or ethnicity, hairstyle and posture to draw information about a person, although they never tell the audience as much. The cold readers find themselves to be psychics, mediums and fortune tellers of the profession.

I’m always struck by those who think that some form of extrasensory perception is happening simply because readers don’t rely on spoken words to discover ‘truths’ about a person. In this case ‘truths’ is a bit of a stretch and not totally accurate, ‘leads’ is probably a better word. I suppose, the magic happens because the audience really is not aware of all the information available to the reader from simple observation. With a few additional cues derived from religion, place of origin and education, of which the reader can simply ask, or even the manner in which they speak, a lot can be learned about a person and quickly. As the cold reader moves forward with generalization and high probabilities guesses, he or she (usually a she, as women are more perceptive and so make better psychics), they navigate through a formulaic serious of potent topics before reaching conclusions. They pick up on cues emitted from their subjects to verify correct pathways and can reinforce certain chance connections and guesses.

Other basic procedures used by readers include techniques such as “shotgunning” allegedly used by mediums such as Sylvia Browne and John Edward where the reader quickly offers a huge quantity of general information to an entire audience hoping something will stick. General information used in reading is called the “rainbow ruse”, where a phrase is advanced that covers a large array of possibilities. The rainbow ruse might include statements that are not quantifiable or so general that it can apply to nearly everyone. The ruse can include statements such as “You are most often cooperative and pleasant, but when someone does you wrong, you are easy to anger and hold a grudge.” Does that not describe everyone you know?

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.

How Hard Is It To Read People?

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Itchy nose or does this mean something else?

Itchy nose or does this mean something else?

Reading people is fairly simple and common sense once the language is learned, but initially there are a lot of cues to recall so at times it can be confusing. At first it might be difficult just remembering the cues, let alone pull them to consciousness when applicable, but with time this second language will seem to flow naturally and in real time. Body language is fluid and happening all the time around us so we can’t hit pause or rewind in real life to review individual cues. Thankfully, though, we don’t have to. Even beginners can get the gist of things just by picking up a few cues here and there, however the full meaning won’t come until the reader can piece together all the cues.

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When you begin to notice things you hadn’t before, it will be obvious that I have accomplished my goal.

You Have Four Minutes!

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You're on the clock, so make it count!

You’re on the clock, so make it count!

It has been repeatedly shown that the first four minutes are crucial to formulating life-long impressions of others. The research has shown that the reality of the matter is that it might even be shorter than this. [!dw-post-more level=”0″]Once a judgment has been past, people will vigorously resist changing it. In fact, our first impressions are so strongly held, that we’d prefer to ignore, omit or distort information about someone as it comes in that doesn’t fit our impressions than to modify our initial impressions of someone. Add to this, the fact that only some our time formulating impressions is done verbally through speaking, but all of our time is spent sending signals nonverbally. Our impressions are made passively, regardless of our desire to create them, so being caught on an off day can really hurt future relationship. If, say, for example, we are caught in a bad mood, or happen to be dealing with a rare crisis, the judgment others make during this period will follow us for a very long time. Shy people who take longer to warm up to others know this all to well and are often reminded of this fact later. As their relationships flourish, friends will tell them how their initial impressions of them were quite different from the person they have come to know. Being shy holds their true personalities from sight, and this hurts them in the short term because the initial impression they make comes across as indifferent and cold.

Knowing that impressions are so important, we can use it to our advantage by placing added emphasis on initial impressions and concentrate our efforts. Once this time has elapsed, we can either relax back to our regular selves and allow our newly created reputation to keep us afloat, or maintain out initial behaviour. The choice will be ours to make. This book will cover the all important job interview and skills to portray confidence and knowledgeable and how to pack it all into the typical four minute interview. Fortunately, this book is almost entirely about formulating and maintaining good impression. [/dw-post-more]So the rule here is to never ignore the power of first impressions. More often than not, first impressions are the ones that last for an entire relationship and can’t be easily corrected later. I should also emphasis that what you ‘say’ is often far less important than what you ‘do’. Listening, and using strong body language will illustrate a much stronger impression then being a good speaker, so always pay more credence to positive body language.

How To Use This Book

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This book was designed to be the only book you would ever need to read on body language, but in doing so, there are probably some areas that you aren’t interested in or are only moderately interested in. For that reason, don’t feel that you need to read the book in sequence and that skipping sections or chapters is necessarily a bad thing. Having said that there might be areas of study that particularly interest you, and for that reason, there are additional Body Language Project volumes to suite that niche need.

Once you get past the first few chapters, the readings become more and more optional depending on interest. By skipping chapters or sections you won’t get the full picture, or gain the fullest amount of power this book harnesses and from that which is nonverbal communication, you’re certain to gain the knowledge that you can use most in your life. Some information, for example, is more applicable as an employer, whereas other information applies most to employees. Others still will benefit from office dynamics, but for others who work outside an office, it won’t be as helpful. We can all learn something from information that doesn’t apply to us directly though so it never hurts to bank that information in case we find ourselves in a novel situation in the future. Feel free to skip ahead, or skim the photographs over, and hit areas again at a later date as your life changes. You will also be surprised by how much more information you will pick up on your second read so by all means re-read. This isn’t to say that we haven’t put a lot of effort into putting things into the best and most logical sequence though, it just means that you won’t suffer by reading it out of order. So split the book at any page, skip sections and just enjoy the wonderful photographs, it’s your book, read it how you want to!

While reading this book just keep in mind that there are quite literally thousands of nonverbal signals that can be emitted by the human body, most of which are covered herein, although sometimes just briefly. It would be entirely impossible and a very likely a futile effort to hit on every minor cue, not to mention extremely long winded and boring! Nevertheless, this book is designed not only as a primer on body language, but also the only book you will really ever need to read. The book covers more than just the major cues, it hits on more the subtle cues, context specific cues and cues that vary from person to person. This book is meant to be nearly exhaustive of all the body language out there, and meant as a stand-alone guide to reading people in all facets of life.

Introduction – Chapter 1

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BodyLanguageProjectCom - Buy Signals

Head down with hand to mouth is a “buy signal.” She’s considering the offer.

Body language is an exciting tool and I often refer to it as such because I can use it like a wrench or screwdriver and sometimes even a hammer whenever I need it, but sometimes even just for fun. Most everyone has had some sort of fascination with body language and has thought consciously about it at one point in their life. However, not everyone will graduate from casual observer to expert or near expert, as you will by reading this book. My biased opinion is that everyone needs to read at least one book on body language, and since this is so, you might as well do it early in your life! Body language works like compound interest, the sooner you know it, the sooner you can begin to benefit from it. We will see that body language applies throughout many facets of our lives.

Certainly body language helps in sales and around the office or during an interview, but it can also help in dating, in personal relationships, and even in marriage as speak from personal experience. Understanding body language has helped me be more cognizant of my tact, or lack of thereof and has allowed me to read my wife’s mind, sometimes to our her benefit and other times, to her annoyance. To a husband, with a dry humour, who wishes to diffuse a distraught wife, pointing out his wife’s negative body language as she stands over him with her arms crossed and her head down can be amusing. It’s even more amusing to catalog her body language as it escalates when she discovers that instead of paying full attention, you’re reading nonverbal cues instead! If you explain that words are not necessary, she paints a vivid image without words, you might however, regain some respect.

Body language is useful in life because, no matter what we do, we are always dealing with people and this fact becomes even more salient when understand that everything on the planet is currently owned or controlled by someone else. That is, every piece of land, every tree, every desk, computer, television, or rock, is the property of someone else or is controlled by someone else. Therefore to acquire anything or everything you must formulate agreements with these people. Reading them becomes paramount.

Spoken language happened much later in our evolutionary history than non-verbal language and is therefore deeply rooted in our minds. Nonverbal language is primordial, primitive and therefore primary to speech. Our minds and bodies are tied together in language which is why we gesticulate while we talk. We might try to bury or ignore our body language but it still creeps out when we aren’t paying attention. For most people who have done no reading about body language at all, it is their default mode and so they show us honest gestures. This is important to us as readers because we can take these gestures more or less at face value.

An evolutionary perspective is how my framework on body language was developed.

Body language helps us predict the emotions and thoughts of the people around us and gives us a framework from which to begin to understand them, even before opening with our sales pitch or agreement, for example. My interest into body language first began in university, as I sought to learn about girls and dating. I wanted to understand what made some men more successful than others, and how, or rather if, women could be read. I was particularly interested in indicators of sexual interest. At the time, I figured the end goal was just as good as good a place to begin, as any. As I learned and studied, it became apparent that it was possible to manipulate the game all the way through and even use body language in an active way instead of a reactive way to turn the tables in my favour. My passion got me into other realms as well, such as evolutionary theory, animal behaviour and ultimately into zoology. This pulled me away from psychology somewhat, but I always had an interest in people and what made them tick. So while I studied animals, how it related to people was always at the back of my mind and helped me create my formula. I now look at life through a zoological perspective because while I was studying, psychology was just beginning to wrestle with evolutionary ideas, but hadn’t totally accepted its force and weight. This is a huge factor in why I got away from psychology and delve more and more into zoology and evolutionary theory. From the start, I knew it was the right way to look at things. My current framework would be classified as sociobiological with a high degree of favourtism toward the biological aspects, evolution in particular. I am particularly fond of primary scientific research, that is, research studies that are normally published in giant periodicals in university libraries. Now we can just grab them, and their findings, digitally through electronic files. The days of photocopying endlessly are over, but the information still needs to be properly filter, dissected and reapplied in a useful fashion by an expert of some sort. You can still get the information from the source, and if you really are keen, should, but it still needs to be interpreted to become useful, and takes a dedicated mind, because at times, it is quite dry. You’ll find this book heavily sprinkled with such primary research which makes it powerfully predictive, tested, empirical, peer reviewed, and more importantly, and as all real science should be, replicable.

By the end of my third year of university I had drafted the guts of a book about sexual body language but never took any action. It sat there for years, but I finally decided to share it with the world and publish it through the www.BodyLanguageProject.com and named it Body Language Project: Dating, Attraction and Sexual Body Language. Body language stuck with me throughout the years because once I had the basics I was always able to read people and throughout life, it really helped me. Every so often I would point out the body language of the people around me, such as my wife and friends, just to make them a little bit more aware of what they are really revealing about themselves. Other times I would read an employer, or read politicians on television, or just regular people walking about on the streets. You will see, like I did, that body language is something that once learned will stick with you for a lifetime. Most of us already have some sort of intuitive ability to read people but this book will help spell it all out for you in plain English with no need for interpretation or guesswork. Next time you read someone, you’ll be right, you won’t be guessing.

Knowing body language will be helpful while presenting to an audience, for example, since it can tell you when it’s time to make your conversation more lively, when people are truly interested, or even when it’s time to wrap it up and move on. Body language is the “intuition” that separates decent speakers from amazing ones. Good speakers will read the degree of ‘head tilt’ in their audience, which shows interest, and then know that they are onto something, or conversely watch for arm crossing, leg crossing, or both, showing withdrawal to indicating that it’s time to switch topics, switch tactics or get the audience involved. Body language can also help around the office to read your boss or if you are a boss to read your employees. Even as a parent, body language will help in reading your children and if you are married, help read your spouses hidden meaning before words set off flames.

If you have ever heard a voice recording playback, absent of video, you know how important body language is in communication and how much meaning is added through the visual channel. Monotone words strung together with no inflection showing no emotion whatsoever makes the meaning of the sentence lost and confusing. Electronic mail or instant messaging, are two wonderful examples of all that can go wrong with communication absent of body language. Text messages become confused, misinterpreted and misread, and as we all know, often end badly, sometimes so badly, it’s irreversible. Message boards also suffer in this way, often resorting to massive infighting simply because the intended meaning is lost. Emotional icons (emoticons) such as ‘smiley faces’ and ‘winks’ we now dot our messages with are good indication of the importance nonverbal cues.

Speech takes meaning from our actions and body positions, not just from resonance, frequencies and pitch carried through air molecules. When people speak, we can tell their emotions by how they use their hands, which words they emphasize, and where they pause in speech. On the other hand, to become more effective speakers we also need to be better at delivering proper body language so again we need to understand the nonverbal channel. This book is a good start on your way to learning body language, but certainly not the finish line. You will still be required to advance a significant effort independent of this book to become proficient at both reading and delivering nonverbal messages, not the least of which will happen by seeing it in real life and in real time.