The Everything Body Language Book

Succeed in work, love, and life - all without saying a word!

Shelly Hagen

• Publisher: Everything
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781440526831
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Emotions in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Is my daughter telling me the truth about where she was last night?
How can I show my boss that I am ready for a promotion?
I think that girl likes me, but I'm not sure. Crossed arms. Eye contact. Fidgeting. These are all the body's subtle ways of speaking, and they can tell you more than you think. With over half of human communication coming from movement, you need a comprehensive guide to reading and understanding body language. This updated edition features an expanded section on discovering deception and foolproof ways to spot a liar.With this guide, you'll learn valuable nonverbal nuances, including how to:

• Project professional body language at work
• Detect a liar at home, school, or in a relationship
• Tell if your date is into you--or planning to leave you
• Recognize and control hostile body language you may project
• Decipher digital and online body language

From dating to job interviews to finding out if your kid really did eat his veggies, this is the ultimate guide to master the art of nonverbal communication!

CHAPTER 1
The Evolution of Body Language

You hear about body language all the time, and from diverse sources. Women’s magazines, for example, claim to hold the secrets of communicating with men without saying a word. Business websites offer tips for wowing potential employers or clients. Scientific journals, meanwhile, try to crack the codes of body language and separate fact from fiction. So … are any of these points of view valid? And where did this notion of nonverbal communication begin, anyway? This chapter will take a look at the origins of and reasons for studying body language.

Survival of the Fittest

Not surprisingly, people have used body language since the beginning of time; however, centuries ago, few men and women understood the power of the unspoken message. Body language was an elusive part of the communication process. Spouses and lovers may have suspected that there was more to a story than what they were hearing from their mates, but they couldn’t quite put their finger on what was adding to or detracting from their conversations.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

The person credited with discovering nonverbal communication cues was none other than Charles Darwin (1809–1882), who is, of course, also credited with a few other scientific discoveries, such as that little project he called the Theory of Evolution.

A recent study suggested that reading others’ nonverbal cues can cause fear. Participants were shown pictures of people who appeared to be frightened; using MRI technology on the participants, researchers measured increases in activity in the part of the brain that registers fear.

Darwin was a brilliant scientist, but even so, it’s fair to question how and why anyone would believe that gestures speak louder than words. Remember, back in the nineteenth century, this was a completely new concept. In addition, during that period people were generally more reserved and didn’t express themselves as passionately and openly as people do today. So … why would anyone think that body movements were the key to understanding human behavior?

The answer lies in Darwin’s earlier work. Darwin was very interested in finding any lingering connections between humans and animals. He noted several similarities in the way humans and animals expressed their emotions through facial expressions. For example, when an animal is frightened, it almost freezes in place—its eyes are wide open, its nostrils are flared, its mouth is slightly ajar. These are all classic fight-or-flight reactions as the animal prepares to either defend itself or flee the scene. Interestingly, humans have the same type of reaction to extreme fear—their own fight-or-flight mechanism kicks in.

After making his initial links between animal and human behaviors, it wasn’t such a stretch for Darwin to theorize that by studying the actions of animals, he could learn a lot about human behavior. And so, the study of nonverbal cues was born.

Who Cares about Animal Behavior?

Animals obviously don’t have the gift of gab. They’re almost totally dependent on reading and interpreting the actions of potential predators and prey in order to survive. Humans, on the other hand, often believe that almost all communication takes place verbally. However, unlike animals, humans really do have two forms of communication going on during any interaction. You move your body as you speak, often without thinking about it, and those gestures often define the meaning behind the spoken message.

Some experts estimate that only one-third of human communication is verbal. If you ignore body language, you might be missing two-thirds of any given interaction! This doesn’t matter all that much if a person’s words and their gestures are in sync, but what if the verbal message contradicts the body language (or vice versa)? What if, for example:

• Your date is saying all the right things, but avoids making eye contact with you?

• Your accountant is tapping his feet under his desk while he tells you that your money is safe and sound?

• Your coworker calls you “Pal,” but consistently shakes your hand in a palm-down fashion?

Maybe you’re thinking, “These actions don’t mean anything on their own. I’d have to hear more of the conversation.” Well … you’ve just overlooked some classic body language cues to human behavior. By recognizing them as red flags, you might be able to save yourself a lot of grief in the long run. This isn’t to say that you should dump an inattentive date or a fidgety accountant right away, but you might want to pay attention to how the rest of the relationship is faring.

Body language isn’t always about sending an obvious message. People also use certain gestures to hide their true feelings. Lack of eye contact, turning the body away, and hiding the hands are just a few cues that indicate there’s something more to someone’s story.

Learning the Lingo

Certain nonverbal communications are innate. They simply happen in a given situation, and anyone who’s watching you will instantly be able to read your body language because he shares the same primal instincts.

Earlier, this chapter discussed the body’s response to fear and the kinds of physical cues you might see in someone who’s experiencing a moment of pure terror (like being chased by a dog, for example, or losing control of your car). These types of responses are preprogrammed in the brain. When you fear for your life, you don’t have to stop and say to yourself, “Wow, if I could just make my eyes wider, I might be able to see any potential danger around me. And if I start breathing a little faster, I’ll put enough oxygen into my bloodstream so that I’m ready for any kind of fight!” (And if you do know someone who has to tell himself how to react to fear, maybe you should be a little afraid—of him.)

Plenty of body language is also learned from interacting with other people and mimicking what you see on TV and in the movies. As you work these learned behaviors into your everyday life, they become second nature. At that point, you use them without consciously making an effort to do so. Some examples of learned body language include:

• Batting your eyelashes at a potential mate (makes you look innocent)

• The palm-down handshake (a domineering move)

• Tilting the head (makes you look nonthreatening)

• Well-timed touches (make you seem friendly)

• Glaring at someone who’s made you angry (another domineering move)

• Widening the eyes during conversation (makes you look interested)

If you find yourself regularly leaving meetings or coming home from dates with the unshakable feeling that things just did not go well, consider the messages you’re silently sending. Depending on what you’ve been doing with your various body parts, your boss or your partner may think you’re hostile or completely uninterested in what she’s saying. Fortunately, even if you have been putting out the wrong vibe, you can learn to correct your body language. And if you’re not putting out any vibe at all, you can learn to ratchet things up so that others will take notice of you.

Modern Body Language

Darwin began the study of body language in the 1800s. A ballet dancer-turned-anthropologist named Ray Birdwhistell (1918–1994) picked up the ball in the 1970s and ran with it.

Kinesics

Birdwhistell referred to the study of body language as kinesics. Although he coined a new phrase, his area of interest was the same as Darwin’s—he observed and analyzed facial expressions and body movements, looking for hidden meanings in them.

Communicating with Kinesics

The study of kinesics is broken down into five main sections of interest, which you might think would make it easy to understand. Unfortunately, these cues vary from culture to culture, so understanding why a Japanese person behaves in a certain way won’t help you determine the meaning behind a Brazilian’s gestures. However, it’s pretty interesting to know that anthropologists have found a way to reduce sometimes-confusing human behavior to just a few categories. These include:

• Emblems: Emblems are nonverbal cues that clearly represent a verbal message, like a thumbs-up gesture or the hand signal for “okay.”

• Illustrators: Think about someone who talks with his hands. Those gestures are illustrators, which underscore the meaning of the verbal message.

• Affect displays: These are facial gestures that convey a nonverbal message (a grimace, a smile, a frown).

• Regulators: These are nonverbal cues that determine how well the verbal communication is going. Basically, these are body language cues that indicate the person has heard and/or understands what you’ve said (head nods or shakes, for example).

• Adaptors: Relaxed movements (like shifting in your seat or shrugging your shoulders to loosen them) are adaptors, and are a hot topic of debate. Some experts feel adaptors are the real clues to nonverbal messages; others say they’re nothing more than comfort measures.

One of Birdwhistell’s theories states that even if you don’t make a conscious note of a person’s gestures while you’re talking to her, you still subconsciously register the meaning of her nonverbal cues.

While learning to read universal gestures isn’t hard, applying your knowledge to everyday relationships isn’t always easy. But with some practice, patience, and a whole lot of perception, you can learn to decipher the spoken word and nonverbal cues and get to the bottom of almost anyone’s story.

Biology Determines Everything

Psychologist Paul Ekman (1934–) also studied kinesiology with a special focus on the face. One of his theories states that because there are no differences in emotional expressions across cultures, they must be biological (and not learned). These universal expressions are:

• Anger

• Disgust

• Fear

• Surprise

• Sadness

• Joy

• Amusement

• Contempt

• Contentment

• Embarrassment

• Excitement

• Guilt

• Pride

• Relief

• Satisfaction

• Sensory pleasure

• Shame

In other words, according to Ekman, a person in New Guinea could certainly recognize grief (or sadness) on the face of a Canadian, who in turn would have no problem recognizing happiness through the facial expressions of a Sri Lankan, and so on around the globe.

The Wizards Project

Ekman and fellow researcher Maureen O’Sullivan also conducted something they called the Wizards Project (originally named the Diogenes Project, after the Greek philosopher who searched high and low for an honest man), during which they tested the lie-detecting abilities of some 20,000 people. Only fifty people were able to consistently observe the “microexpressions” congruent with deception, and were deemed lie-detecting “Wizards.”

So what are microexpressions, and should you be worried if you are missing them? Microexpressions are completely unconscious changes in facial expressions that can last just a fraction of a second. Obviously, according to these numbers, most of us overlook these fleeting twitches in others, which is why Chapter 15 is completely devoted to observing the entire body language of liars (giving you a better shot at stopping them in their tracks, even if you aren’t a Wizard). And if it makes you feel any better, psychologists and policemen in this experiment didn’t even do well enough t...