Last week I gave a talk on body language for post-graduates at Middlesex University. I promised I’d write up a blog about it as a reference for all those lovely people in the audience who listened so attentively and had so many interesting questions for me afterwards (for 2 hours!). So here’s the gist of the main points…

The brain produces many thoughts during any interaction.
Every thought generates a feeling.
Human feelings are spontaneously expressed in body language.

Thus it is possible to work backwards along this chain of events in the following way:

A person’s body language can give you an insight into what they are feeling.
Knowledge of what a person is feeling can be used to infer their thoughts.
But only if you have given the P. I. C. process careful consideration:

• PERSPECTIVES – bear context of each situation in mind: crossed arms = feeling defensive? Or just cold?
• INCONGRUENCE – when words don’t match the voice &/or body language the words will be discounted
• CLUSTERS – of body language cues are MUCH more reliable than individual ones

The key thing to bear in mind when thinking about one’s own body language is to try to avoid postures / gestures that raise the suspicion that you are feeling anxious, guilty, uncertain etc. If you know what other people might be looking out for body language-wise then you can take measures to avoid accidentally giving out the wrong message.

Body Language Is Born

In 1971 Prof Albert Mehrabian together with colleagues at UCLA published a paper indicating that when we say a word the meaning of that word only accounts for 7% of the information communicated. Visual signals (body posture, facial expressions, eye contact etc) accounted for a whopping 55% of the message and acoustic signals in the voice (volume, tempo, rhythm etc) accounted for 38%. Amazingly, given how unlikely these figures seem when we first hear them, it seems that this idea has more or less stood the test of time.

Visual > Auditory > Linguistic – In Communication Signals We Trust (most > least)

Mehrabian et al’s work indicated that if what is being said somehow doesn’t fit with the rhythm, speed, volume of voice and/or facial expressions, eye movements and body posture displayed by the speaker, we become suspicious of the words and tend to ignore them. So if we wish to communicate clearly then we must take measures to ensure that these are all aligned. It is vitally important to ensure that you do not inadvertently send mixed messages into the outside world that might cause people to be confused by, angered by or distrustful of the words we speak. This is particularly important when making a first impression in a job interview, business meeting or on a date.

Two Way Street

When we feel happy we smile, when we are sad or angry we frown. Not only do these facial expressions helpfully communicate how we’re feeling to others so that they might use this information to guide their behaviour, it also affects the way we feel ourselves (facial feedback hypothesis).

If you pull a smiling expression, it might feel fake, but it will send a torrent of sensory messages to the brain about the position of your face.  This, in turn, triggers activity in the emotional pathways to create feelings that match the facial expression. The same thing goes for the negative emotions. If you pull a sad face – with bottom lip protruding as if you’re going to start blubbing – eventually you will start to feel melancholy and thoughts of things you really are sad about will start to flit around in your head. People who have had Botox for cosmetic purposes – to remove frown lines in their forehead (making them physically incapable of frowning) – even leads to increased ratings of happiness!

The critical point of all this is that it’s a two way street:

• Emotions spontaneously generated by your brain can automatically induce a facial expression
• Facial expressions commanded voluntarily by your brain can automatically induce an emotion

When somebody smiles at you, you will instinctively smile back. That is because in our species a smile indicates that the smiling person in question means no harm – it says: I am friendly, you have nothing to fear. If you think about the two way street of facial expressions / emotions in the context of our innate tendency to mimic the facial expressions of the people around us – when you smile at someone it makes them smile, and their own smiling face makes them feel ever so slightly happier. Never underestimate the power of the smile. Your own happiness can be infectious and people like to spend time around people who make them feel good.

Part two describes body language evolution, leakage and Dr Jack’s A-H of body language, so please CLICK HERE.

Springing a Leak

Although we can voluntarily move our faces around at will, pulling whatever facial expressions we want when called upon to do so, there are other automatic physiological responses generated in the body by emotions that we can’t control.

We betray our true feelings through body language all the time. When we lie, our awareness that we are doing wrong produces feelings of guilt (in most but not all people), which in turn “leak“ out into the outside world through various aspects of body and voice. Whether we are feeling comfortable or stressed. Whether we are feeling confident or timid. Even aspects of our personality are advertised to our immediate environment through our body language.

At the same time that we are constantly leaking information into the outside world through body language, information that subtly betrays our true feelings, there are many body positions that we assume and actions that we perform which have nothing to do with our current feelings whatsoever.

Beware Lone Rangers

Sometimes we scratch our nose just because it is itchy, and it has nothing to do with whether or not we are lying. Just a spurious coincidence. Sometimes we put our hand to our mouth simply because we’re stifling an unfortunately-timed belch, any apparent relevance to the words just uttered entirely coincidental. The point here is critical – there is lots of noise in the body language signal. The secret to decoding the signals properly is to keep the P.I.C. in mind and never allow a lone indicator to skew your thinking.

Dr Jack’s A-H of Body Language

Here’s my A-H of Body Language signals (with guidance for avoiding giving confused signals in parentheses) :

A – Appendages (uncross arms & legs, plant feet squarely on floor, keep your hands in view / suppress urge to fidget)

B – Body Posture / Tension (sit up straight, alert, edge of your seat to open diaphragm, breathe deep to reduce stress)

C – Contact (beware the limp hand shake – grasp palm to palm)

D – Dress (what you wear speaks volumes about you, invest wisely in a suitable outfit that blends in to the particular work environment)

E – Eyes (listen with eyes; professional triangle of gaze: eye, forehead, eye; don’t look away too much; not looking = not listening)

F – Face (pulling a smile = friendliness, frown = hostility; smile to show you are friendly and mean no harm, but don’t over do it!)

G – Gestures (amplify your words with firm gestures. Get in the Goldilocks Zone: not too much, not too little, but just right)

H – Head (Active listening involves plenty of eye contact but also nodding [slow→fast] to show you: are following → agree → want to speak)

Over the next few weeks look for these critical sites of body language in the people around you whilst traveling, in restaurants, pubs, bars, offices, meeting rooms and in your home. The more you study it the more aware you will become of the feelings of the people around you. The more you increase your awareness of how body language betrays true feelings in others, the more you will start noticing yourself betraying your true feelings to others. As your awareness of your own body language and that of others increases you will not only get better at detecting deception in others but you will be able to communicate more effectively yourself by ensuring that the visual, auditory and linguistic components line up so that you come across as confident, competent and trustworthy.

Origins of Body Language

The human brain became much, much larger than our primate cousins as we began living in larger and larger groups. And over these many thousands of years certain areas of this expanded brain real estate became specialised to improve our abilities to communicate with each other. We now have brain networks specialised for creating and understanding speech, but also others that discern eye gaze direction and movements, another territory for perceiving faces, yet another involved in registering body parts and even several involved in trying to deduce what a person is really thinking.

More effective communication would likely have been the foundation for stronger, broader allegiances which in turn enabled pre-human species to enjoy a greater ability to read between the lines. This probably increased likelihood of survival amongst these creatures leaving the less sophisticated communicators in their wake. In this way the human brain would have evolved according to a selection pressure on communication abilities to equip the human race with increasingly sophisticated social skills whilst competitors without the ability to read true intentions from voice and body language perished.

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