How to Read People: Preparing to Read

Learning to read people is one of the most important skills you can have in your interpersonal
life. Whether youre focusing on professional success, friendship, romance, marriage, career or
parenting, understanding How to Read People will give you the ability to make sound decisions
and develop incredible insight into peoples lives. With practice, your ability to understand the core
motivations, desires, and thoughts of others can become so accurate as to border on an invasion of
privacy.
In this 3-part series I will be covering the following:
1. Preparing Yourself to Read People: this is the subject of this first post. I describe how to mentally
prepare yourself to become an effective people reader.
2. Beyond Words what people are really saying: The next post contains the techniques and
mindset needed to develop the art of reading people.
3. How to Tell if Someone is Lying to You: In the final post Ill explain the techniques professional
interrogators and body-language experts use to catch someone in a lie.
Taken from skills Ive learned over the years from animal tracking (yes animal tracking has a lot to do
with reading people), techniques and ideas taught to me by a former interrogator for the CIA, as well
as professional people readers like Jo-Ellan Demitrius I will give you a concise step-by-step
approach to accurately reading people.

Preparing Yourself to Read People

Im sorry to burst your bubble here, but there is no quick fix in learning to read people. I know
you want to get right into learning the latest body-language interpretation techniques and principles,
but as with most things, you need to first build a proper foundation. And that is what this post is
about.
The first step in learning how to read people is gaining a general understanding of the makeup
of others and surprisinglyourselves. Without understanding the walls people build up around
themselves, as well as the barriers that we put in our own way, we will never be able to successfully
read people.

-People are Like OnionsWhen it comes to revealing ourselves to others, people are very much like a four-layered onion.
The outermost layer is that part of our personality that we reveal to strangers the most
superficial aspects of who we really are. An example of this can be seen when we talk with a stranger
sitting next to us on a bus. Trivial topics like the weather, current events, sights and sounds around us
are typical things we feel willing to talk about.
Around our friends and some acquaintances we feel comfortable enough to peel back that
outermost layer to reveal the next one. For example, if you were chatting with a coworker this time,

you would probably feel more comfortable revealing more about yourself. Your attitudes towards work,
certain emotions and your general thoughts about life are some of the things that might come up in
conversation.
The third layer is reserved for those with whom we have an intimate relationship with, such as a
close friend or spouse. In many cases, intimate relationships take time to develop, and with that time,
trust is earned. Imagine now sitting on that same bus next to your spouse or significant other. The
depth of what you reveal this time is much greater than any previous layer. Your goals, personal
problems, and fears and so on, all fall within this layer.
The fourth and innermost layer contains that part of ourselves that we dont share with anyone.
It contains our deepest and sometimes darkest thoughts and secrets that we would rather not
acknowledge. The fact that we are trying to come to terms with many of these things ourselves makes
us not comfortable sharing them with others.
The extent to which you can read someone is determined by how many of their layers youre able to
get them to reveal. And heres a little secret: a person will reveal their layers in direct proportion to
you revealing yours. This is the onion theory in a nutshell.
-Removing our own BarriersThe second part of preparing ourselves to read people involves removing the barriers that keep us
from accurate people-reading. The two barriers are our prejudices and our projections.
When people think of prejudice, mostly the racial kind comes to mind. Although a part of it, this is not
entirely what Im talking about here. Anytime you make an opinion, whether it is positive or negative,
without knowledge or examination of the facts, you are being prejudiced.
Whenever you come up with some preconceived notion based on things such as race, color, political
alignment, or even the way people dress, it taints your ability to accurately read others. Our
prejudices can be based on our fears, feeling threatened, upbringing or a myriad of other things.
Closely related to prejudice is projection. In the late 50s Leon Festinger coined a phrase called
Cognitive Dissonance which can basically be described as the human tendency to close ones eyes
and minds to things that are uncomfortable or disturbing. We tend to project our view onto a situation
because it is easier to deal with.
For example, a parent noticing a childs slipping grades, lack of appetite, and tendency to come home
late, might try to shrug it off as puberty or new-found love when its clear to everyone else that it may
be a drug problem something that the parent is unwilling to accept.
When we are emotionally committed to someone or something it can blind us from the truth of
a situation, leading us to an incorrect reading of someone.
-Waiting Patiently with an Empty CupThe key to effectively reading people is by being completely objective having an empty cup so
to speak. Overcoming our biases, prejudices and projections allows us to be completely objective.
The last important step is learning to be patient. Dont fill your cup up so fast that you rush in
drawing your conclusions. Ive seen this with my experiences in animal tracking. In the beginning I was
in such a hurry to interpret the trail and the animal I was following that Id fail to see the big picture.
One time I remember my friend laughing at me while pointing out that what I thought were perfect sets
of deer tracks, ended up only being the heel of a sneaker. If I took my time to let the whole picture

develop and not come to a conclusion so quickly, it would have saved me the disappointment and
embarrassment I felt.
Its the same thing in learning to read people. As you learn the techniques to interpret peoples body
language and environment (I will discuss this in the next posts), resist the urge to jump to
conclusions. If you think for example that they are defensive because they have their arms folded
well maybe theyre sitting under an a/c vent and theyre simply cold. Are they lying because theyre
fidgeting and seem nervous? Well, possibly they need to go to the bathroom real bad. In other words,
hold off until later to make your final decision.
In the next post, Ill be covering the second part in this series: Beyond Words what people are really
saying.

How to Read People: Beyond the Words

In this post, the second in a 3-part series, I reveal the techniques and mindset that you will need
to effectively read people. I tried to be as succinct as possible without losing any important details,
but because of its length feel free to bookmark this page and read it in sections.

Reading people is as much a science as it is an art.

The science deals with an understanding of the mechanics and principles involved in people reading;
For example, you study all the cold, hard facts about what a specific mannerism could mean, what a
certain tone of voice might suggest, or how the context of a persons environment may influence their
behavior. However, knowledge of the basic principles is only half of the equation.
Once the principles are understood, open up the right brain that part of yourself that does not think in
terms of linear thought, words, or mathematics, but instead with patterns, colors and abstracts. This is
the art.
Those who are successful at combining the two become amazing people readers.
There is no replacement for practice. You could read all the books out there on body language, vocal
interpretation, lie detection, etc. and still not be a great reader of people. I can give you the tools, but
you must come up with the passion to put them to work. I am confident though, that as you
practice these techniques and adopt the mindset, that the passion will naturally develop and many of
these things will become instinctual. So lets begin!
The 4 Principles of Reading People
Establish the Baseline
Recognize Patterns
Challenge and Refine Your Assumptions
Make a Decision
All areas of people reading rely on your ability to put these principles into practice. You begin by
establishing a general baseline. From that baseline you look for specific patterns and consistencies
whereupon you make your assumptions. Then comes the cyclical aspect of constantly challenging and

refining those assumptions by observing new patterns and using the art of questioning. Then, backed
by experience and intuition, you make a decision.

Establish the Baseline

Establishing the baseline is the first step. When youre starting to read someone, begin by studying
their behavior. Ask yourself if how they are acting at this moment reflects their typical way of being. If a
person is in a comfortable, familiar environment and surrounded by those who know them intimately,
its a safe bet that they are in a baseline state. This will become your standard from which you will
make your assumptions.
If youre in a situation where it doesnt offer this opportunity, then you need to wait it out. Time will help
you notice what the persons average behavior is.
This is best practiced with someone that you know. Pick someone, like a coworker at your office. For
the next week study them. I carry what I call an observation journal with me. Try to figure out what
their baseline is. Any deviation from the norm is something you should record and be aware of.
Because we all have our good and bad days, with time youll begin to see how they normally act.

Recognize Patterns
Because our minds can only consciously process a limited amount of data at one time (some say only
about 5-9 bits), it becomes very selective in what it brings to our attention. I had a friend growing
up that loved playing the Punch-Buggy game whenever we went for a drive. He always saw the little
VW Bugs and hit me long before I could. Somehow he had trained his mind to bring Volkswagen
Beetles immediately to the forefront of his consciousness hed see them everywhere. Reading
people is no different. With all the distractions coming in, professional people readers filter out the
inessential and bring to the forefront the indispensable.
Well, what should I be looking for then, you may ask? Patterns. Trends. A theme. As you begin
analyzing people, look for clusters groups of related signals that coincide with a specific
behavior or state of mind. Single traits by themselves, rarely tell the whole story of what a person is
all about. Its not until you broaden your view to include the whole picture, will you begin to correctly
analyze someone. I cannot stress this enough. If success with this is your goal, then it is so important
that you learn to see in patterns. When you discover these consistencies, it is a safe bet that you are
onto something that will reveal the person to you.
Patterns begin with the first impression and continue onward. As you combine the first impression
with specific tells, behavior, vocal attributes, and their environment, you are well on your way
to reading them correctly.
Beyond the Blink: reading the first impression
Malcolm Gladwell wrote a fantastic book called Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking . In
it he observed our ability to make snap judgments about a person in the blink of an eye.
Snap judgments are, first of all, enormously quick: they rely on the thinnest slices of experiencethey
are also unconscious. We thin-slice because we have to, and we come to rely on that ability because
there are lots of hidden fists out there, lots of situations where careful attention to the details of a very
thin slice, even for no more than a second or two, can tell us an awful lot.

However Malcolm explains that in many cases, these thin-slices of experience from which we draw
our conclusions are many times incorrect. What Im asking for you to do is to control the blink
response and retrain your brain, consciously at first, to look for meaning behind the impression.
Through experience, this blink response will become very accurate.
When you begin sizing them up, dont overlook anything. This is where you notice the small details
about the person: their hair, their walk, their fingernails, their body language, the clothes they wear.
Always ask yourself, what is this telling me?.
Appearance
For example, hair can tell a lot about a person. In women, short stylish hair could denote someone
who is creative, artistic, or expressive. Because maintaining perfectly styled hair is expensive, it may
signify wealth. If that isnt the case, then their willingness to spend a lot of their money to maintain their
coif might show vanity, or a need for acceptance, even insecurity.
Less styled short hair on the other hand could mean practicality.
For men, professionally styled hair usually goes hand in hand with the desire to show status and
power. If combined with expensive clothing and accessories, this is usually a sure bet. Most men do
not have the time or desire to regularly have their hair styled at a professional salon. Because it
deviates from the norm, this is a good example of something to look out for.
Every detail of a persons appearance can offer further clues into their interests, beliefs,
emotions and values. Since there are too many details to list here, Ill share with you some of the
things you should be looking out for, as well as questions you should ask.
As I have explained earlier, any trait that stands out from the baseline, needs to be noted. Note
that a deviation from the baseline is not only things that stand out on the individual, but how that
person stands out as a whole compared to what the norm is around them. With extremes in
appearance you might ask yourself: are they seeking attention? trying to imitate someone they look up
to? being rebellious? are they self-centered and are insensitive to others? have they just not been
taught how to dress and act in an appropriate way? or do they just lack common sense?
Be aware of things like physical characteristics, jewelery, makeup, clothing, accessories, hygiene, and
piercings/tattoos etc. Again ask yourself, what is this telling me?.
Body Language
Since the publication of Julius Fasts Body Language in 1970, hordes of people began to see crossed
legs, folded arms, facial tics specific behavioral traits in a whole new light. Even in our time, a
generation later, many people are still conscious about crossing their arms in a meeting so as not to
appear closed.
Body language, like appearance, can only be correctly analyzed when viewed against the first two
principles of reading people: finding the baseline and recognizing patterns. Thinking that youll be able
to make someone, off of one or two bodily quirks, is not realistic. You want to look for consistency.
Body language is only effective as you begin to observe more of the persons character, and to
know their character you must recognize patterns, not just in their body language, but in
everything that has to do with them.
- Bundling the Behaviors: noticing the patterns of action -

A good determinate of a persons core personality is how they act when they dont have to
act. Take the workplace for example. Is he polite and charming to his subordinates when the boss is
around, only to show his true colors when she leaves? Seeing how a person behaves in different
situations will help you to further understand what they are all about.
Study their interaction with different people, such as with children, co-workers, normal day-to-day
people, their family and friends. This will tell you a lot about them.
The saying, You can tell how a man will treat you by the way he treats his mother, although not
always the case, does have a measure of truth to it. Many of us have been on dates where they are
wonderfully polite and charming with you, only underhandedly being rude to or badmouthing the
people serving you. Watch for veiled acts of inconsistency. Their charming, delightful personality
may not be so charming and delightful as the novelty of the relationship wears off.
People behave a certain way based on their wants, needs, or values. We tend to project these
values and wants on others because it is a source of validation. Athletes value those with
strength and stamina. Artists value the creativity in others. If your way of showing love is buying others
gifts, then I would bet when people buy you gifts you feel loved too. What someone consistently does
for others or seeks out in them can be a big help in determining what they desire or value.
Realize that sometimes, because of fear, anger, or duress a person will act out of character. Lest I
keep repeating myself, remember the principles of baseline and recognizing patterns. Are you sensing
a pattern yet?
- Beyond the Words: what people are really saying Vocal attributes play an important role in determining what someone is really saying. These traits in
many cases contain hidden messages that require you to pay attention.
Someone with a loud voice may indicate a need to control their environment. Like a drill seargent, they
use their voice to intimidate and dominate. Sometimes it can be for reasons of trying to compensate
for something they think theyre lacking. I know this really short guy at work who speaks louder and
deeper than Ive seen with guys almost twice his size. This combined with his need to talk over you
shows his insecurities. Realize that a loud voice could also mean a loss of hearing or that theyre
inebriated. Remember to take everything into consideration.
A soft voice also could have different meanings. Dont immediately dismiss the person as someone
who lacks confidence. It may mean theyre tired or depressed. It may show that they have a calmassurance about them. It may also show their arrogance in the sense that they feel you need to listen
more if you want to know what theyre saying.
Think about all the possible reasons for rapid or slow speech, mumbling, different intonations and
emphasis, an unemotional, pretentious or whining tone of voice. Each of these may reveal something
deeper than what was first expected.
Look for the matching of ones vocal attributes, with their body language and words.
Beyond vocal attributes, understanding verbal gymnastics is the other half of what people are
communicating in their speech patterns. For example, always question why someone is leading you
towards or away from a topic of conversation. Are they showing conceit by trying to find an opportunity
to brag? Are they showing compassion through their leading away from gossiping about someone?

The way someone answers can also be used to control or direct a conversation. Try to interpret why
they could be rambling, changing the subject, giving a long drawn-out or a short answer, or not simply
not responding at all.
As always, question deviations from the norm. Someone who rarely uses profanity might, with specific
people, use it frequently. This could indicate theyre seeking acceptance, or trying to present
themselves as someone theyre not.
- Interpreting their Environment One of the best sources of people reading is the persons environment. So many clues can be
discovered here, such as hints about their job, education, religion, culture, hobbies, marital and family
status, political alignment, friends, and wealth. Youd be surprised at what someone can learn about
you, just from them reading your environment, that it can be quite embarrassing.
Because most of our time is spent at home or at work, these areas provide an accurate source
of reading into peoples lives. If you can get exposed to both of these areas, and compare the two,
very precise conclusions can be made about them. For example, noticing a discrepancy between their
work and home environment, shows that their public image is quite different from their private one.
The Workplace
Reading the workplace environment starts with the geographical location of someones home in
relation to their work. A father who moves his family downtown to be close to work could indicate that
hes a workaholic, is self-centered, or ambitious. However the close proximity might also show that the
parents are interested in providing their children easy exposure to cultural opportunities or that the
shorter commute means more time with his family. It is through studying both the home and
workplace that a more telling story will develop.
Now begin to study the job itself. Why do you think theyve chosen it? What does it tell about the
person? Their education or drive? The fact that theyre a medical doctor may show a desire to help
others, indicating someone whos compassionate. However, they might only be interested in the status
of such a job. I even know someone who became a doctor because of pressure from their father, this
tells a whole other story.
The items at the workplace that people surround themselves with are also very telling. In many ways,
these items are a microcosm of the persons life.To give you an idea, consider some of these
items:

Plants Do they keep fresh flowers or plants? This indicates a person who loves nature or is
sensitive to beauty. It may also show that theyre health conscious.

Calendars These are good indicators of hobbies, interests, or sense of humor.

Books and Reading Material Having novels or magazines not connected to the job do show
personal interests, but beyond that, it also can show that their mind is not on the job. Leaving
them lying on the desk can where the boss will surely notice, may show a lack of judgment.

Desktop Items What a person keeps in their immediate view also provides answers. Having
multiple pictures of his children in different stages of their lives shows his love for family.
However, if theres not one of his wife, it may indicate a divorce, a strained relationship, or that
hes are embarrassed about her looks.

The Home
Because the home is where the heart is, a persons living area reveals volumes about them. As
with the workplace, consider the location, the neighborhood, and the items within and without. What
are they telling you? Some important items to consider are books and reading material, items on the
refrigerator, collections, photos, artwork, childrens toys. Take note of the layout and decorations of the
home.
Someone who wears very expensive clothes, but has a very humble home, may reveal a desire to
appear differently to others. Look for things where a persons home is in contrast to their public
persona. The bigger the gap the greater the desire to appear a certain way.
The Automobile
Like the home and workplace, a persons car will reveal a lot about them. But as always, take it in
comparison to everything else. Like clothes, having an expensive well-maintained automobile may at
first indicate wealth, but taken in context with a run-down home may again show a desire to maintain a
certain public image.
A messy, disorganized car usually indicates a messy, disorganized person. I also tend to notice
the little sticker that oil-change shops put on the upper left corner of the windshield. Seeing the actual
cars mileage being much greater than the mileage indicated by the sticker may show a lack of
awareness, complacency, or laziness.
The Social Environment
Where do they spend their free time and who with? Where a person tends to regularly hang out
as well as the company one keeps will tell you more details of their personality and interests.
The Socioeconomic Environment
A persons socioeconomic environment and background is a major key to determining ones behavior.
Remember to be aware of your prejudice. As I spoke of in the last post, prejudice may taint your ability
to read someone successfully. As with everything else, the socioeconomic environment needs to
be considered within the context of everything else.

Delving Deeper through the Art of Questioning

Through the process of recognizing patterns and refining your assumptions, there comes a time where
you need to delve deeper. If you are setting up a date with someone, at a job interview, or just trying to
get to know the person better, learning the art of questioning is very handy.
The types of questions that should be asked are those which help confirm or contradict the
assumptions that youve made throughout this process. Dont make it sound like an interrogation (that
will be covered in the next post How to Detect Lies

). Do however, make it a natural part of the

conversation. Remember to seek first to understand, then to be understood.

Making your Decision

After all the cards are laid on the table, and you have established the baseline, recognized patterns,
and challenged and refined your assumptions through questioning, then and only then should you
make a final decision. Its the combination of many details pointing in the same direction that will
remind you that youre on track. Being that reading people is a science and an art, use the facts that

have presented themselves and couple it with your intuition. If you do this, you will rarely be
wrong about someone.
If youve come this far, good job at staying with me! Remember that Ive just provided you with the
tools, you need to come up with the passion. Practice will create this passion.
In the next and final post on How to Read People, I will teach you how to detect lies.

How to Read People: Detecting Lies

Have you ever wished that you could tell when someone is lying to you? Whether youre dealing with
Mike the mechanic from the local repair shop, or watching one of our beloved politicians on prime
time, learning how to ferret out deception is a deserving skill in a world very unlike
Pleasantville. It is in this final post on How to Read People, that I go into detail about how you can
detect lies.

Human communication is an extremely complex exchange. While speaking, a person produces

around 75-100 verbal and nonverbal cues per second. With the average person capable of only
processing around 7 bits of information at one time, its no wonder that so many of us can be
deceived!
There seems to be some limitation built into us whether by learning or by the design of our nervous
systems, a limit that keeps our channel capacities in this general range determined by George Miller
author of The Magical Number Seven.
Because of our apparent limitation in conscious processing, the average Joe can only detect lies
with about 50% accuracy. With the skills that youve learned in the previous post on reading people,
it brings this level to around 65%. Through mastery of the techniques presented here, your ability can
increase to 90% accuracy!
If you have any hesitation in ever meeting me, for fear that Ill unveil your deepest secrets, let it be
known that I havent yet reached this level. This is why Ive created this site to help you and me.
However, I am constantly practicing these skills, and have noticed a tremendous increase so far in my
abilities to read othersso beware!
It is important to note that this article deals mainly with the principles behind lie detection. There are
many sites/books that explain the techniques, however without a knowledge and a foundation in
the principles you will not be successful.

The Principles of Lie Detection

The process of detecting lies is found in Behavior Analysis. For the purpose of lie detection,
behavior analysis is the study of the verbal and nonverbal cues of truthfulness. Since lie detection is a
subset of reading people, it follows the same 4 principles as discussed in the previous article:
1.

Establish a baseline behavior in your subject make note of any deviation (this is THE KEY to
lie detection!!)

2.

Recognize the related clusters (patterns) of deception

3.

Challenge and refine your assumptions through observation and questioning (continue w/ step
3 and 4 until you)

4.

Make your decision

Unlike what you may at first suspect, you are in fact first studying what truth looks and sounds like, not
deception. After establishing how they behave when theyre being truthful (the baseline), youll
be able to recognize any departure from this normal state which may be a lie!

The Process
To understand how this works, lets study an example. Assume you are dealing with a used-car
salesman and you want to make sure that hes not selling you a lemon. Begin by creating a framework
of non-invasive questions to establish his normal, baseline behavior. Essentially you want to ask
questions in which youre sure hell tell the truth. It may go something like this:
YOU: Now, if I decide I want this car today, what are the steps I need to take?
HIM: explains to you
YOU: So, how long have you been in business? (hes unlikely to lie since this can be confirmed, if he
does then you already have your answer)
HIM: goes on to tell about the history of the place
YOU: Since Im in the area today, what restaurants do you recommend? What kind of food do they
serve?
HIM: tells you about his favorite place
If you noticed, none of these questions were invasive. Also, he has no incentive to lie about these
things. While you are listening to him, pay attention to his voice, eyes, body language and facial
expressions. Where does he look when hes describing his favorite dish? What are his hands doing as
hes explaining? Whats the general pitch and tone of his voice? Is he leaning toward or away from
you? Does he tend to overly gesticulate?
When you feel pretty confident that you recognize his baseline, you can now ask him the questions
that you really want to know. These will be questions about the quality and history of the car, its
maintenance record, etc. Its at this point that you want to look for those patterns that arent in
harmony with his baseline.

The Verbal Clusters of Deception

Verbal clusters are generally the least reliable of all the deception patterns. However, combined
with the other clusters, they can improve detection accuracy. The main issue with verbal patterns is
that they can be rehearsed, but this can be avoided through spontaneous questioning.
General Verbal Responses

May take longer to start answering

May answer to quickly or before the question is completed

Often ask the questioner to repeat the question or they repeat it themselves

Overly polite or apologetic dialog

Persistent complaints

Unnatural silence

The Behavioral Clusters of Deception

Deceptive people follow certain behavioral patterns. These can be viewed from the most apparent
(macro-patterns) to the almost imperceptible (micro-patterns). Heres the progression from largest to
smallest:
- Macro Patterns
General Behaviors:

Increased discomfort and anxiety

Hostility

Unmerited anger towards you

Persistent evasiveness

Resistance

Posture:

Early signs of extreme rigidity followed by alternating stiffness and relaxation

Hands, legs, objects put in front of body to form a barrier (folding arms, crossing legs, etc.)

Feigned lack of interest

Posture changes caused by topic changes

Not facing you

Distancing or leaning away from you

Gestures and Movements:

Rubbing the forehead near the temple region

Squeezing the face, rubbing the neck, or stroking the back of the head with the hand.

Using fewer hand movements to illustrate their actions than usual

Movement away from you

Lip licking and hard swallowing

Wringing hands

Hiding the eyes

There are two psychological reasons behind the source of these macro patterns. The first is the
brains inability to differentiate a real physical threat from a perceived one. This awakens the
fight or flight instinct and explains the hostility, anger, evasiveness or physical attempts to move away
from you.
The second reason is that psychological stress increases anxiety so much that we cannot store
it internally anymore. This leads to an external overflow, explaining the fidgeting, hand rubbing,
sweating, lip licking, leg bouncing etc. When you see stress overflow try asking yourself what it may
mean. If it arose as a result of your questioning, then it may point to deception.
- Micro Patterns
The micro patterns are all expressed on the face. And again there is a continuum from largest to
smallest:
General Expressions:

Averting the eyes

Focusing the eyes some will try to stare down to show control. (A truthful person stares only
half the time on average)

Face whitening (indicates fear)

Face flushing (indicates anger or shame)

Eye-Accessing Cues
In the field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) they use the phenomenon of eye-accessing cues
to help recognize patterns of thinking. By the direction of where the persons eyes are looking, you can
determine whether they are using vision, sound or kinesthetic (feeling) to trigger their thinking.

If this represents a person facing you then when they look up and to the left (your upper right) theyll
be accessing a visual memory. Up and to the right (again, your upper left) means that theyre visually
constructing (imagining) something. To your right, theyre remembering a sound, to your left, theyre
creating a sound. Down right, the person is accessing a bodily feeling or emotion. Down left (your
down right), they are accessing inner dialog (talking to themselves).
If, for example, you were asking your child where they got the candybar, and they look to their
constructing side, then you can be sure theyre fabricating the story.
Keep in mind that this is reversed for left-dominant people (left handers). So before you can use this,
be aware of which of their sides is the dominant one.
Micro Expressions
Clearly the most difficult to master, however if you do, this can give you a 90% success rate at
detecting lies.
In the nineteen-sixties, renowned psychologist Paul Ekman began decoding the language of facial
expressions. He organized them into a syntax of language which he termed action units the set of
all distinct muscular movements that the face could make. This totaled to only 46 individual
movements, but in combination with each other, the face is capable of producing over 7000 unique
expressions!
Luckily for us, we dont have to memorize each one or its meaning, just be able to perceive the
inconsistent micro-expressions that one makes during deceit. The FBI and CIA use Ekmans
methods to determine any deception from suspects during interrogations. And their ability to percieve it
is amazing. This is due to the fact that some of the muscles involved in expressions are not under
conscious control.
This is clearly the case when we feel strong emotions, but wish to supress or hide them. Those
expressions of emotion appear on our faces, even if only for a fraction of a second. It probably

explains our intuitive feelings that someone is being dishonest, because subconsciously were picking
up on these expressions. These fleeting, almost imperceptible looks are whats called microexpressions.
When people lie, they try to hide the fact through altering their voluntary facial expressions (macro
expressions) and body language to appear in harmony with their words. Because of this, the face will
hold accurate as well as misleading information. Unfortunately, most people respond to the macro
expressions and become decieved; However, a few keen observers can detect these micro
expressions as well as other imperfections in the macro displays, and are correctly informed.
For example, distinguishing between a fake smile, one that can be performed at will, and a real smile,
which is generated by the unconscious brain, comes down to awareness of the action units involved in
a genuine smile. (Heres a great link from the BBC which provides a test to determine if you can
determine a genuine smile from a fake one through recognizing these micro expressions:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/surveys/smiles/index.shtml
According to Ekman, deception will most always show up in the face as an inconsistency
between the micro and macro expressions. Even though most people are not attuned to the
recognition of micro expressions, most can learn to become sensitive to them.
For more information about this, training materials, and workshops check out Paul Ekmans site

Conclusion
As you learn to establish the baseline behavior of honesty, recognize deception clusters that deviate
from this baseline, and progressively refine your assumptions through questioning and observations,
you will be well on your way to becoming an amazing lie detector. Remember to look at things as a
whole. The more patterns you can discover that seem to point in one direction, the more accurate
your detection will be.
I want to thank you for hanging in there! This series (long winded at times, I know) on How to Read
People has hopefully been a help to you in your desire for personal growth and knowledge. Feel free
to leave any comments of your experiences or experiments with these skills.
Reading Faces: Face Value
About a Face
Are you a good judge of character? Perhaps you think you can judge someone's personality just by
looking at their face? Research shows that most of us - 90% according to one study - think we can.

What does a face really tell us

about someone's personality?

But this may not all be down to arrogance. Scientists are uncovering evidence that some personality
traits may be written all over our faces.
This could have important implications for the way we behave, and even how we choose our sexual
partners.
Professor David Perrett of the Perception Lab at St Andrews University has spent the best part of a
decade trying to pin down the essence of facial attractiveness.
Perfect Profile
His technique of digitally manipulating faces first attracted attention four years ago, when he showed
that women prefer more masculine faces during the fertile period of their menstrual cycle. Faces were
made more masculine by strengthening the jawline and brows and more feminine by widening the face
and raising the eyebrows.
Now Professor Perrett is using the same techniques to investigate the connections between facial
features and personality. Perrett is using the most widely accepted model of human personality: the
five-factor model. This consists of:

Openness to experience - creative, original, independent

Conscientiousness - careful, hard-working, conscientious

Extraversion - affectionate, talkative, sociable

Agreeableness - forgiving, sympathetic, warm

Neuroticism - nervous, worrying, highly strung

Altered Images
For the time being, Perrett has decided to focus his attention on the best understood of the 'big five'
personality factors: extraversion and its opposite state, introversion. Extraverts are talkative, fun-loving
and sociable, while introverts tend to be reserved, quiet and retiring.
In previous experiments, Perrett and Little have found that digitally altering the masculinity and
femininity of a face affects how people perceive aspects of their personality.
"As we manipulate female faces to make them more feminine, people see them as more extravert,"
says Perrett.
But masculinity and femininity is only part of the story. Pinning down the essence of an introvert or
extravert face is more complicated.
Perrett and Little found that there was little data on what constituted an extravert or an introvert face.
However, Perrett and his team came up with an ingenious solution.
After showing a group of volunteers 15 carefully chosen faces, the team asked them to complete a 20item questionnaire. The questionnaire asked the volunteers to say which faces best represented
certain character traits.
The team then carried out a statistical technique known as factor analysis on the results. This allowed
them to draw out the features in a face that people regard as extravert and introvert.

Volunteers rate face composites in

a university computer laboratory.
With this information, they created average extravert and average introvert faces from the same 15
images by using computer software to amplify some features and suppress others. These composite
images were then used to transform other faces, making them either more introvert or more extravert.
"A lot of the things that we're seeing in extravert and introvert faces are transient things like how likely
you are to smile," says Dr Tony Little, of the Perception Lab at St Andrews. Indeed, while the
withdrawn look of introvert faces is instantly recognisable, extravert faces seem to be fixed in the
earliest stages of a grin.
Fight Club
But why would such subtle facial cues have evolved? Dr Little believes they might have played an
important role in physical confrontations between our ancient ancestors.
"We all become highly competitive when confronting an opponent we think we can realistically beat.
However, we will submit to opponents we feel are superior to us in order to avoid fighting a battle we
will probably lose. Evolution is a game of survival, so it pays to know when to fight and when to run.

Extraverts may have stumbled into

more physical confrontations than
people with other personality types.
"If you were sickly, it would have paid to stay out of harm's way. An introvert face would have told rivals
you weren't a threat," Little explains. Introverts might not have dominated in the social pecking order,
but they would have secured their survival by avoiding confrontation.
"Extraversion was a more risky strategy because there was a greater chance you would encounter
confrontation," says Little. But the fact that extraverts are still with us strongly suggests that the
rewards of winning those battles were enough to make fighting them worthwhile.
Domination game

Little won't speculate on what the rewards of winning these battles might have been, but it's not hard
to fathom that dominant males would have had better access to food, resources and may have been
more attractive to females.
Our preferences for introvert and extravert faces might also have fascinating implications for how we
choose partners.
In Perrett's experience, opposites don't attract. Instead, like seems to attract like. Previous findings
from the Perception Lab show that we tend to choose partners who look like our opposite sex parents.
This seems to suggest that we prefer to mate with people who appear to share the same genes as us.
Are you local?
This apparent tendency towards inbreeding might come as a surprise. Inbreeding can cause harmful
recessive genes to pair up in children, resulting in deformity or disease.
In a well-known study, Dr Marion Petrie and Dr Craig Roberts of the University of Newcastle asked
female volunteers to wear the same T-shirt for several days. Male subjects were then asked to choose
which one smelt best. Men invariably prefer the smell of a woman with an immune system very
different to their own.
Children born to parents with different immune systems have a better chance of fighting off disease,
suggesting that outbreeding has definite advantages.
But Dr Petrie sees no contradiction between her findings and those of Perrett's. "There is an optimum
genetic distance that is preferred. You don't want a mate that's identical because that would be
inbreeding," says Petrie.
"But if [animals] mate at too great a genetic distance, [they] could be mating with another species," she
adds, "and that could be bad news."
The suggestion is that a little inbreeding is no bad thing, because it preserves useful combinations of
genes that are adapted to your environment. Petrie believes that chemical cues from smell work in an
opposite way to facial cues of attractiveness in order to strike this balance between extreme
inbreeding and extreme outbreeding.
Perrett and Little are working on the hypothesis that preferences for different personalities follow the
same pattern as facial cues. Prof Robert Zajonc of Stanford University has found that long-term
partners tend to have similar personalities. It may be that they grow more similar through shared
experiences.
But Little thinks this is because humans unconsciously treat personality as another measure of genetic
similarity.

Studying the human face might

unlock the secrets of sexual
attraction
This theory is supported by work conducted at the University of Cambridge in 1989 by zoologist Pat
Bateson. Using an experimental set-up called the Amsterdam Apparatus, Bateson invited Japanese
quails to choose from a selection of opposite sex birds arrayed behind miniature shop windows.
Family business
The birds preferred first cousins over both full siblings and unrelated birds, suggesting that they prefer
inbreeding, though not incest.
In a follow-up study, Professor Bateson put newly hatched chicks in a pen with each other. Amazingly,
siblings and cousins tended to clump together in groups, even though they had never come into
contact.
"Although we never proved it, we speculated that this was due to similar behavioural preferences
between relatives," says Bateson. "How it was mediated, we never found out," he adds, "but since the
quail chicks also tended to be attracted to relatives in adulthood, we reasonably thought that they were
using behavioural cues here as well."
Further work may be needed to discover the precise mechanisms by which personality and facial
features interact to determine our mating preferences.
In the human mating game, describing someone as having a nice personality has turned into an insult,
because we regard a person's behaviour as secondary to other, more important cues of
attractiveness.
But the next time someone describes an eligible member of the opposite sex in this way, perhaps we
should all take a bit more notice.
Reading Faces: Facial Prejudice
Read my face
If you visit the movies much, you'll know just how full of stereotypes they are. Heroines in romantic
comedies are invariably sweet-faced and girly. Male action heroes are invariably square-jawed and
beetle-browed.

What personality traits do we

associate with masculine faces?
For instance, would hard man Russell Crowe have been quite as convincing hacking his way through
an arena in the film Gladiator had he been born baby-faced and weak-chinned? Professor David
Perrett of the University of St Andrews thinks not. Perrett is investigating how the features of a
person's face shape how we think of them.
His technique of digitally manipulating faces first attracted attention four years ago, when he showed
that women prefer more masculine faces during the fertile period of their menstrual cycle. Faces were
made more masculine by strengthening the jawline and brows and more feminine by widening the face
and raising the eyebrows.
Perrett's team has found that one of the most important things that influences perceived personality is
the set of features that give a face its gender. This seems to have its roots in the different personality
traits we associate with men and women.
The Big Five
To test his hypotheses, Perrett is using the most widely accepted framework of human personality: the
five-factor model. This consists of:

Extraversion - affectionate, talkative, sociable

Conscientiousness - careful, hard-working, conscientious

Agreeableness - forgiving, sympathetic, warm

Openness to experience - creative, original, independent

Neuroticism - nervous, worrying, highly strung

Volunteers rate face composites in

a university computer laboratory.

With this information, they created average extravert and average introvert faces from the same 15
images by using computer software to amplify some features and suppress others. These composite
images were then used to transform other faces, making them either more introvert or more extravert.
"A lot of the things that we're seeing in extravert and introvert faces are transient things like how likely
you are to smile," says Dr Tony Little, of the Perception Lab at St Andrews. Indeed, while the
withdrawn look of introvert faces is instantly recognisable, extravert faces seem to be fixed in the
earliest stages of a grin.
Fight club
But why would such subtle facial cues have evolved? Dr Little believes they might have played an
important role in physical confrontations between our ancient ancestors.
"We all become highly competitive when confronting an opponent we think we can realistically beat.
However, we will submit to opponents we feel are superior to us in order to avoid fighting a battle we
will probably lose. Evolution is a game of survival, so it pays to know when to fight and when to run.

The eyes have it. Do we really

associate feminine features with
kindness?
Agreeableness is the personality dimension most important for social success. People who fall
towards the positive pole of agreeableness are sympathetic, helpful and trusting. Those who fall
towards the negative pole are uncooperative, suspicious and cynical. Perrett has found a strong link
between agreeableness and femininity.
"People find feminine faces, whether male or female, more agreeable. This appears to be because
women are perceived as kind and soft-hearted," says Perrett. "Faces seem less agreeable to people
as you make them more masculine," he adds.
Therefore, men with slightly feminine facial features should be perceived as more agreeable than their
macho counterparts. And women with 'cute' feminine looks should be seen as more agreeable than
women with more masculine features.
These assumptions might be transmitted culturally. But Perrett is working on the hunch that they are in
fact instinctive reactions that have developed over the course of evolution.
In the evolutionary past, our ability to recognise clues about someone's personality in their face may
have helped us decide how to deal with them effectively. In conflict, it may also have helped us know
who we had a good chance of beating and who might prove a tough opponent.

But the fact that a face's gender, rather than more transient features such as facial expressions, has
such a strong influence on the personality we ascribe to a face suggests that personality must have
some biological basis.
Boys will be boys
Our perceptions of agreeableness exactly mirror the action of the male sex hormone testosterone.
Several studies have shown that testosterone tends to make men more confrontational and anti-social.

Testosterone is responsible for

masculinizing the face, but it also
has well-known effects on
behaviour.
Professor Dan Olweus and his team at the University of Berggen in Norway tested the effect of
testosterone on the behaviour of a group of teenage boys. They found that contrary to predictions,
high levels of testosterone were not associated with overt aggression in teenage boys.
But the boys with the highest testosterone were more irritable and disagreeable. They also displayed
an aggressive response to provocation, being more likely to answer back to a teacher that criticised
them.
Professor Allan Booth and Dr James Dabbs of Penn State University have even shown that, in a group
of US air force servicemen, males with testosterone levels significantly above the average were 50%
less likely to marry, which may suggest they have difficulty co-operating in a partnership with another
individual. Testosterone is also responsible for giving a face its masculine qualities.
Men behaving badly
But this shouldn't be viewed as an excuse for grouchiness or bad behaviour. Testosterone only seems
to have this effect in the proportion of the population whose brains are predisposed to such behaviour.
There seems to be an equally important proportion of high-testosterone individuals who do not try to
dominate through anti-social behaviour. This sort of behaviour would seem to cause downward
mobility in the class system. But studies have found no evidence for a concentration of hightestosterone males amongst socioeconomic groups with low incomes. Instead, they are evenly spread
across society.
Masculinity and femininity also seems to affect another well-studied personality trait: extraversion. But
in this case, there seems to be a parallel rather than opposite relationship between the action of male
and female sex hormones.
Professor Werner Martin Herrmann of the Free University in Berlin found that administering oestrogen
to female volunteers made them score more highly for extraversion on personality questionnaires.

Several other studies have shown that testosterone is responsible for making makes men more
extravert, encouraging them to try and dominate social situations.
That little bit extra
Perrett has found preliminary evidence that masculine male faces are perceived as more extravert
than their female counterparts. And feminine female faces are seen as more extravert than more butch
faces. Again, this trend exactly mirrors the effect of sex hormones.

Do feminine female faces seem

more extravert?
The biological basis of neuroticism is not as clear. It does not seem to be directly affected by the action
of sex hormones. But, on average, women score more highly for neuroticism on personality
questionnaires, so Perrett believes that faces might start to look more neurotic as you increase their
femininity.

First impressions count

It is not known how openness and conscientiousness will be affected by changing the masculinity or
femininity of a face. However, masculine faces are often described as untrustworthy, which may have
implications for the types of faces we regard as conscientious, or reliable.
They say we shouldn't judge a book by its cover. Even though we should know better, every day we
use those old tricks we learnt in our evolutionary past. Our distant ancestors, it seems, knew what
every seasoned businessman knows today: that first impressions count.
Language of Love
Read between the lines
If you've never considered searching for a date in the lonely hearts columns, count yourself lucky. It's a
jungle out there and that's scientific fact.

Are lonely hearts columns a

window into our evolutionary past?

Enter the world of lonely hearts and you take a trip back through your evolutionary past, where the
veneer of civilisation is stripped away and men and women are slaves to their most basic instincts.
The frank vocabulary of the ads illuminates the rules of human mating in the most unambiguous way.
If you're a blonde, attractive, curvaceous female, that's exactly how you should describe yourself in
your ad. The same applies if you're a handsome, athletic, millionaire male.
For this very reason, lonely hearts may give us a unique insight into the reasons for our sexual
preferences - preferences that have been moulded by millions of years of natural selection.
Column inches
Professor Robin Dunbar of Liverpool University spent much of the latter half of the 1990s studying the
hidden evolutionary signals contained in Lonely Hearts advertisements.
"We were studying 19th century folk [love] songs, but it wasn't working out as well as we had thought.
Many folk songs are political when you scratch beneath the surface," explains Dunbar.
"When we changed our focus to Lonely Hearts, we found a close link with evolutionary preferences,"
he adds.
The language of love
Dunbar found that the vast majority of words used by people to describe themselves in ads could be
lumped into five different categories.
He asked 200 university students to rate the appeal of ads containing different categories of words.
When Dunbar analysed the results, he found that men and women attached very different levels of
importance to the five categories:
Men's preferences

Women's preferences

1. Attractiveness

1. Commitment

1. Commitment

2. Social Skills

3. Social Skills

3. Resources

4. Resources

4. Attractiveness

4. Sexiness

5. Sexiness

Far from being conditioned to regard these things as important, Dunbar argued that men and women
had evolved these preferences over millions of years of evolution. These were crucial qualities that
enhanced the fitness of children, and, lest we forget, children are the key to the survival of our species.

What hidden messages do we

send the opposite sex?
Pregnancy and breast-feeding place great stress on a mother, so females make the biggest
investment in reproduction. This is why women are choosier about their partners than men, with 20something women being the choosiest of all.
This big parental investment also explains why women seek males who are willing to stick around and
provide for children.
Diamonds are a girl's best friend
But evolutionary theory tells us that resources should be just as important to women, if not more so.
Good fathers need to have the means to feed offspring as well as the willingness to stick around.
In our evolutionary past, before resources meant a Rolex watch and a sports car, a well-heeled man
was one with high status in a hunting tribe. High status males were often good hunters and likely to
provide a steady supply of food.
When the desire for reproduction is taken out of the equation, preferences change drastically. Dunbar
has shown that lesbians were three times less likely to seek resources than heterosexual women.
But why should such an intangible quality like social skills score highly with heterosexual women?
Dunbar puts this down to the Scheherazade effect, a phrase coined by cognitive psychologist Geoffrey
Miller.
The Scheherazade effect refers to the possible tactics used by ancestral women to appeal to a man's
conversational skills in order to keep them around.
Research conducted by Professor Doug Kenrick at the University of Arizona seems to support this
sexual dynamic. Kenrick has found that both sexes regard social skills as important, particularly a
sense of humour. But that a good sense of humour has a different meaning for women than it does for
men.
"When women look for a sense of humour in a man, they're saying: 'show me what you've got'. But
when a man looks for a sense of humour in a woman, they're saying 'she laughs at my jokes, she
must think I'm a great guy'."
Playing the field
The very fact that men need an incentive to stick around leads us to the question of male priorities in
the mating game. Men, like women, want to maximise their contribution to the gene pool by having as
many offspring as possible.

But for males, time spent providing for a pregnant partner could be better spent fathering other
children with other women. This may explain why men place such a high premium on attractiveness.
Attractiveness is a rough indicator of age, and in women, age is a good indicator of fertility. After her
late 20s, a woman's fertility steadily declines, and so does her value on the dating market.

We all want to make babies. But

when it comes to the politics of
mating, men and women dance to
a different tune.
Ageing beauties
Men, so the biological assumption goes, always prefer younger women, because they are likely to
bear them more children.
But a recent study seems to contradict this theory. Dr George Fieldman, of the Buckinhamshire
Chilterns University College showed images of women to about 200 men with an average age of 30.
A picture of a 36-year old woman, who a separate group of men had found attractive, was shown to
the men along with eight other photos of women aged 20 to 45 who had been rated as less attractive.
Asked to choose one woman as a long-term partner, all three groups chose the beautiful woman
regardless of what age they thought she was.
"They are saying: 'I'd rather risk a relationship with an older woman who is not going to give me as
many children but is very beautiful, than a woman who is more fecund but whose children will be
plainer," says Fieldman.
The theory is based on the notion that a beautiful woman is more likely to bear beautiful offspring and
that those offspring will be more successful than plainer offspring.
"Female beauty has evolved through sexual selection. If you're beautiful then it's likely that you're also
symmetrical," he adds.
Symmetry is a difficult characteristic for genes to code for, leading many scientists to conclude that it is
an indicator of good genes.
Fieldman's research suggests that beauty is important to men on a deeper level than just a simple
indicator of youth.
Led astray
However, Kenrick thinks that in this instance, men are being confused by the benefits of modern
healthcare and beauty products.

"My suspicion is that we respond to visual cues of attractiveness, not what you see on someone's birth
certifcate. Liz Hurley, for example, looks attractive because she's got all those cues [despite her age],"
he explains.
"In evolutionary history, by the time a woman got to be 45, she'd have had five children and various
parasites. She wouldn't have looked like one of those Hollywood actresses," Kenrick adds.
Studies have shown that men seem to prefer women with smooth skin and glossy hair, features which
seem to be associated with higher levels of the female sex hormone oestrogen. In our evolutionary
past, these would also have been strong indicators of youth.
Dirty old men
As male lonely hearts age, they seek women who are increasingly younger than they are. This reflects
their increasing value on the dating market due to their increasing resources, or wealth.
But why males should value commitment so highly is less clear. Dunbar thinks he has the answer: "In
males I think commitment is to linked to paternity certainty," he explains. If a male is to spread his
genes, he needs to know that the children being born are his and not those of a rival.
The patterns of preferences amongst homosexual male advertisers are startlingly different. In one
study, gay men offered resources and attractiveness half as often as heterosexual men did.

On average, female lonely hearts

prefer a man five years older than
them.
Like everyone else, lonely hearts raise or lower their standards according to their own circumstances.
Young men have low expectations because they don't have much wealth to offer. Older women are
similarly undemanding, because of their reduced attractiveness.
Liar, liar
But the lonely hearts columns seem to amplify one important tactic of the mating game: lying. One of
the most common complaints made by people responding to advertisements is that the advertiser was
nothing like their description in the ad.
So if you're thinking of flicking through the lonely hearts, take all those evolutionary traits on display
with a pinch of salt, even if it means ignoring your most basic instincts.

Spot The Fake Smile

Most people are surprisingly bad at spotting fake smiles. One possible explanation for this is that it
may be easier for people to get along if they don't always know what others are really feeling.
Although fake smiles often look very similar to genuine smiles, they are actually slightly different,
because they are brought about by different muscles, which are controlled by different parts of the
brain.
Fake smiles can be performed at will, because the brain signals that create them come from the
conscious part of the brain and prompt the zygomaticus major muscles in the cheeks to contract.
These are the muscles that pull the corners of the mouth outwards.
Genuine smiles, on the other hand, are generated by the unconscious brain, so are automatic. When
people feel pleasure, signals pass through the part of the brain that processes emotion. As well as
making the mouth muscles move, the muscles that raise the cheeks the orbicularis oculi and the
pars orbitalis also contract, making the eyes crease up, and the eyebrows dip slightly.
Lines around the eyes do sometimes appear in intense fake smiles, and the cheeks may bunch up,
making it look as if the eyes are contracting and the smile is genuine. But there are a few key signs
that distinguish these smiles from real ones. For example, when a smile is genuine, the eye cover fold
- the fleshy part of the eye between the eyebrow and the eyelid - moves downwards and the end of the
eyebrows dip slightly.

Nonverbal communication
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Nonverbal communication is usually understood as the process of communication through sending
and receiving wordless messages. i.e., language is not the only source of communication, there are
other means also. Messages can be communicated through gestures and touch (Haptic
communication), by body language or posture, by facial expression and eye contact. Meaning can also
be communicated through object or artifacts (such as clothing, hairstyles or architecture), symbols,
and icons (or graphics). Speech contains nonverbal elements known as paralanguage, including voice
quality, rate, pitch, volume, and speaking style, as well as prosodic features such as rhythm, intonation
and stress. Dance is also regarded as a form of nonverbal communication. Likewise, written texts
have nonverbal elements such as handwriting style, spatial arrangement of words, or the physical
layout of a page.
However, much of the study of nonverbal communication has focused on face-to-face interaction,
where it can be classified into three principal areas: environmental conditions where communication
takes place, the physical characteristics of the communicators, and behaviors of communicators
during interaction.[1]

Contents
[hide]

1 Verbal vs. oral communication

2 History

3 Arbitrariness

4 Characteristics of nonverbal communication

5 Clothing and bodily characteristics

6 Physical environment

6.1 Proxemics: physical space in communication

6.2 Chronemics: time in communication

6.2.1 Monochronic Time

6.2.2 Polychronic Time

7 Movement and body position

o

7.1 Kinesics

7.2 Posture

7.3 Gesture

7.4 Haptics: touching in communication

8 Eye gaze

9 Paralanguage: nonverbal cues of the voice

10 Functions of nonverbal communication

o

10.1 Concealing deception

11 The relation between verbal and nonverbal communication

o

11.1 The relative importance of verbal and nonverbal communication

11.2 Interaction of verbal and nonverbal communication

11.2.1 Repeating

11.2.2 Conflicting

11.2.3 Complementing

11.2.4 Substituting

11.2.5 Regulating

11.2.6 Accenting/Moderating

12 Dance and nonverbal communication

13 Clinical studies of nonverbal communication

14 Difficulties with nonverbal communication

15 Footnotes

16 See also

17 References

18 External links

Verbal vs. oral communication

Scholars in this field usually use a strict sense of the term "verbal", meaning "of or concerned with
words", and do not use "verbal communication" as a synonym for oral or spoken communication.
Thus, vocal sounds that are not considered to be words, such as a grunt, or singing a wordless note,
are nonverbal. Sign languages and writing are generally understood as forms of verbal
communication, as both make use of words although like speech, both may contain paralinguistic
elements and often occur alongside nonverbal messages. Nonverbal communication can occur
through any sensory channel sight, sound, smell, touch or taste. Nonverbal communication is
important as:
"When we speak (or listen), our attention is focused on words rather than body language. But our
judgment includes both. An audience is simultaneously processing both verbal and nonverbal cues.
Body movements are not usually positive or negative in and of themselves; rather, the situation and
the message will determine the appraisal." (Givens, 2000, p. 4)
History
The first scientific study of nonverbal communication was Charles Darwin's book The Expression of
the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). He argued that all mammals show emotion reliably in their
faces. Studies now range across a number of fields, including , linguistics, semiotics and social
psychology.
Arbitrariness
While much nonverbal communication is based on arbitrary symbols, which differ from culture to
culture, a large proportion is also to some extent iconic and may be universally understood. Paul
Ekman's influential 1960s studies of facial expression determined that expressions of anger, disgust,
fear, joy, sadness and surprise are universal.

Characteristics of nonverbal communication

1. Non-verbal messages primarily communicate emotions, attitudes.
2. Non-verbal cues substitute for, contradict, emphasize or regulate verbal message.
3. Non-verbal cues are often ambiguous.
4. Non-verbal cues are continuous.
5. Non-verbal cues are more reliable.
6. Non-verbal cues are culture bound.
Clothing and bodily characteristics

Uniforms have both a functional and a communicative purpose. This man's clothes identify him as
male and a police officer; his badges and shoulder sleeve insignia give information about his job and
rank.
Elements such as physique, height, weight, hair, skin color, gender, odors, and clothing send
nonverbal messages during interaction. For example, a study [2], carried out in Vienna, Austria, of the
clothing worn by women attending discothques showed that in certain groups of women (especially
women who were in town without their partners) motivation for sex, and levels of sexual hormones,
were correlated with aspects of the clothing, especially the amount of skin displayed, and the presence
of sheer clothing, e.g. at the arms. Thus, to some degree, clothing sent signals about interest in
courtship.
Research into height has generally found that taller people are perceived as being more impressive.
Melamed & Bozionelos (1992) studied a sample of managers in the UK and found that height was a
key factor affecting who was promoted. Often people try to make themselves taller, for example,
standing on a platform, when they want to make more of an impact with their speaking.
Physical environment
Environmental factors such as furniture, architectural style, interior decorating, lighting conditions,
colors, temperature, noise, and music affect the behavior of communicators during interaction. The
furniture itself can be seen as a nonverbal message[1]
Proxemics: physical space in communication
Proxemics is the study of how people use and perceive the physical space around them. The space
between the sender and the receiver of a message influences the way the message is interpreted The

perception and use of space varies significantly across cultures [3] and different settings within cultures.
Space in nonverbal communication may be divided into four main categories: intimate, social,
personal, and public space.
The term territoriality is still used in the study of proxemics to explain human behavior regarding
personal space.[4] Hargie & Dickson (2004, p. 69) identify 4 such territories:
1. Primary territory: this refers to an area that is associated with someone who has exclusive use
of it. For example, a house that others cannot enter without the owners permission.
2. Secondary territory: unlike the previous type, there is no right to occupancy, but people may
still feel some degree of ownership of a particular space. For example, someone may sit in the
same seat on train every day and feel aggrieved if someone else sits there.
3. Public territory: this refers to an area that is available to all, but only for a set period, such as a
parking space or a seat in a library. Although people have only a limited claim over that space,
they often exceed that claim. For example, it was found that people take longer to leave a
parking space when someone is waiting to take that space.
4. Interaction territory: this is space created by others when they are interacting. For example,
when a group is talking to each other on a footpath, others will walk around the group rather
than disturb it.
Chronemics: time in communication
Chronemics is the study of the use of time in nonverbal communication. The way we perceive time,
structure our time and react to time is a powerful communication tool, and helps set the stage for
communication. Time perceptions include punctuality and willingness to wait, the speed of speech and
how long people are willing to listen. The timing and frequency of an action as well as the tempo and
rhythm of communications within an interaction contributes to the interpretation of nonverbal
messages. Gudykunst & Ting-Toomey (1988) identified 2 dominant time patterns:
Monochronic Time
A monochronic time system means that things are done one at a time and time is segmented into
precise, small units. Under this system time is scheduled, arranged and managed.
The United States is considered a monochronic society. This perception of time is learned and rooted
in the Industrial Revolution, where "factory life required the labor force to be on hand and in place at
an appointed hour" (Guerrero, DeVito & Hecht, 1999, p. 238). For Americans, time is a precious
resource not to be wasted or taken lightly. "We buy time, save time, spend time and make time. Our
time can be broken down into years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds and even milliseconds.
We use time to structure both our daily lives and events that we are planning for the future. We have
schedules that we must follow: appointments that we must go to at a certain time, classes that start
and end at certain times, work schedules that start and end at certain times, and even our favorite TV
shows, that start and end at a certain time. [1]
As communication scholar Edward T. Hall wrote regarding the Americans viewpoint of time in the
business world, the schedule is sacred. Hall says that for monochronic cultures, such as the
American culture, time is tangible and viewed as a commodity where time is money or time is
wasted. The result of this perspective is that Americans and other monochronic cultures, such as the
German and Swiss, place a paramount value on schedules, tasks and getting the job done. These
cultures are committed to regimented schedules and may view those who do not subscribe to the
same perception of time as disrespectful.

Monochronic cultures include Germany, Canada, Switzerland, United States, and Scandinavia.
Polychronic Time
A polychronic time system is a system where several things can be done at once, and a more fluid
approach is taken to scheduling time. Unlike European-Americans and most northern and western
European cultures, Native American, Latin American and Arabic cultures use the polychronic system of
time.
These cultures are much less focused on the preciseness of accounting for each and every moment.
As Raymond Cohen notes, polychronic cultures are deeply steeped in tradition rather than in tasksa
clear difference from their monochronic counterparts. Cohen notes that "Traditional societies have all
the time in the world. The arbitrary divisions of the clock face have little saliency in cultures grounded
in the cycle of the seasons, the invariant pattern of rural life, and the calendar of religious festivities"
(Cohen, 1997, p. 34).
Instead, their culture is more focused on relationships, rather than watching the clock. They have no
problem being late for an event if they are with family or friends, because the relationship is what
really matters. As a result, polychronic cultures have a much less formal perception of time. They are
not ruled by precise calendars and schedules. Rather, cultures that use the polychronic time system
often schedule multiple appointments simultaneously so keeping on schedule is an impossibility. [2]
Polychronic cultures include Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Mexico, Philippines, India, and many in Africa.
Movement and body position
Kinesics

Information about the relationship and affect of these two skaters is communicated by their body
posture, eye gaze and physical contact.
The term "Kinesics" was first used (in 1952) by Ray Birdwhistell, an anthropologist who wished to
study how people communicate through posture, gesture, stance, and movement. Part of

Birdwhistell's work involved making film of people in social situations and analyzing them to show
different levels of communication not clearly seen otherwise. The study was joined by several other
anthropologists, including Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson.
Posture
Posture can be used to determine a participants degree of attention or involvement, the difference in
status between communicators, and the level of fondness a person has for the other communicator. [5]
Studies investigating the impact of posture on interpersonal relationships suggest that mirror-image
congruent postures, where one persons left side is parallel to the other persons right side, leads to
favorable perception of communicators and positive speech; a person who displays a forward lean or
a decrease in a backwards lean also signify positive sentiment during communication. [6] Posture is
understood through such indicators as direction of lean, body orientation, arm position, and body
openness.
Gesture

A wink is a type of gesture.

A gesture is a non-vocal bodily movement intended to express meaning. They may be articulated with
the hands, arms or body, and also include movements of the head, face and eyes, such as winking,
nodding, or rolling ones' eyes. The boundary between language and gesture, or verbal and nonverbal
communication, can be hard to identify.
Although the study of gesture is still in its infancy, some broad categories of gestures have been
identified by researchers. The most familiar are the so-called emblems or quotable gestures. These
are conventional, culture-specific gestures that can be used as replacement for words, such as the
hand-wave used in the US for "hello" and "goodbye". A single emblematic gesture can have a very
different significance in different cultural contexts, ranging from complimentary to highly offensive.[9]
For a list of emblematic gestures, see list of gestures.
Another broad category of gestures comprises those gestures used spontaneously when we speak.
These gestures are closely coordinated with speech. The so-called beat gestures are used in
conjunction with speech and keep time with the rhythm of speech to emphasize certain words or
phrases. These types of gestures are integrally connected to speech and thought processes.[10]
Other spontaneous gestures used when we speak are more contentful and may echo or elaborate the
meaning of the co-occurring speech.For example, a gesture that depicts the act of throwing may be
synchronous with the utterance, "He threw the ball right into the window."[10]
Gestural languages such as American Sign Language and its regional siblings operate as complete
natural languages that are gestural in modality. They should not be confused with finger spelling, in
which a set of emblematic gestures are used to represent a written alphabet.
Gestures can also be categorized as either speech-independent or speech-related. Speechindependent gestures are dependent upon culturally accepted interpretation and have a direct verbal
translation.[7] A wave hello or a peace sign are examples of speech-independent gestures. Speech

related gestures are used in parallel with verbal speech; this form of nonverbal communication is used
to emphasize the message that is being communicated. Speech related gestures are intended to
provide supplemental information to a verbal message such as pointing to an object of discussion.
Gestures such as Mudra (Sanskrit) encode sophisticated information accessible to initiates that are
privy to the subtlety of elements encoded in their tradition.
Haptics: touching in communication

A high five is an example of communicative touch.

Haptics is the study of touching as nonverbal communication. Touches that can be defined as
communication include handshakes, holding hands, kissing (cheek, lips, hand), back slapping, high
fives, a pat on the shoulder, and brushing an arm. Touching of oneself may include licking, picking,
holding, and scratching.[7] These behaviors are referred to as "adapter" or "tells" and may send
messages that reveal the intentions or feelings of a communicator. The meaning conveyed from touch
is highly dependent upon the context of the situation, the relationship between communicators, and
the manner of touch.[8]
Humans communicate interpersonal closeness through a series of non-verbal actions known as
immediacy behaviors. Examples of immediacy behaviors are: smiling, touching, open body positions,
and eye contact. Cultures that display these immediacy behaviors are known to be high contact
cultures.
Haptic communication is the means by which people and other animals communicate via touching.
Touch is an extremely important sense for humans; as well as providing information about surfaces
and textures it is a component of nonverbal communication in interpersonal relationships, and vital in
conveying physical intimacy. It can be both sexual (such as kissing) and platonic (such as hugging or
tickling).
Touch is the earliest sense to develop in the fetus. The development of an infant's haptic senses and
how it relates to the development of the other senses such as vision has been the target of much
research. Human babies have been observed to have enormous difficulty surviving if they do not
possess a sense of touch, even if they retain sight and hearing. Babies who can perceive through
touch, even without sight and hearing, tend to fare much better. Touch can be thought of as a basic
sense in that most life forms have a response to being touched, while only a subset have sight and
hearing.

In chimpanzees the sense of touch is highly developed. As newborns they see and hear poorly but
cling strongly to their mothers. Harry Harlow conducted a controversial study involving rhesus
monkeys and observed that monkeys reared with a "terry cloth mother", a wire feeding apparatus
wrapped in softer terry cloth which provided a level of tactile stimulation and comfort, were
considerably more emotionally stable as adults than those with a mere wire mother.(Harlow,1958)
Touching is treated differently from one country to another and socially acceptable levels of touching
vary from one culture to another (Remland, 2009). In the Thai culture, for example, touching
someone's head may be thought rude. Remland and Jones (1995) studied groups of people
communicating and found that in England (8%), France (5%) and the Netherlands (4%) touching was
rare compared to their Italian (14%) and Greek (12.5%) sample. [9]
Striking, pushing, pulling, pinching, kicking, strangling and hand-to-hand fighting are forms of touch in
the context of physical abuse. In a sentence like "I never touched him/her" or "Don't you dare to touch
him/her" the term touch may be meant as euphemism for either physical abuse or sexual touching. To
'touch oneself' is a euphemism for masturbation.
The word touch has many other metaphorical uses. One can be emotionally touched, referring to an
action or object that evokes an emotional response. To say "I was touched by your letter" implies the
reader felt a strong emotion when reading it. Usually does not include anger, disgust or other forms of
emotional rejection unless used in a sarcastic manner.
Stoeltje (2003) wrote about how Americans are losing touch with this important communication skill.
During a study conducted by University of Miami School of Medicine, Touch Research Institutes,
American children were said to be more aggressive than their French counterparts while playing at a
playground. It was noted that French women touched their children more
Eye gaze
The study of the role of eyes in nonverbal communication is sometimes referred to as "oculesics". Eye
contact can indicate interest, attention, and involvement. Studies have found that people use their
eyes to indicate their interest and with more than the frequently recognized actions of winking and
slight movement of the eyebrows. Eye contact is an event when two people look at each other's eyes
at the same time. It is a form of nonverbal communication and has a large influence on social
behavior. Frequency and interpretation of eye contact vary between cultures and species. Eye
aversion is the avoidance of eye contact. Eye contact and facial expressions provide important social
and emotional information. People, perhaps without consciously doing so, probe each other's eyes
and faces for positive or negative mood signs. [8] Gaze comprises the actions of looking while talking,
looking while listening, amount of gaze, and frequency of glances, patterns of fixation, pupil dilation,
and blink rate.[10]
Paralanguage: nonverbal cues of the voice
Paralanguage (sometimes called vocalics) is the study of nonverbal cues of the voice. Various
acoustic properties of speech such as tone, pitch and accent, collectively known as prosody, can all
give off nonverbal cues. Paralanguage may change the meaning of words.
The linguist George L. Trager developed a classification system which consists of the voice set, voice
qualities, and vocalization.[11]

The voice set is the context in which the speaker is speaking. This can include the situation,
gender, mood, age and a person's culture.

The voice qualities are volume, pitch, tempo, rhythm, articulation, resonance, nasality, and
accent. They give each individual a unique "voice print".

Vocalization consists of three subsections: characterizers, qualifiers and segregates.

Characterizers are emotions expressed while speaking, such as laughing, crying, and
yawning. A voice qualifier is the style of delivering a message - for example, yelling "Hey stop
that!", as opposed to whispering "Hey stop that". Vocal segregates such as "uh-huh" notify the
speaker that the listener is listening.

Functions of nonverbal communication

Argyle (1970) [12] put forward the hypothesis that whereas spoken language is normally used for
communicating information about events external to the speakers, non-verbal codes are used to
establish and maintain interpersonal relationships. It is considered more polite or nicer to communicate
attitudes towards others non-verbally rather than verbally, for instance in order to avoid embarrassing
situations [13].
Argyle (1988) concluded there are five primary functions of nonverbal bodily behavior in human
communication:[14]

Express emotions

Express interpersonal attitudes

To accompany speech in managing the cues of interaction between speakers and listeners

Self-presentation of ones personality

Rituals (greetings)

Concealing deception
Nonverbal communication makes it easier to lie without being revealed. This is the conclusion of a
study where people watched made-up interviews of persons accused of having stolen a wallet. The
interviewees lied in about 50% of the cases. People had access to either written transcripts of the
interviews, or audio tape recordings, or video recordings. The more clues that were available to those
watching, the larger was the trend that interviewees who actually lied were judged to be truthful. That
is, people that are clever at lying can use voice tone and face expression to give the impression that
they are truthful [15].
However, there are many cited examples of 'leakage' cues[16], delivered via nonverbal (paraverbal and
visual) communication channels, through which deceivers unwittingly provide clues to their concealed
knowledge or actual opinions. Most studies examining the leakage hypothesis from visual cues rely
upon hand coding of video footage (c.f. Vrij, 2008[17]), a method that is open to coding errors. A recent
study, however, demonstrated clear bodily movement differences between truth-tellers and liars using
an automated body motion capture system: truth-tellers demonstrated greater overall bodily movement
compared to liars in two different situations[18].
The relation between verbal and nonverbal communication
The relative importance of verbal and nonverbal communication
An interesting question is: When two people are communicating face-to-face, how much of the
meaning is communicated verbally, and how much is communicated non-verbally? This was
investigated by Albert Mehrabian and reported in two papers [19][20]. The latter paper concluded: "It is

suggested that the combined effect of simultaneous verbal, vocal, and facial attitude communications
is a weighted sum of their independent effects - with coefficients of .07, .38, and .55, respectively."
This "rule" that clues from spoken words, from the voice tone, and from the facial expression,
contribute 7 %, 38 %, and 55 % respectively to the total meaning, is widely cited. It is presented on all
types of popular courses with statements like "scientists have found out that . . . ". In reality, however, it
is extremely weakly founded. First, it is based on the judgment of the meaning of single tape-recorded
words, i.e. a very artificial context. Second, the figures are obtained by combining results from two
different studies which potentially cannot be combined. Third, it relates only to the communication of
positive versus negative emotions. Fourth, it relates only to women, as men did not participate in the
study.
Since then, other studies have analysed the relative contribution of verbal and nonverbal signals under
more naturalistic situations. Argyle [12] , using video tapes shown to the subjects, analysed the
communication of submissive/dominant attitude and found that non-verbal cues had 4.3 times the
effect of verbal cues. The most important effect was that body posture communicated superior status
in a very efficient way. On the other hand, a study by Hsee et al. [21] had subjects judge a person on the
dimension happy/sad and found that words spoken with minimal variation in intonation had an impact
about 4 times larger than face expressions seen in a film without sound. Thus, the relative importance
of spoken words and facial expressions may be very different in studies using different set-ups.
Interaction of verbal and nonverbal communication
When communicating, nonverbal messages can interact with verbal messages in six ways: repeating,
conflicting, complementing, substituting, regulating and accenting/moderating.
Repeating
"Repeating" consists of using gestures to strengthen a verbal message, such as pointing to the object
of discussion.[22]
Conflicting
Verbal and nonverbal messages within the same interaction can sometimes send opposing or
conflicting messages. A person verbally expressing a statement of truth while simultaneously fidgeting
or avoiding eye contact may convey a mixed message to the receiver in the interaction. Conflicting
messages may occur for a variety of reasons often stemming from feelings of uncertainty,
ambivalence, or frustration.[23] When mixed messages occur, nonverbal communication becomes the
primary tool people use to attain additional information to clarify the situation; great attention is placed
on bodily movements and positioning when people perceive mixed messages during interactions.
Complementing
Accurate interpretation of messages is made easier when nonverbal and verbal communication
complement each other. Nonverbal cues can be used to elaborate on verbal messages to reinforce the
information sent when trying to achieve communicative goals; messages have been shown to be
remembered better when nonverbal signals affirm the verbal exchange. [24]
Substituting
Nonverbal behavior is sometimes used as the sole channel for communication of a message. People
learn to identify facial expressions, body movements, and body positioning as corresponding with
specific feelings and intentions. Nonverbal signals can be used without verbal communication to
convey messages; when nonverbal behavior does not effectively communicate a message, verbal
methods are used to enhance understanding.[25]

Regulating
Nonverbal behavior also regulates our conversations. For example, touching someone's arm can
signal that you want to talk next or interrupt.[25]
Accenting/Moderating
Nonverbal signals are used to alter the interpretation of verbal messages. Touch, voice pitch, and
gestures are some of the tools people use to accent or amplify the message that is sent; nonverbal
behavior can also be used to moderate or tone down aspects of verbal messages as well. [26] For
example, a person who is verbally expressing anger may accent the verbal message by shaking a fist.
Dance and nonverbal communication
Dance is a form of nonverbal communication that requires the same underlying faculty in the brain for
conceptualization, creativity and memory as does verbal language in speaking and writing. Means of
self-expression, both forms have vocabulary (steps and gestures in dance), grammar (rules for putting
the vocabulary together) and meaning. Dance, however, assembles (choreographs) these elements in
a manner that more often resembles poetry, with its ambiguity and multiple, symbolic and elusive
meanings.
Clinical studies of nonverbal communication
From 1977 to 2004, the influence of disease and drugs on receptivity of nonverbal communication was
studied by teams at three separate medical schools using a similar paradigm. [27].Researchers at the
University of Pittsburgh, Yale University and Ohio State University had subjects observe gamblers at a
slot machine awaiting payoffs. The amount of this payoff was read by nonverbal transmission prior to
reinforcement. This technique was developed by and the studies directed by psychologist, Dr. Robert
E. Miller and psychiatrist, Dr. A. James Giannini. These groups reported diminished receptive ability in
heroin addicts [28] and phencyclidine abusers[29] was contrasted with increased receptivity in cocaine
addicts. Men with major depression[30] manifested significantly decreased ability to read nonverbal
cues when compared with euthymic men.
Freitas-Magalhaes studied the effect of smile in the treatment of depression and concluded that
depressive states decrease when you smile more often. [31]
Obese women[32] and women with premenstrual syndrome[33] were found to also possess diminished
abilities to read these cues. In contradistinction, men with bipolar disorder possessed increased
abilities.[34]. A woman with total paralysis of the nerves of facial expression was found unable to
transmit any nonverbal facial cues whatsoever.[35]. Because of the changes in levels of accuracy on the
levels of nonverbal receptivity, the members of the research team hypothesized a biochemical site in
the brain which was operative for reception of nonverbal cues. Because certain drugs enhanced ability
while others diminished it, the neurotransmitters dopamine and endorphin were considered to be likely
etiological candidate. Based on the available data, however, the primary cause and primary effect
could not be sorted out on the basis of the paradigm employed [36].
A byproduct of the work of the Pittsburgh/Yale/ Ohio State team was an investigation of the role of
nonverbal facial cues in heterosexual nondate rape. Males who were serial rapists of adult women
were studied for nonverbal receptive abilities. Their scores were the highest of any subgroup. [37] Rape
victims were next tested. It was reported that women who had been raped on at least two occasions
by different perpetrators had a highly significant impairment in their abilities to read these cues in
either male or female senders.[38] These results were troubling, indicating a predator-prey model. The
authors did note that whatever the nature of these preliminary findings the responsibility of the rapist
was in no manner or level, diminished.

The final target of study for this group was the medical students they taught. Medical students at Ohio
State University, Ohio University and Northest Ohio Medical College were invited to serve as subjects.
Students indicating a preference for the specialties of family practice, psychiatry, pediatrics and
obstetrics-gynecology achieved significantly higher levels of accuracy than those students who
planned to train as surgeons, radiologists, or pathologists. Internal medicine and plastic surgery
candidates scored at levels near the mean[39].
Difficulties with nonverbal communication
People vary in their ability to send and receive nonverbal communication. On average, to a moderate
degree, women are better at nonverbal communication than are men [40][41][42][43].
Measurements of the ability to communicate nonverbally and the capacity to feel empathy have shown
that the two abilities are independent of each other [44].
For people who have relatively large difficulties with nonverbal communication, this can pose
significant challenges, especially in interpersonal relationships. There exist resources that are tailored
specifically to these people, which attempt to assist those in understanding information which comes
more easily to others. A specific group of persons that face these challenges are those with autism
spectrum disorders, including Asperger syndrome.

Body language
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A study in body language.

Body language is a form of non-verbal communication, which consists of body posture, gestures,
facial expressions, and eye movements. Humans send and interpret such signals almost entirely
subconsciously.

John Borg attests that human communication consists of 93 percent body language and paralinguistic
cues, while only 7% of communication consists of words themselves [1]; however, Albert Mehrabian, the
researcher whose 1960s work is the source of these statistics, has stated that this is a
misunderstanding of the findings[2] (see Misinterpretation of Mehrabian's rule). Others assert that
"Research has suggested that between 60 and 70 percent of all meaning is derived from nonverbal
behavior."[3]
Body language may provide clues as to the attitude or state of mind of a person. For example, it may
indicate aggression, attentiveness, boredom, relaxed state, pleasure, amusement, and intoxication,
among many other cues.

Contents
[hide]

1 Understanding body language

o

1.1 Physical expression

2 How prevalent is non-verbal communication in humans?

3 Body language and space

4 Unintentional gestures

5 See also

6 References

7 External links

Understanding body language

The technique of "reading" people is used frequently. For example, the idea of mirroring body
language to put people at ease is commonly used in interviews. Mirroring the body language of
someone else indicates that they are understood.[citation needed] It is important to note that while some
indicators of emotion (e.g. smiling/laughing when happy, frowning/crying when sad) are largely
universal[citation needed][4], however in the 1990s Ekman expanded his list of basic emotions, including a
range of positive and negative emotions not all of which are encoded in facial muscles.[13] The newly
included emotions are: 1. Amusement 2. Contempt 3. Contentment 4. Embarrassment 5. Excitement
6. Guilt 7. Pride in achievement 8. Relief 9. Satisfaction 10. Sensory pleasure 11. Shame

Body language signals may have a goal other than communication. Both people would keep this in
mind. Observers limit the weight they place on non-verbal cues. Signalers clarify their signals to
indicate the biological origin of their actions. Examples would include yawning (sleepiness), showing
lack of interest (sexual interest/survival interest), attempts to change the topic (fight or flight drivers).
Physical expression
Physical expressions like waving, pointing, touching and slouching are all forms of nonverbal
communication. The study of body movement and expression is known as kinesics. Humans move
their bodies when communicating because, as research has shown [citation needed], it helps "ease the

mental effort when communication is difficult." Physical expressions reveal many things about the
person using them. For example, gestures can emphasize a point or relay a message, posture can
reveal boredom or great interest, and touch can convey encouragement or caution. [5]

One of the most basic and powerful body-language signals is when a person crosses his or
her arms across the chest.[citation needed] This can indicate that a person is putting up an
unconscious barrier between themselves and others. It can also indicate that the person's
arms are cold, which would be clarified by rubbing the arms or huddling. When the overall
situation is amicable, it can mean that a person is thinking deeply about what is being
discussed. But in a serious or confrontational situation, it can mean that a person is
expressing opposition. This is especially so if the person is leaning away from the speaker. A
harsh or blank facial expression often indicates outright hostility.

Consistent eye contact can indicate that a person is thinking positively of what the speaker is
saying. It can also mean that the other person doesn't trust the speaker enough to "take their
eyes off" the speaker. Lack of eye contact can indicate negativity. On the other hand,
individuals with anxiety disorders are often unable to make eye contact without discomfort.
Eye contact can also be a secondary and misleading gesture because cultural norms about it
vary widely. If a person is looking at you, but is making the arms-across-chest signal, the eye
contact could be indicative that something is bothering the person, and that he wants to talk
about it. Or if while making direct eye contact, a person is fiddling with something, even while
directly looking at you, it could indicate the attention is elsewhere. Also, there are three
standard areas that a person will look which represent different states of being. If the person
looks from one eye to the other than to the forehead, it is a sign that they are taking an
authoritative position. If they move from one eye to the other than to the nose, that signals that
they are engaging in what they consider to be a "level conversation" with neither party holding
superiority. The last case is from one eye to the other and then down to the lips. This is a
strong indication of romantic feelings.[citation needed]

Disbelief is often indicated by averted gaze, or by touching the ear or scratching the chin.
When a person is not being convinced by what someone is saying, the attention invariably
wanders, and the eyes will stare away for an extended period. [citation needed]

Boredom is indicated by the head tilting to one side, or by the eyes looking straight at the
speaker but becoming slightly unfocused. A head tilt may also indicate a sore neck or
Amblyopia, and unfocused eyes may indicate ocular problems in the listener.[citation needed]

Interest can be indicated through posture or extended eye contact, such as standing and
listening properly.[citation needed]

Deceit or the act of withholding information can sometimes be indicated by touching the face
during conversation. Excessive blinking is a well-known indicator of someone who is lying.
Recently[when?], evidence has surfaced that the absence of blinking can also represent lying as
a more reliable factor than excessive blinking. [1]

Some people use and understand body language differently, or not at all. [citation needed] Interpreting their
gestures and facial expressions (or lack thereof) in the context of normal body language usually leads
to misunderstandings and misinterpretations (especially if body language is given priority over spoken
language). It should also be stated that people from different cultures can interpret body language in
different ways.
How prevalent is non-verbal communication in humans?
Some researchers[who?] put the level of nonverbal communication as high as 80 percent of all
communication when it could be at around 50-65 percent. Different studies have found differing
amounts, with some studies showing that facial communication is believed 4.3 times more often than
verbal meaning, and another finding that verbal communication in a flat tone is 4 times more likely to

be understood than a pure facial expression.[citation needed] Albert Mehrabian is noted for finding a 7%38%-55% rule, supposedly denoting how much communication was conferred by words, tone, and
body language. However he was only referring to cases of expressing feelings or attitudes.
Body language and space
Main article: Personal space
Interpersonal space refers to the psychological "bubble" that we can imagine exists when someone is
standing too close to us. Research has revealed that there are four different zones of interpersonal
space.

The first zone is called intimate distance and ranges from touching to about eighteen inches
(46 cm) apart. Intimate distance is the space around us that we reserve for lovers, children, as
well as close family members and friends, and also pet animals.

The second zone is called personal distance and begins about an arm's length away; starting
around eighteen inches (46 cm) from our person and ending about four feet (122 cm) away.
We use personal distance in conversations with friends, to chat with associates, and in group
discussions.

The third zone of interpersonal space is called social distance and is the area that ranges from
four to eight feet (1.2 m - 2.4 m) away from you. Social distance is reserved for strangers,
newly formed groups, and new acquaintances.

The fourth identified zone of space is public distance and includes anything more than eight
feet (2.4 m) away from you. This zone is used for speeches, lectures, and theater; essentially,
public distance is that range reserved for larger audiences. [6]

Unintentional gestures
Recently[when?], there has been huge interest in studying human behavioral clues that could be useful
for developing an interactive and adaptive human-machine system. Unintentional human gestures
such as making an eye rub, a chin rest, a lip touch, a nose itch, a head scratch, an ear scratch,
crossing arms, and a finger lock have been found conveying some useful information in specific
context. Some researchers[who?] have tried to extract such gestures in a specific context of educational
applications.[citation needed] In poker games, such gestures are referred to as "tells" and are useful to
players for detecting deception or behavioral patterns in an opponent(s).

Facial Action Coding System

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Muscles of head and neck.

Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is a system to taxonomize human facial expressions, originally
developed by Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen in 1978.[1] It is a common standard to systematically
categorize the physical expression of emotions, and it has proven useful to psychologists and to
animators.
[edit] Uses
Using FACS, human coders can manually code nearly any anatomically possible facial expression,
deconstructing it into the specific Action Units (AU) and their temporal segments that produced the
expression. As AUs are independent of any interpretation, they can be used for any higher order
decision making process including recognition of basic emotions, or pre-programmed commands for
an ambient intelligent environment. The FACS Manual is over 500 pages in length and provides the
AUs, as well as Dr. Ekmans interpretation of their meaning.
FACS defines AUs, which are a contraction or relaxation of one or more muscles. It also defines a
number of Action Descriptors, which differ from AUs in that the authors of FACS have not specified the
muscular basis for the action and have not distinguished specific behaviors as precisely as they have
for the AUs.
For example, FACS can be used to distinguish two types of smiles as follows:[2]

Insincere and voluntary Pan American smile: contraction of zygomatic major alone

Sincere and involuntary Duchenne smile: contraction of zygomatic major and inferior part of
orbicularis oculi.

Although the labeling of expressions currently requires trained experts, researchers have had some
success in using computers to automatically identify FACS codes, and thus quickly identify emotions [3].
Computer graphical face models, such as CANDIDE or Artnatomy, allow expressions to be artificially
posed by setting the desired action units.
The use of FACS has been proposed for use in the analysis of depression[4], and the measurement of
pain in patients unable to express themselves verbally[5].
FACS is designed to be self-instructional. People can learn the technique from a number of sources [6],
including manuals and workshops[7], and obtain certification through testing[8]. A variant of FACS has
been developed to analyze facial expressions in chimpanzees[9].
P. Ekman and W. V. Friesen also developed EMFACS (Emotion Facial Action Coding System) [10] and
FACSAID (Facial Action Coding System Affect Interpretation Dictionary) [11] which consider only
emotion-related facial actions. For example:
Emotion

Action Units

Happiness

6+12

Sadness

1+4+15

Surprise

1+2+5B+26

Fear

1+2+4+5

Anger

4+5+7+23

Disgust

9+16+15

Contempt

R12A+R14A

[edit] Codes for Action Units

See also: List of muscles in the human body#The muscles of the head
For clarification, FACS is an index of facial expressions, but does not actually provide any biomechanical information about the degree of muscle activation. Though muscle activation is not part of
FACS, the main muscles involved in the facial expression have been added here for the benefit of the
reader.
Action Units (AUs) are the fundamental actions of individual muscles or groups of muscles.
Action Descriptors (ADs) are unitary movements that may involve the actions of several muscle
groups (e.g., a forwardthrusting movement of the jaw). The muscular basis for these actions hasnt
been specified and specific behaviors havent been distinguished as precisely as for the AUs.
For most accurate annotation, FACS suggests agreement from at least two independent certified
FACS encoders.
[edit] Intensity Scoring
Intensities of FACS are annotated by appending letters AE (for minimal-maximial intensity) to the
Action Unit number (e.g. AU 1A is the weakest trace of AU 1 and AU 1E is the maximum intensity
possible for the individual person).

A Trace

B Slight

C Marked or Pronounced

D Severe or Extreme

E Maximum

[edit] List of Action Units and Action Descriptors (with underlying facial muscles)
AU Number
FACS Name
Muscular Basis
0

Neutral Face

Inner Brow Raiser

Frontalis (pars medialis)

Outer Brow Raiser

Frontalis (pars lateralis)

Brow Lowerer

Depressor glabellae, Depressor supercilii, Corrugator supercilii

Upper Lid Raiser

Levator palpebrae superioris

Cheek Raiser

Orbicularis oculi (pars orbitalis)

Lid Tightener

Orbicularis oculi (pars palpebralis)

Nose Wrinkler

Levator labii superioris alaeque nasi

10

Upper Lip Raiser

Levator labii superioris, caput infraorbitalis

11

Nasolabial Deepener Zygomaticus minor

12

Lip Corner Puller

Zygomaticus major

13

Sharp Lip Puller

Levator anguli oris (also known as Caninus)

14

Dimpler

Buccinator

15

Lip Corner
Depressor

Depressor anguli oris (also known as Triangularis)

16

Lower Lip Depressor Depressor labii inferioris

17

Chin Raiser

Mentalis

18

Lip Pucker

Incisivii labii superioris and Incisivii labii inferioris

19

Tongue Show

20

Lip Stretcher

Risorius w/ platysma

21

Neck Tightener

Platysma

22

Lip Funneler

Orbicularis oris

23

Lip Tightener

Orbicularis oris

24

Lip Pressor

Orbicularis oris

25

Lips Part

Depressor labii inferioris or relaxation of Mentalis, or Orbicularis

oris

26

Jaw Drop

Masseter, relaxed Temporalis and internal pterygoid

27

Mouth Stretch

Pterygoids, Digastric

28

Lip Suck

Orbicularis oris

29

Jaw Thrust

30

Jaw Sideways

31

Jaw Clencher

32

[Lip] Bite

33

[Cheek] Blow

34

[Cheek] Puff

35

[Cheek] Suck

36

[Tongue] Bulge

Masseter

37

Lip Wipe

38

Nostril Dilator

39

Nostril Compressor

41

Glabella Lowerer

Separate Strand of AU 4

42

Inner Eyebrow
Lowerer

Separate Strand of AU 4

43

Eyes Closed

Relaxation of Levator palpebrae superioris; Orbicularis oculi (pars

palpebralis)

44

Eyebrow Gatherer

Separate Strand of AU 4

45

Blink

Relaxation of Levator palpebrae superioris; Orbicularis oculi (pars

palpebralis)

46

Wink

Relaxation of Levator palpebrae superioris; Orbicularis oculi (pars

palpebralis)

[edit] Head Movement Code

AU
FACS Name
Number

Action

51

Head Turn Left

52

Head Turn Right

53

Head Up

54

Head Down

55

Head Tilt Left

M55

Head Tilt Left

56

Head Tilt Right

M56

Head Tilt Right

57

Head Forward

M57

Head Thrust
Forward

58

Head Back

M59

Head Shake Up The onset of 17+24 is immediately preceded, accompanied, or followed

and Down
an up-down head shake (nod).

M60

Head Shake
Side to Side

The onset of 17+24 is immediately preceded, accompanied, or followed

by a side to side head shake.

M83

Head Upward

The onset of the symmetrical 14 is immediately preceded or

The onset of the symmetrical 14 is immediately preceded or

accompanied by a head tilt to the left.

The onset of the symmetrical 14 is immediately preceded or

accompanied by a head tilt to the right.

The onset of 17+24 is immediately preceded, accompanied, or followed

by a head thrust forward.

and to the Side

accompanied by a movement of the head, upward and turned and/or

tilted to either the left or right.

[edit] Eye Movement Codes

AU
FACS Name
Number

Action

61

Eyes Turn Left

M61

Eyes Left

62

Eyes Turn Right

M62

Eyes Right

63

Eyes Up

65

Eyes Down

65

Walleye

66

Cross-eye

M68

Upward Rolling of The onset of the symmetrical 14 is immediately preceded or

Eyes
accompanied by an upward rolling of the eyes.

69

Eyes Positioned to
The 4, 5, or 7, alone or in combination, occurs while the eye position is
Look at Other
fixed on the other person in the conversation.
Person

M69

The onset of the symmetrical 14 or AUs 4, 5, and 7, alone or in

Head and/or Eyes
combination, is immediately preceded or accompanied by a movement
Look at Other
of the eyes or of the head and eyes to look at the other person in the
Person
conversation.

The onset of the symmetrical 14 is immediately preceded or

accompanied by eye movement to the left.

The onset of the symmetrical 14 is immediately preceded or

accompanied by eye movement to the right.

[edit] Visibility Codes

AU Number

FACS Name

70

Brows and forehead not visible

71

Eyes not visible

72

Lower face not visible

73

Entire face not visible

74

Unscorable

[edit] Gross Behavior Codes

These codes are reserved for recording information about gross behaviors that may be relevant to the
facial actions that are scored.
AU Number

FACS Name

40

Sniff

50

Speech

80

Swallow

81

Chewing

82

Shoulder shrug

84

Head shake back and forth

85

Head nod up and down

91

Flash

92

Partial flash

97

Shiver/Tremble

98

Fast up-down look

The Naked Face

ANNALS OF PSYCHOLOGY
Can you read people's thoughts
just by looking at them?
1.
Some years ago, John Yarbrough was working patrol for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.
It was about two in the morning. He and his partner were in the Willowbrook section of South Central
Los Angeles, and they pulled over a sports car. "Dark, nighttime, average stop," Yarbrough recalls.
"Patrol for me was like going hunting. At that time of night in the area I was working, there was a lot of
criminal activity, and hardly anyone had a driver's license. Almost everyone had something intoxicating
in the car. We stopped drunk drivers all the time. You're hunting for guns or lots of dope, or suspects
wanted for major things. You look at someone and you get an instinctive reaction. And the longer
you've been working the stronger that instinctive reaction is."
Yarbrough was driving, and in a two-man patrol car the procedure is for the driver to make the
approach and the officer on the passenger side to provide backup. He opened the door and stepped
out onto the street, walking toward the vehicle with his weapon drawn. Suddenly, a man jumped out of
the passenger side and pointed a gun directly at him. The two of them froze, separated by no more
than a few yards. "There was a tree behind him, to his right," Yarbrough recalls. "He was about
seventeen. He had the gun in his right hand. He was on the curb side. I was on the other side, facing
him. It was just a matter of who was going to shoot first. I remember it clear as day. But for some
reason I didn't shoot him." Yarbrough is an ex-marine with close-cropped graying hair and a small
mustache, and he speaks in measured tones. "Is he a danger? Sure. He's standing there with a gun,
and what person in his right mind does that facing a uniformed armed policeman? If you looked at it
logically, I should have shot him. But logic had nothing to do with it. Something just didn't feel right. It
was a gut reaction not to shoot-- a hunch that at that exact moment he was not an imminent threat to
me." So Yarbrough stopped, and, sure enough, so did the kid. He pointed a gun at an armed
policeman on a dark street in South Central L.A., and then backed down.
Yarbrough retired last year from the sheriff's department after almost thirty years, sixteen of which
were in homicide. He now lives in western Arizona, in a small, immaculate house overlooking the

Colorado River, with pictures of John Wayne, Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, and Dale Earnhardt
on the wall. He has a policeman's watchfulness: while he listens to you, his eyes alight on your face,
and then they follow your hands, if you move them, and the areas to your immediate left and right-and then back again, in a steady cycle. He grew up in an affluent household in the San Fernando
Valley, the son of two doctors, and he is intensely analytical: he is the sort to take a problem and break
it down, working it over slowly and patiently in his mind, and the incident in Willowbrook is one of those
problems. Policemen shoot people who point guns directly at them at two in the morning. But
something he saw held him back, something that ninety-nine people out of a hundred wouldn't have
seen.
Many years later, Yarbrough met with a team of psychologists who were conducting training sessions
for law enforcement. They sat beside him in a darkened room and showed him a series of videotapes
of people who were either lying or telling the truth. He had to say who was doing what. One tape
showed people talking about their views on the death penalty and on smoking in public. Another
featured a series of nurses who were all talking about a nature film they were supposedly watching,
even though some of them were actually watching grisly documentary footage about burn victims and
amputees. It may sound as if the tests should have been easy, because we all think we can tell
whether someone is lying. But these were not the obvious fibs of a child, or the prevarications of
people whose habits and tendencies we know well. These were strangers who were motivated to
deceive, and the task of spotting the liars turns out to be fantastically difficult. There is just too much
information--words, intonation, gestures, eyes, mouth--and it is impossible to know how the various
cues should be weighted, or how to put them all together, and in any case it's all happening so quickly
that you can't even follow what you think you ought to follow. The tests have been given to policemen,
customs officers, judges, trial lawyers, and psychotherapists, as well as to officers from the F.B.I., the
C.I.A., the D.E.A., and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms-- people one would have thought
would be good at spotting lies. On average, they score fifty per cent, which is to say that they would
have done just as well if they hadn't watched the tapes at all and just guessed. But every now and
again-- roughly one time in a thousand--someone scores off the charts. A Texas Ranger named David
Maxwell did extremely well, for example, as did an ex-A.T.F. agent named J.J. Newberry, a few
therapists, an arbitrator, a vice cop-- and John Yarbrough, which suggests that what happened in
Willowbrook may have been more than a fluke or a lucky guess. Something in our faces signals
whether we're going to shoot, say, or whether we're lying about the film we just saw. Most of us aren't
very good at spotting it. But a handful of people are virtuosos. What do they see that we miss?
2.
All of us, a thousand times a day, read faces. When someone says "I love you," we look into that
person's eyes to judge his or her sincerity. When we meet someone new, we often pick up on subtle
signals, so that, even though he or she may have talked in a normal and friendly manner, afterward we
say, "I don't think he liked me," or "I don't think she's very happy." We easily parse complex distinctions
in facial expression. If you saw me grinning, for example, with my eyes twinkling, you'd say I was
amused. But that's not the only way we interpret a smile. If you saw me nod and smile exaggeratedly,
with the corners of my lips tightened, you would take it that I had been teased and was responding
sarcastically. If I made eye contact with someone, gave a small smile and then looked down and
averted my gaze, you would think I was flirting. If I followed a remark with an abrupt smile and then
nodded, or tilted my head sideways, you might conclude that I had just said something a little harsh,
and wanted to take the edge off it. You wouldn't need to hear anything I was saying in order to reach
these conclusions. The face is such an extraordinarily efficient instrument of communication that there
must be rules that govern the way we interpret facial expressions. But what are those rules? And are
they the same for everyone?
In the nineteen-sixties, a young San Francisco psychologist named Paul Ekman began to study facial
expression, and he discovered that no one knew the answers to those questions. Ekman went to see
Margaret Mead, climbing the stairs to her tower office at the American Museum of Natural History. He
had an idea. What if he travelled around the world to find out whether people from different cultures
agreed on the meaning of different facial expressions? Mead, he recalls, "looked at me as if I were
crazy." Like most social scientists of her day, she believed that expression was culturally determined-that we simply used our faces according to a set of learned social conventions. Charles Darwin had
discussed the face in his later writings; in his 1872 book, "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and
Animals," he argued that all mammals show emotion reliably in their faces. But in the nineteen-sixties

academic psychologists were more interested in motivation and cognition than in emotion or its
expression. Ekman was undaunted; he began travelling to places like Japan, Brazil, and Argentina,
carrying photographs of men and women making a variety of distinctive faces. Everywhere he went,
people agreed on what those expressions meant. But what if people in the developed world had all
picked up the same cultural rules from watching the same movies and television shows? So Ekman
set out again, this time making his way through the jungles of Papua New Guinea, to the most remote
villages, and he found that the tribesmen there had no problem interpreting the expressions, either.
This may not sound like much of a breakthrough. But in the scientific climate of the time it was a
revelation. Ekman had established that expressions were the universal products of evolution. There
were fundamental lessons to be learned from the face, if you knew where to look.
Paul Ekman is now in his sixties. He is clean-shaven, with closely set eyes and thick, prominent
eyebrows, and although he is of medium build, he seems much larger than he is: there is something
stubborn and substantial in his demeanor. He grew up in Newark, the son of a pediatrician, and
entered the University of Chicago at fifteen. He speaks deliberately: before he laughs, he pauses
slightly, as if waiting for permission. He is the sort to make lists, and number his arguments. His
academic writing has an orderly logic to it; by the end of an Ekman essay, each stray objection and
problem has been gathered up and catalogued. In the mid-sixties, Ekman set up a lab in a ramshackle
Victorian house at the University of California at San Francisco, where he holds a professorship. If the
face was part of a physiological system, he reasoned, the system could be learned. He set out to
teach himself. He treated the face as an adventurer would a foreign land, exploring its every crevice
and contour. He assembled a videotape library of people's facial expressions, which soon filled three
rooms in his lab, and studied them to the point where he could look at a face and pick up a flicker of
emotion that might last no more than a fraction of a second. Ekman created the lying tests. He filmed
the nurses talking about the movie they were watching and the movie they weren't watching. Working
with Maureen O'Sullivan, a psychologist from the University of San Francisco, and other colleagues,
he located people who had a reputation for being uncannily perceptive, and put them to the test, and
that's how Yarbrough and the other high-scorers were identified. O'Sullivan and Ekman call this study
of gifted face readers the Diogenes Project, after the Greek philosopher of antiquity who used to
wander around Athens with a lantern, peering into people's faces as he searched for an honest man.
Ekman has taken the most vaporous of sensations-- the hunch you have about someone else-- and
sought to give them definition. Most of us don't trust our hunches, because we don't know where they
came from. We think they can't be explained. But what if they can?
3.
Paul Ekman got his start in the face-reading business because of a man named Silvan Tomkins, and
Silvan Tomkins may have been the best face reader there ever was. Tomkins was from Philadelphia,
the son of a dentist from Russia. He was short, and slightly thick around the middle, with a wild mane
of white hair and huge black plastic-rimmed glasses. He taught psychology at Princeton and Rutgers,
and was the author of "Affect, Imagery, Consciousness," a four-volume work so dense that its readers
were evenly divided between those who understood it and thought it was brilliant and those who did
not understand it and thought it was brilliant. He was a legendary talker. At the end of a cocktail party,
fifteen people would sit, rapt, at Tomkins's feet, and someone would say, "One more question!" and
they would all sit there for another hour and a half, as Tomkins held forth on, say, comic books, a
television sitcom, the biology of emotion, his problem with Kant, and his enthusiasm for the latest fad
diets, all enfolded into one extended riff. During the Depression, in the midst of his doctoral studies at
Harvard, he worked as a handicapper for a horse-racing syndicate, and was so successful that he
lived lavishly on Manhattan's Upper East Side. At the track, where he sat in the stands for hours,
staring at the horses through binoculars, he was known as the Professor. "He had a system for
predicting how a horse would do based on what horse was on either side of him, based on their
emotional relationship," Ekman said. If a male horse, for instance, had lost to a mare in his first or
second year, he would be ruined if he went to the gate with a mare next to him in the lineup. (Or
something like that-- no one really knew for certain.) Tomkins felt that emotion was the code to life, and
that with enough attention to particulars the code could be cracked. He thought this about the horses,
and, more important, he thought this about the human face.
Tomkins, it was said, could walk into a post office, go over to the "Wanted" posters, and, just by
looking at mug shots, tell you what crimes the various fugitives had committed. "He would watch the
show "To Tell the Truth,' and without fault he could always pick the person who was lying and who his

confederates were," his son, Mark, recalls. "He actually wrote the producer at one point to say it was
too easy, and the man invited him to come to New York, go backstage, and show his stuff." Virginia
Demos, who teaches psychology at Harvard, recalls having long conversations with Tomkins. "We
would sit and talk on the phone, and he would turn the sound down as Jesse Jackson was talking to
Michael Dukakis, at the Democratic National Convention. And he would read the faces and give his
predictions on what would happen. It was profound."
Ekman's most memorable encounter with Tomkins took place in the late sixties. Ekman had just
tracked down a hundred thousand feet of film that had been shot by the virologist Carleton Gajdusek
in the remote jungles of Papua New Guinea. Some of the footage was of a tribe called the South Fore,
who were a peaceful and friendly people. The rest was of the Kukukuku, who were hostile and
murderous and who had a homosexual ritual where pre-adolescent boys were required to serve as
courtesans for the male elders of the tribe. Ekman was still working on the problem of whether human
facial expressions were universal, and the Gajdusek film was invaluable. For six months, Ekman and
his collaborator, Wallace Friesen, sorted through the footage. They cut extraneous scenes, focussing
just on closeups of the faces of the tribesmen, and when the editing was finished Ekman called in
Tomkins.
The two men, protg and mentor, sat at the back of the room, as faces flickered across the screen.
Ekman had told Tomkins nothing about the tribes involved; all identifying context had been edited out.
Tomkins looked on intently, peering through his glasses. At the end, he went up to the screen and
pointed to the faces of the South Fore. "These are a sweet, gentle people, very indulgent, very
peaceful," he said. Then he pointed to the faces of the Kukukuku. "This other group is violent, and
there is lots of evidence to suggest homosexuality." Even today, a third of a century later, Ekman
cannot get over what Tomkins did. "My God! I vividly remember saying, "Silvan, how on earth are you
doing that?' " Ekman recalls. "And he went up to the screen and, while we played the film backward, in
slow motion, he pointed out the particular bulges and wrinkles in the face that he was using to make
his judgment. That's when I realized, "I've got to unpack the face.' It was a gold mine of information
that everyone had ignored. This guy could see it, and if he could see it, maybe everyone else could,
too."
Ekman and Friesen decided that they needed to create a taxonomy of facial expressions, so day after
day they sat across from each other and began to make every conceivable face they could. Soon,
though, they realized that their efforts weren't enough. "I met an anthropologist, Wade Seaford, told
him what I was doing, and he said, 'Do you have this movement?'" --and here Ekman contracted
what's called the triangularis, which is the muscle that depresses the corners of the lips, forming an
arc of distaste-- "and it wasn't in my system, because I had never seen it before. I had built a system
not on what the face can do but on what I had seen. I was devastated. So I came back and said, 'I've
got to learn the anatomy.' " Friesen and Ekman then combed through medical textbooks that outlined
each of the facial muscles, and identified every distinct muscular movement that the face could make.
There were forty-three such movements. Ekman and Friesen called them "action units." Then they sat
across from each other again, and began manipulating each action unit in turn, first locating the
muscle in their mind and then concentrating on isolating it, watching each other closely as they did,
checking their movements in a mirror, making notes of how the wrinkle patterns on their faces would
change with each muscle movement, and videotaping the movement for their records. On the few
occasions when they couldn't make a particular movement, they went next door to the U.C.S.F.
anatomy department, where a surgeon they knew would stick them with a needle and electrically
stimulate the recalcitrant muscle. "That wasn't pleasant at all," Ekman recalls. When each of those
action units had been mastered, Ekman and Friesen began working action units in combination,
layering one movement on top of another. The entire process took seven years. "There are three
hundred combinations of two muscles," Ekman says. "If you add in a third, you get over four thousand.
We took it up to five muscles, which is over ten thousand visible facial configurations." Most of those
ten thousand facial expressions don't mean anything, of course. They are the kind of nonsense faces
that children make. But, by working through each action-unit combination, Ekman and Friesen
identified about three thousand that did seem to mean something, until they had catalogued the
essential repertoire of human emotion.
4.

On a recent afternoon, Ekman sat in his office at U.C.S.F., in what is known as the Human Interaction
Laboratory, a standard academic's lair of books and files, with photographs of his two heroes, Tomkins
and Darwin, on the wall. He leaned forward slightly, placing his hands on his knees, and began
running through the action-unit configurations he had learned so long ago. "Everybody can do action
unit four," he began. He lowered his brow, using his depressor glabellae, depressor supercilli, and
corrugator. "Almost everyone can do A.U. nine." He wrinkled his nose, using his levator labii superioris,
alaeque nasi. "Everybody can do five." He contracted his levator palpebrae superioris, raising his
upper eyelid.
I was trying to follow along with him, and he looked up at me. "You've got a very good five," he said
generously. "The more deeply set your eyes are, the harder it is to see the five. Then there's seven."
He squinted. "Twelve." He flashed a smile, activating the zygomatic major. The inner parts of his
eyebrows shot up. "That's A.U. ---- distress, anguish." Then he used his frontalis, pars lateralis, to
raise the outer half of his eyebrows. "That's A.U. two. It's also very hard, but it's worthless. It's not part
of anything except Kabuki theatre. Twenty-three is one of my favorites. It's the narrowing of the red
margin of the lips. Very reliable anger sign. It's very hard to do voluntarily." He narrowed his lips.
"Moving one ear at a time is still the hardest thing to do. I have to really concentrate. It takes
everything I've got." He laughed. "This is something my daughter always wanted me to do for her
friends. Here we go." He wiggled his left ear, then his right ear. Ekman does not appear to have a
particularly expressive face. He has the demeanor of a psychoanalyst, watchful and impassive, and
his ability to transform his face so easily and quickly was astonishing. "There is one I can't do," he
went on. "It's A.U. thirty-nine. Fortunately, one of my postdocs can do it. A.U. thirty-eight is dilating the
nostrils. Thirty-nine is the opposite. It's the muscle that pulls them down." He shook his head and
looked at me again. "Oooh! You've got a fantastic thirty-nine. That's one of the best I've ever seen. It's
genetic. There should be other members of your family who have this heretofore unknown talent.
You've got it, you've got it." He laughed again. "You're in a position to flash it at people. See, you
should try that in a singles bar!"
Ekman then began to layer one action unit on top of another, in order to compose the more
complicated facial expressions that we generally recognize as emotions. Happiness, for instance, is
essentially A.U. six and twelve-- contracting the muscles that raise the cheek (orbicularis oculi, pars
orbitalis) in combination with the zygomatic major, which pulls up the corners of the lips. Fear is A.U.
one, two and four, or, more fully, one, two, four, five, and twenty, with or without action units twentyfive, twenty-six, or twenty-seven. That is: the inner brow raiser (frontalis, pars medialis) plus the outer
brow raiser (frontalis, pars lateralis) plus the brow-lowering depressor supercilli plus the levator
palpebrae superioris (which raises the upper lid), plus the risorius (which stretches the lips), the
parting of the lips (depressor labii), and the masseter (which drops the jaw). Disgust? That's mostly
A.U. nine, the wrinkling of the nose (levator labii superioris, alaeque nasi), but it can sometimes be ten,
and in either case may be combined with A.U. fifteen or sixteen or seventeen.
Ekman and Friesen ultimately assembled all these combinations--and the rules for reading and
interpreting them-- into the Facial Action Coding System, or FACS, and wrote them up in a fivehundred-page binder. It is a strangely riveting document, full of details like the possible movements of
the lips (elongate, de-elongate, narrow, widen, flatten, protrude, tighten and stretch); the four different
changes of the skin between the eyes and the cheeks (bulges, bags, pouches, and lines); or the
critical distinctions between infraorbital furrows and the nasolabial furrow. Researchers have employed
the system to study everything from schizophrenia to heart disease; it has even been put to use by
computer animators at Pixar ("Toy Story"), andat DreamWorks ("Shrek"). FACS takes weeks to master
in its entirety, and only five hundred people around the world have been certified to use it in research.
But for those who have, the experience of looking at others is forever changed. They learn to read the
face the way that people like John Yarbrough did intuitively. Ekman compares it to the way you start to
hear a symphony once you've been trained to read music: an experience that used to wash over you
becomes particularized and nuanced.
Ekman recalls the first time he saw Bill Clinton, during the 1992 Democratic primaries. "I was watching
his facial expressions, and I said to my wife, 'This is Peck's Bad Boy,' " Ekman says. "This is a guy
who wants to be caught with his hand in the cookie jar, and have us love him for it anyway. There was
this expression that's one of his favorites. It's that hand-in-the-cookie-jar, love-me-Mommy-becauseI'm-a-rascal look. It's A.U. twelve, fifteen, seventeen, and twenty-four, with an eye roll." Ekman paused,
then reconstructed that particular sequence of expressions on his face. He contracted his zygomatic

major, A.U. twelve, in a classic smile, then tugged the corners of his lips down with his triangularis,
A.U. fifteen. He flexed the mentalis, A.U. seventeen, which raises the chin, slightly pressed his lips
together in A.U. twenty-four, and finally rolled his eyes--and it was as if Slick Willie himself were
suddenly in the room. "I knew someone who was on his communications staff. So I contacted him. I
said, 'Look, Clinton's got this way of rolling his eyes along with a certain expression, and what it
conveys is "I'm a bad boy." I don't think it's a good thing. I could teach him how not to do that in two to
three hours.' And he said, 'Well, we can't take the risk that he's known to be seeing an expert on lying.'
I think it's a great tragedy, because . . ." Ekman's voice trailed off. It was clear that he rather liked
Clinton, and that he wanted Clinton's trademark expression to have been no more than a meaningless
facial tic. Ekman shrugged. "Unfortunately, I guess, he needed to get caught--and he got caught."
5.
Early in his career, Paul Ekman filmed forty psychiatric patients, including a woman named Mary, a
forty-two-year-old housewife. She had attempted suicide three times, and survived the last attempt--an
overdose of pills--only because someone found her in time and rushed her to the hospital. Her children
had left home and her husband was inattentive, and she was depressed. When she first went to the
hospital, she simply sat and cried, but she seemed to respond well to therapy. After three weeks, she
told her doctor that she was feeling much better and wanted a weekend pass to see her family. The
doctor agreed, but just before Mary was to leave the hospital she confessed that the real reason she
wanted to go on weekend leave was so that she could make another suicide attempt. Several years
later, a group of young psychiatrists asked Ekman how they could tell when suicidal patients were
lying. He didn't know, but, remembering Mary, he decided to try to find out. If the face really was a
reliable guide to emotion, shouldn't he be able to look back on the film and tell that she was lying?
Ekman and Friesen began to analyze the film for clues. They played it over and over for dozens of
hours, examining in slow motion every gesture and expression. Finally, they saw it. As Mary's doctor
asked her about her plans for the future, a look of utter despair flashed across her face so quickly that
it was almost imperceptible.
Ekman calls that kind of fleeting look a "microexpression," and one cannot understand why John
Yarbrough did what he did on that night in South Central without also understanding the particular role
and significance of microexpressions. Many facial expressions can be made voluntarily. If I' m trying to
look stern as I give you a tongue-lashing, I'll have no difficulty doing so, and you' ll have no difficulty
interpreting my glare. But our faces are also governed by a separate, involuntary system. We know
this because stroke victims who suffer damage to what is known as the pyramidal neural system will
laugh at a joke, but they cannot smile if you ask them to. At the same time, patients with damage to
another part of the brain have the opposite problem. They can smile on demand, but if you tell them a
joke they can't laugh. Similarly, few of us can voluntarily do A.U. one, the sadness sign. (A notable
exception, Ekman points out, is Woody Allen, who uses his frontalis, pars medialis, to create his
trademark look of comic distress.) Yet we raise our inner eyebrows all the time, without thinking, when
we are unhappy. Watch a baby just as he or she starts to cry, and you'll often see the frontalis, pars
medialis, shoot up, as if it were on a string.
Perhaps the most famous involuntary expression is what Ekman has dubbed the Duchenne smile, in
honor of the nineteenth-century French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne, who first attempted to
document the workings of the muscles of the face with the camera. If I ask you to smile, you' ll flex
your zygomatic major. By contrast, if you smile spontaneously, in the presence of genuine emotion,
you' ll not only flex your zygomatic but also tighten the orbicularis oculi, pars orbitalis, which is the
muscle that encircles the eye. It is almost impossible to tighten the orbicularis oculi, pars lateralis, on
demand, and it is equally difficult to stop it from tightening when we smile at something genuinely
pleasurable. This kind of smile "does not obey the will," Duchenne wrote. "Its absence unmasks the
false friend." When we experience a basic emotion, a corresponding message is automatically sent to
the muscles of the face. That message may linger on the face for just a fraction of a second, or be
detectable only if you attached electrical sensors to the face, but It's always there. Silvan Tomkins
once began a lecture by bellowing, "The face is like the penis!" and this is what he meant--that the
face has, to a large extent, a mind of its own. This doesn't mean we have no control over our faces.
We can use our voluntary muscular system to try to suppress those involuntary responses. But, often,
some little part of that suppressed emotion--the sense that I' m really unhappy, even though I deny it-leaks out. Our voluntary expressive system is the way we intentionally signal our emotions. But our

involuntary expressive system is in many ways even more important: it is the way we have been
equipped by evolution to signal our authentic feelings.
"You must have had the experience where somebody comments on your expression and you didn't
know you were making it,"Ekman says. "Somebody tells you, "What are you getting upset about?'
"Why are you smirking?' You can hear your voice, but you can't see your face. If we knew what was on
our face, we would be better at concealing it. But that wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. Imagine if
there were a switch that all of us had, to turn off the expressions on our face at will. If babies had that
switch, we wouldn't know what they were feeling. They' d be in trouble. You could make an argument,
if you wanted to, that the system evolved so that parents would be able to take care of kids. Or
imagine if you were married to someone with a switch? It would be impossible. I don't think mating and
infatuation and friendships and closeness would occur if our faces didn't work that way."
Ekman slipped a tape taken from the O.J. Simpson trial into the VCR. It was of Kato Kaelin, Simpson's
shaggy-haired house guest, being examined by Marcia Clark, one of the prosecutors in the case.
Kaelin sits in the witness box, with his trademark vacant look. Clark asks a hostile question. Kaelin
leans forward and answers softly. "Did you see that?" Ekman asked me. I saw nothing, just Kato being
Kato-- harmless and passive. Ekman stopped the tape, rewound it, and played it back in slow motion.
On the screen, Kaelin moved forward to answer the question, and in that fraction of a second his face
was utterly transformed. His nose wrinkled, as he flexed his levator labii superioris, alaeque nasi. His
teeth were bared, his brows lowered. "It was almost totally A.U. nine," Ekman said. "It's disgust, with
anger there as well, and the clue to that is that when your eyebrows go down, typically your eyes are
not as open as they are here. The raised upper eyelid is a component of anger, not disgust. It's very
quick." Ekman stopped the tape and played it again, peering at the screen. "You know, he looks like a
snarling dog."
Ekman said that there was nothing magical about his ability to pick up an emotion that fleeting. It was
simply a matter of practice. "I could show you forty examples, and you could pick it up. I have a
training tape, and people love it. They start it, and they can't see any of these expressions. Thirty-five
minutes later, they can see them all. What that says is that this is an accessible skill."
Ekman showed another clip, this one from a press conference given by Kim Philby in 1955. Philby had
not yet been revealed as a Soviet spy, but two of his colleagues, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess,
had just defected to the Soviet Union. Philby is wearing a dark suit and a white shirt. His hair is straight
and parted to the left. His face has the hauteur of privilege.
"Mr. Philby," he is asked. "Mr. Macmillan, the foreign secretary, said there was no evidence that you
were the so-called third man who allegedly tipped off Burgess and Maclean. Are you satisfied with that
clearance that he gave you?"
Philby answers confidently, in the plummy tones of the English upper class. "Yes, I am."
"Well, if there was a third man, were you in fact the third man?"
"No," Philby says, just as forcefully. "I was not."
Ekman rewound the tape, and replayed it in slow motion. "Look at this," he said, pointing to the
screen. "Twice, after being asked serious questions about whether he's committed treason, he's going
to smirk. He looks like the cat who ate the canary." The expression was too brief to see normally. But
at quarter speed it was painted on his face--the lips pressed together in a look of pure smugness.
"He's enjoying himself, isn't he?" Ekman went on. "I call this--duping delight-- the thrill you get from
fooling other people." Ekman started the VCR up again. "There's another thing he does." On the
screen, Philby was answering another question. "In the second place, the Burgess-Maclean affair has
raised issues of great"-- he pauses-- "delicacy." Ekman went back to the pause, and froze the tape.
"Here it is,"he said. "A very subtle microexpression of distress or unhappiness. It's only in the
eyebrows-- in fact, just in one eyebrow." Sure enough, Philby's right inner eyebrow was raised in an
unmistakable A.U. one. "It's very brief," Ekman said. "He's not doing it voluntarily. And it totally

contradicts all his confidence and assertiveness. It comes when he's talking about Burgess and
Maclean, whom he had tipped off. It's a hot spot that suggests, 'You shouldn't trust what you hear.' "
A decade ago, Ekman joined forces with J. J. Newberry--the ex-A.T.F. agent who is one of the highscorers in the Diogenes Project-- to put together a program for educating law-enforcement officials
around the world in the techniques of interviewing and lie detection. In recent months, they have flown
to Washington, D.C., to assist the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. in counter-terrorism training. At the same time,
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has asked Ekman and his former student
Mark Frank, now at Rutgers, to develop experimental scenarios for studying deception that would be
relevant to counter-terrorism. The objective is to teach people to look for discrepancies between what
is said and what is signalled--to pick up on the difference between Philby's crisp denials and his
fleeting anguish. It's a completely different approach from the shouting cop we see on TV and in the
movies, who threatens the suspect and sweeps all of the papers and coffee cups off the battered desk.
The Hollywood interrogation is an exercise in intimidation, and its point is to force the suspect to tell
you what you need to know. It does not take much to see the limitations of this strategy. It depends for
its success on the coperation of the suspect--when, of course, the suspect's involuntary
communication may be just as critical. And it privileges the voice over the face, when the voice and the
face are equally significant channels in the same system.
Ekman received his most memorable lesson in this truth when he and Friesen first began working on
expressions of anger and distress. "It was weeks before one of us finally admitted feeling terrible after
a session where we' d been making one of those faces all day," Friesen says. "Then the other realized
that he'd been feeling poorly, too, so we began to keep track." They then went back and began
monitoring their body during particular facial movements. "Say you do A.U. one, raising the inner
eyebrows, and six, raising the cheeks, and fifteen, the lowering of the corner of the lips," Ekman said,
and then did all three. "What we discovered is that that expression alone is sufficient to create marked
changes in the autonomic nervous system. When this first occurred, we were stunned. We weren't
expecting this at all. And it happened to both of us. We felt terrible . What we were generating was
sadness, anguish. And when I lower my brows, which is four, and raise the upper eyelid, which is five,
and narrow the eyelids, which is seven, and press the lips together, which is twenty-four, I' m
generating anger. My heartbeat will go up ten to twelve beats. My hands will get hot. As I do it, I can't
disconnect from the system. It's very unpleasant, very unpleasant."
Ekman, Friesen, and another colleague, Robert Levenson, who teaches at Berkeley, published a study
of this effect in Science. They monitored the bodily indices of anger, sadness, and fear--heart rate and
body temperature--in two groups. The first group was instructed to remember and relive a particularly
stressful experience. The other was told to simply produce a series of facial movements, as instructed
by Ekman-- to "assume the position," as they say in acting class. The second group, the people who
were pretending, showed the same physiological responses as the first. A few years later, a German
team of psychologists published a similar study. They had a group of subjects look at cartoons, either
while holding a pen between their lips--an action that made it impossible to contract either of the two
major smiling muscles, the risorius and the zygomatic major-- or while holding a pen clenched
between their teeth, which had the opposite effect and forced them to smile. The people with the pen
between their teeth found the cartoons much funnier. Emotion doesn't just go from the inside out. It
goes from the outside in. What's more, neither the subjects "assuming the position" nor the people
with pens in their teeth knew they were making expressions of emotion. In the facial-feedback system,
an expression you do not even know that you have can create an emotion you did not choose to feel.
It is hard to talk to anyone who knows FACS without this point coming up again and again. Facereading depends not just on seeing facial expressions but also on taking them seriously. One reason
most of us--like the TV cop-- do not closely attend to the face is that we view its evidence as
secondary, as an adjunct to what we believe to be real emotion. But there's nothing secondary about
the face, and surely this realization is what set John Yarbrough apart on the night that the boy in the
sports car came at him with a gun. It's not just that he saw a microexpression that the rest of us would
have missed. It's that he took what he saw so seriously that he was able to overcome every selfprotective instinct in his body, and hold his fire.
6.

Yarbrough has a friend in the L.A. County Sheriff's Department, Sergeant Bob Harms, who works in
narcotics in Palmdale. Harms is a member of the Diogenes Project as well, but the two men come
across very differently. Harms is bigger than Yarbrough, taller and broader in the chest, with soft brown
eyes and dark, thick hair. Yarbrough is restoring a Corvette and wears Rush Limbaugh ties, and he
says that if he hadn't been a cop he would have liked to stay in the Marines. Harms came out of
college wanting to be a commercial artist; now he plans to open a bed-and-breakfast in Vermont with
his wife when he retires. On the day we met, Harms was wearing a pair of jean shorts and a shortsleeved patterned shirt. His badge was hidden inside his shirt. He takes notes not on a yellow legal
pad, which he considers unnecessarily intimidating to witnesses, but on a powder-blue one. "I always
get teased because I'm the touchy-feely one," Harms said. "John Yarbrough is very analytical. He
thinks before he speaks. There is a lot going on inside his head. He's constantly thinking four or five
steps ahead, then formulating whatever his answers are going to be. That's not how I do my
interviews. I have a conversation. It's not "Where were you on Friday night?' Because that's the way
we normally communicate. I never say, "I'm Sergeant Harms.' I always start by saying, "I'm Bob
Harms, and I'm here to talk to you about your case,' and the first thing I do is smile."
The sensation of talking to the two men, however, is surprisingly similar. Normal conversation is like a
game of tennis: you talk and I listen, you listen and I talk, and we feel scrutinized by our conversational
partner only when the ball is in our court. But Yarbrough and Harms never stop watching, even when
they're doing the talking. Yarbrough would comment on my conversational style, noting where I held
my hands as I talked, or how long I would wait out a lull in the conversation. At one point, he stood up
and soundlessly moved to the door-- which he could have seen only in his peripheral vision--opening it
just before a visitor rang the doorbell. Harms gave the impression that he was deeply interested in me.
It wasn't empathy. It was a kind of powerful curiosity. "I remember once, when I was in prison custody,
I used to shake prisoners' hands," Harms said. "The deputies thought I was crazy. But I wanted to see
what happened, because that's what these men are starving for, some dignity and respect."
Some of what sets Yarbrough and Harms and the other face readers apart is no doubt innate. But the
fact that people can be taught so easily to recognize microexpressions, and can learn FACS, suggests
that we all have at least the potential capacity for this kind of perception. Among those who do very
well at face-reading, tellingly, are some aphasics, such as stroke victims who have lost the ability to
understand language. Collaborating with Ekman on a paper that was recently published in Nature, the
psychologist Nancy Etcoff, of Massachusetts General Hospital, described how a group of aphasics
trounced a group of undergraduates at M.I.T. on the nurses tape. Robbed of the power to understand
speech, the stroke victims had apparently been forced to become far more sensitive to the information
written on people's faces. "They are compensating for the loss in one channel through these other
channels," Etcoff says. "We could hypothesize that there is some kind of rewiring in the brain, but I
don't think we need that explanation. They simply exercise these skills much more than we do."
Ekman has also done work showing that some abused children are particularly good at reading faces
as well: like the aphasics in the study, they developed "interpretive strategies"--in their case, so they
could predict the behavior of their volatile parents.
What appears to be a kind of magical, effortless intuition about faces, then, may not really be effortless
and magical at all. This kind of intuition is a product of desire and effort. Silvan Tomkins took a
sabbatical from Princeton when his son Mark was born, and stayed in his house on the Jersey Shore,
staring into his son's face, long and hard, picking up the patterns of emotion--the cycles of interest, joy,
sadness, and anger--that flash across an infant's face in the first few months of life. He taught himself
the logic of the furrows and the wrinkles and the creases, the subtle differences between the pre-smile
and the pre-cry face. Later, he put together a library of thousands of photographs of human faces, in
every conceivable expression. He developed something called the Picture Arrangement Test, which
was his version of the Rorschach blot: a patient would look at a series of pictures and be asked to
arrange them in a sequence and then tell a story based on what he saw. The psychologist was
supposed to interpret the meaning of the story, but Tomkins would watch a videotape of the patient
with the sound off, and by studying the expressions on the patient's face teach himself to predict what
the story was. Face-reading, for those who have mastered it, becomes a kind of compulsion; it
becomes hard to be satisfied with the level and quality of information that most of us glean from
normal social encounters. "Whenever we get together," Harms says of spending time with other face
readers, "we debrief each other. We're constantly talking about cases, or some of these videotapes of
Ekman's, and we say, "I missed that, did you get that?' Maybe there's an emotion attached there.
We're always trying to place things, and replaying interviews in our head."

This is surely why the majority of us don't do well at reading faces: we feel no need to make that extra
effort. People fail at the nurses tape, Ekman says, because they end up just listening to the words.
That's why, when Tomkins was starting out in his quest to understand the face, he always watched
television with the sound turned off. "We are such creatures of language that what we hear takes
precedence over what is supposed to be our primary channel of communication, the visual channel,"
he once said. "Even though the visual channel provides such enormous information, the fact is that the
voice prempts the individual's attention, so that he cannot really see the face while he listens." We
prefer that way of dealing with the world because it does not challenge the ordinary boundaries of
human relationships. Ekman, in one of his essays, writes of what he learned from the legendary
sociologist Erving Goffman. Goffman said that part of what it means to be civilized is not to "steal"
information that is not freely given to us. When someone picks his nose or cleans his ears, out of
unthinking habit, we look away. Ekman writes that for Goffman the spoken word is "the acknowledged
information, the information for which the person who states it is willing to take responsibility," and he
goes on:
When the secretary who is miserable about a fight with her husband the previous night answers, "Just
fine," when her boss asks, "How are you this morning?"--that false message may be the one relevant
to the boss's interactions with her. It tells him that she is going to do her job. The true message--that
she is miserable--he may not care to know about at all as long as she does not intend to let it impair
her job performance.
What would the boss gain by reading the subtle and contradictory microexpressions on his secretary's
face? It would be an invasion of her privacy and an act of disrespect. More than that, it would entail an
obligation. He would be obliged to do something, or say something, or feel something that might
otherwise be avoided entirely. To see what is intended to be hidden, or, at least, what is usually
missed, opens up a world of uncomfortable possibilities. This is the hard part of being a face reader.
People like that have more faith in their hunches than the rest of us do. But faith is not certainty.
Sometimes, on a routine traffic stop late at night, you end up finding out that your hunch was right. But
at other times you'll never know. And you can't even explain it properly, because what can you say?
You did something the rest of us would never have done, based on something the rest of us would
never have seen.
"I was working in West Hollywood once, in the nineteen-eighties," Harms said. "I was with a partner,
Scott. I was driving. I had just recently come off the prostitution team, and we spotted a man in drag.
He was on Sunset, and I didn't recognize him. At that time, Sunset was normally for females. So it was
kind of odd. It was a cold night in January. There was an all-night restaurant on Sunset called Ben
Franks, so I asked my partner to roll down the window and ask the guy if he was going to Ben Franks-just to get a reaction. And the guy immediately keys on Scott, and he's got an overcoat on, and he's all
bundled up, and he starts walking over to the car. It had been raining so much that the sewers in West
Hollywood had backed up, and one of the manhole covers had been cordoned off because it was
pumping out water. The guy comes over to the squad car, and he's walking right through that. He's
fixated on Scott. So we asked him what he was doing. He says, "I was out for a walk.' And then he
says, "I have something to show you.'"
Later, after the incident was over, Harms and his partner learned that the man had been going around
Hollywood making serious threats, that he was unstable and had just attempted suicide, that he was in
all likelihood about to erupt. A departmental inquiry into the incident would affirm that Harms and his
partner had been in danger: the man was armed with a makeshift flamethrower, and what he had in
mind, evidently, was to turn the inside of the squad car into an inferno. But at the time all Harms had
was a hunch, a sense from the situation and the man's behavior and what he glimpsed inside the
man's coat and on the man's face-- something that was the opposite of whatever John Yarbrough saw
in the face of the boy in Willowbrook. Harms pulled out his gun and shot the man through the open
window. "Scott looked at me and was, like, "What did you do?' because he didn't perceive any
danger," Harms said. "But I did."
How to Easily Read Faces and Facial Expressions

It is much easier to read facial expressions and find out what someone is feeling than is believed. You
will learn how to recognise 'micro-expressions' small facial expressions that show what a person is
feeling.
edit Steps

1.

Before trying to read anyone's face, teach yourself to recognise 'micro-expressions'.

These are small facial expressions, a different one for whenever someone is feeling an increase in any
different emotion. They are:

Happiness - A smile, quite an obvious one, however, if there is no wrinkling, increase

in puffiness or general muscle movement around the eyes, the person is faking the smile.

Sadness - Eyebrows up, lips down-turned. Eyebrows up can also mean the person is
feeling guilty.

Contempt - One corner of the mouth rises, like a sort of 'half-smile'. In extreme
contempt, the person's mouth shifts over in an odd way.

Disgust - The top lip is raised, showing the teeth in extreme cases, like a scorn.

Surprise - Gaping mouth with eyebrows raised. If this expression lasts longer than a
second, the person is faking it.

Fear - Eyebrows raised and lower part of the mouth lowered in extreme cases.
Swallowing also indicates fear.

Anger - Lips tightened, flaring nostrils, eyebrows pulled down and together are all
signs of anger.

2.

Start looking. When you've taught yourself to recognise micro-expressions try looking for
them in people you see everyday.

3.

Establish a 'baseline' in the person you're looking for micro-expressions in. A baseline is
their normal muscle activity when feeling little or no emotion. Ask them normal questions. Take mental
note of their muscle activity when telling the truth. You're pretty much done. Just look for microexpressions and try and fit them in with what the person is saying.

How to Detect Micro Expressions

Do you ever wonder what someone is really feeling or thinking when they tell you one thing? Do you
sometimes wonder if your being told the truth? The human face of capable of making over 50,000
different individual expressions, but it all boils down to only 7 different combination that form the
expressions we all know: Happiness, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, Fear, Surprise and Contempt. These
are called micro-expressions and last less than a second. Learn to spot micro-expressions and gain

the key to understanding the real feelings behind the face. This how-to will cover the basics of spotting
the seven micro-expressions.
Difficulty: Moderately Challenging
Instructions
Things You'll Need:

1.

Nothing
1

Know what to look for! Spotting microexpressions can be difficult. There is small percentage of
people in the world who can naturally pick up on microexpressions, sometimes, they don't even
know they can. You may be one of these people if you 1) Can always spot a lie, 2) Know who
someone is with out really getting to know them, 3) Can accurately predict motive, 4) Don't trust
people and don't have a very good reason for why.
Don't worry though, if your not a natural, you can learn. I seem to have been a natural for most of
my life, but I never knew what micro-expressions were until recently, then things all started to
make sense.
Anywho, when looking for microexpressions, focus on the subject's face. Most muscle activity
during a microexpression will occur around the eyes and mouth. Stay sharp though, the thing that
makes a microexpression micro is the duration. Most microexpressions last an average of 1/25th
of a second to 1 full second.
In the next 7 steps, I will walk you through each of the seven microexpressions. And then I will
give advice on learning and practicing microexpression detection.
2.

Crows Feet
Happiness. We all know that when someone smiles they are happy. But it isn't to difficult to "fake"
being happy. This can occur when someone is saying something you don't agree with or don't like
and you pretend to think its funny or good. There are numerous other cases when someone will
pretend to be happy. Other times, someone may flash a sign of being happy when they shouldn't
be. This will often be the case when someone is proud of something they are being scolded or
reprimanded for. Often times when a serial killer is asked about their crimes in jail, they will flash a
quick microexpression for happiness because they are proud of what they've done.
The key attribute of happiness is, yes, the smile. But is isn't just any smile. In true happiness you
will see the corners of the lips turn up and the cheeks will raise slightly. But the tell tale sign of true

happiness are the crow's-feet that appear at the corners of the eyes. If you don't see movement
from the muscles around the eyes or crows-feet, the smile is a fake.
3.

Sadness
Sadness. Most of us can tell when someone is feeling a bit blue. But there are times when it's very
important to know someone is truly sad, even if they swear up and down they are fine. Many
people who really want to end their lives will appear very happy just before letting go. But you can
always catch that hint of sorrow behind their front. On a happier note, many people will pretend to
be happy when they are not because they don't want to bring others down. They really want to talk
to someone about it, but will never admit it, being able to spot their sadness can be a helpful hint
that they could use a good conversation.
In sadness the upper eyelids and outer edges of eyebrows will droop. The subject will appear to
have very little focus in their eyes. Also, the corners of the lips will be pulled slightly down.
4.

Anger
Anger. Anger is usually pretty easy to spot. But sometimes there lies anger hidden beneath the
surface and it good to be able to spot this incase someone is about ready to snap.
Anger's microexpression consists of the lips being narrowed and pressed together tightly. You will
also see the eyebrows slanted down and towards the nose. And perhaps the most revealing
characteristic of anger; glaring. The subjects eyes will glare intensely.
5.

Contempt
Contempt. Contempt is my favorite microexpression, and coincidentally it's the easiest to spot.
Interestingly, it is the only microexpression that is unilateral, that is, the only one that is biased to
one side of the face. All other microexpressions are equally distributed across the face about a
vertical center-line.
The dead giveaway to contempt is the raising of one side of the lips. It can be very subtle and
even look like just a twitch. Occasionally the lip raise is paired with the head tilting back slightly so
that the subject can look down slightly at the focus of their contempt.
6.

Disgust
Disgust. This is another one of those indicators that someone does not like what you are talking
about, or very much disagrees with something you have done or believe. Also, if you have secretly
passed a bit of gas, it is a good indicator that someone knows you have as it seems to be a
instinctual response that Darwin suggested closes off the nasal passages.
Disgust is characterized by the upper lip being raised generally exposing the teeth. This will be
coupled with a wrinkling of the nose.
7.

Fear

Fear. Fear is feeling we all know. Wether someone makes us uneasy, we are in a situation we
don't like, or we are watching a scary movie, we show the expression for fear.
In fear you will see the lips stretched horizontally towards the ears. The lower eyelids will be
tensed and the upper eyelids will be raised. You will also notice the eyebrows being raised and
pushed together.
8.

Surprise
Surprise. This is a very important micro-expression. It can be used to help in the lie detection
process. If you accuse someone of something, and they seem surprised, it could be the that your
accusation is incorrect. However, it is easy to fake surprise, but what people don't know is that
faked surprise is easily recognizable.
Surprise can be spotted by widened eyes and raised eyebrows. Also the mouth will open a little
bit.
Note that in a true expression of surprise the eyebrows will be raised for less than a second. So if
someone is acting surprised, but leaves their eyebrows lifted for more than a second, they are
lying, no questions asked.
9.

9
Learning micro-expressions. Learning micro-expressions can take time. But, one of the best ways
to learn them is to just read and read. Pictures and videos are also a great tool. Fox has a TV
show called Lie To Me, most people think it is just TV, but I did a bit of research and the show is
based of a real person named Dr. Eckman who was the pioneer researcher in microexpressions.
The information in the show is true and they have a scientific adviser that helps them stay true to
the facts. I've noticed that watching it has greatly improved my ability to spot microexpressions.
One of the things you will hear over and over again from people who train in microexpression
detection is to learn to make the faces yourself. Find pictures of the expressions, and then get in
front of your mirror and mimmic them. The muscle memory of the expressions will your brain
recognize them.
There are a few tests that I've found helpful in testing the effectiveness of my training. Also, the
tests can be used as a training tool by learning from your mistakes. You can find a practice test
created by Dr. Eckman himself at www.mettonline.com. I will post this in the related links section.
Another one that is a little more fun and focuses more on lying are the Lightman Tests on Fox's Lie
to Me website. I will post this link as a related link as well.
The last training tip I can offer is to not be afraid to practice. When you are practicing, make sure
its with someone you know well and who won't get mad at you. Also, it might be a good idea to

ask them if you can use them as practice. Don't sit down and have a "practice session", instead
inform them you plan to use them as a test subject at random, and then sometime later, when you
spot a micro expression ask them if you are correct. Until you are very comfortable with your
abilities you should probably not use the micro expression detection in any arguments or
accusations.
Also, please note that Test 1 of the Lightman tests is pretty much useless, its just a quiz about
lying statistics. Test 2 is the best.
I hope this information has been helpful to you. Once you learn it, its not something you can make
go away so be careful, it's not always a blessing; you may learn things you didn't want to know.
Use this information responsibly.

Read more: How to Detect Micro Expressions | eHow.com

http://www.ehow.com/how_5311172_detect-micro-expressions.html#ixzz1GBkQMhGP

Become Versed in Reading Faces

Facial expressions expert Paul Ekman, Ph.D., reveals how to read the posturing and
poker faces commonly seen when doing business.
In business and in life, it doesn't matter what language you speak, where you live, what you do for a
living--the facial expressions you show for anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, contempt and happiness
will be the same. You share these expressions with all human beings, and many of them with the great apes.
Each emotion has a family of related expressions. For example, the anger family differs in intensity from
annoyance to rage, and also contains such variations as indignation, vengefulness and sulking. These
members of the anger family of emotions are reflected in variations in the anger expressions, all revolving
around one prototypical expression.
Most facial expressions of emotion are on the face for just a few seconds, long enough to recognize easily
if you aren't distracted by your own thoughts, or figuring out what you're going to say next. We don't have
to be taught how to recognize the seven universal emotions, but we do need to learn how to recognize the
micro expressions.
When people try to conceal how they're feeling, the expression is reduced in time from a few seconds to a
fraction of a second--one-twenty-fifth of a second--so brief you can miss it if you blink. Most people don't
recognize the emotions shown in these micro expressions. But people can learn to see them. Learning to
read facial expressions gives you an edge in business because it allows you to communicate more
effectively with business partners.
The Micro Expression Training Tool (METT), developed by The Paul Ekman Group, teaches people in
about one hour how to spot micro expressions. A demo of the difference between the expressions anger and
disgust can be watched here. A variety of people have begun to use METT, including corporate executives,
claims adjusters, sales persons, medical students, TSA, Special Forces and law enforcement.
In one recently published study by Tamara Russell of London University, Russell was able to bring
schizophrenics up to a normal level of recognizing emotion after a half-hour of METT training. In another

study, my colleague David Matsumoto, Ph.D., and I provided less than 40 minutes of METT training to
some sales personnel, while others were instructed about emotion but not given the training. Their
supervisors, who didn't know who'd received METT training, rated those trained with METT as more
successful in sales, and easier to get along with than the people who were not trained.
Once you recognize micro expressions, you have to decide how to use that concealed information. It
depends in part on why you think the other person was concealing her feelings. Was it embarrassment--or
some darker motive? In bargaining, we don't expect to be told how the other person is feeling about an
offer, but it can be valuable to find that out, just as it is in sales. A law enforcement interrogation is a very
different situation, however, in which those intending to break the law, or those suspected of having already
committed a crime, claim to be honest but are not.
Consider the intended future of your relationship with the person who's showing the micro expression.
Obviously, your consideration differs depending on whether that person is your child, intimate partner,
sales prospect, witness or insurance claimant. Your response when you recognize a micro expression might
simply be to take note of it in planning what you do next. You might want to say, "Is there something else
you're feeling that you haven't told me yet?" Or, "I had a sense you were upset about something that just
happened." Or you might be more exact and name the emotion: "Are you worried about something?" In my
book, Emotions Revealed, I give examples of how to use the information derived from micro expressions
in family life, the workplace and friendship.
You might have noticed that I left off my list of universal facial expressions a number of other emotions:
embarrassment, guilt, shame, envy, jealousy and pride. As best we can tell, these emotions don't have a
universal expression, even though the emotions themselves are universal.
One warning: You may not always be pleased by what you'll see if you use METT. You may not want to
know that your guests didn't really think your joke was funny, your children are hiding how they feel about
something, your spouse is not being forthright, or the actor wasn't doing such a good job in that
performance. But once learned you can't turn it off. You'll always be aware of the emotions others are trying
to conceal from you.
I believe in the long run, in most cases, we're better off knowing how people are feeling, if we're careful not
to confront them, and not to use that knowledge for exploitive purposes.

Techniques

Behavior

Mindset

Fun

Persuasion

Understanding Facial Expressions and Microexpressions

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You can go to a book store and find many books on body-language, communication and
persuasion. Many of them seem to cover the same material though: posture, gestures,
words that work, etc. Sometimes you can find a book or a blog like AJs that has unique
insights and applications to help you get better at communicating and persuading.
So, where, besides AJs blog, can you get good information that not a lot of people have
access to, which will help you understand what other people are thinking and
experiencing? This information, of course, would help you become a better persuader.
You can also use a system like the Mojo Dialer to increase your contacts when youre
trying to persuade people over the phone.
Thirty years ago, Paul Ekman did cross-cultural research and identified seven basic
human emotions. He identified the seven basic emotions through facial expressions.
No matter where in the world, what culture, class, race, gender, or lighting, these seven
facial expressions were identified across the board. By learning to identify these seven
basic human emotions, you will get insight into just what people are experiencing.

The Seven Basic Facial Expressions:

(Pictures are from FOXs new show LIE TO ME)

These emotions are displayed based on how the muscles in your face move. While
researching the face, Ekman created a coding system to identify all of the possible
movements that each of you facial muscles can make called the Facial Action Coding
System. You dont have to become an expert in the FACS to read faces though. Ekman
offers a nice set of tools to help you better identify peoples facial expressions in realtime.
On his website, you can view a few video interviews that he has done over the years
analyzing and explaining his reading of faces. These videos are great both as training
tools to understand the range and depth of information that faces present. They also give
you a great insight into how you can use facial recognition to more accurately read a

persons emotional state, both the subtle emotions people experience and the emotions
they dont want you to see.

Training Yourself To Notice Facial Expressions

Mr. Ekman has created two training modules that can help you identify these seven basic
facial expressions with more precision and ease. It is relatively easy to identify these
facial expression when we are shown a picture, but people dont usually wear their
expressions for minutes at a time! On his website, you can use his training videos to
identify what he call micro-expressions and subtle-expressions.

Subtle expressions
Subtle expressions happen when someone experiences an emotion very briefly or when
the emotion is not as intense. The subtle expression training tool shows you how to
recognize the subtle movements in a persons facial muscles that correspond with various
emotions.

Microexpressions
Micro expressions occur when a person is trying to suppress or repress an emotion. Have
you ever tried to not smile, or not look angry? In the show Lie To Me, the main character
deals with people who are constantly trying to hide their emotions. This training enables
you to read a persons emotional state, even when they dont want you to!
Using these two training programs will not only help you read pure emotions, but you
will also learn to notice when someone displays conflicting emotions, as in where theyre
not sure what to think or feel about something. Mixed emotions are displayed by people
when they have two contrasting emotions. Because people can experience more than one
emotion at a time, our faces sometimes give off mixed signals. For a brief instant,
someone may smile with their mouth at a joke and at the same time display anger with
their brow.

Lie to Me
The show Lie to Me on Fox is actually an application of Paul Ekmans work. In the show,
you will see Cal Lightman (the character of Paul Ekamn played by Tim Roth) help private
individuals, companies and government investigators find out the truth behind a
situation. By expertly reading the expressions of the people he interviews, he uncovers
the story behind the story. The show serves as a great introduction to reading bodylanguage and facial expressions.
If you watch the show (close) enough, youll start to recognize the richness of
information that people present through their facial expressions. Even after gone through
the training tools myself, I find myself watching Lie To Me reruns on Hulu to see more of
the subtly in facial expressions.

The Analytical Personality Type

Knowing what kind of personality type someone is can be a major advantage in building
rapport, closing a deal, or networking. The hardest part isnt learning about how to tell
who is what, but rather how to use subconscious versatility at any given time. What I
mean by this is being able to interact with people, instantly figuring out which personality
type they are, then automatically adjusting who you are to communicate with them. Can
you imagine how many new powerful connections you can make? The more people who
feel comfortable around you, the more chances you have in-exponentially increasing your
business.

How Analyticals Work

People who are the Analytical personality type usually appear to be very intelligent,
nerdy, or systematical. Im not saying that all analytical are smart or technologically
advanced, although many of them are, but that most pay close attention to the smallest
details. Youll also find that many Analyticals wear glasses because their eyes are
vigorously reading and analyzing data faster than most resulting in their eyes wearing
out quicker (this was determined from my personal experience of having dealt with
thousands of people through out the years at seminars, meetings, and functions.)
Analtyicals are people who, like Drivers, have little to no emotion, yet unlike Drivers or
expressives, make decisions slowly and with much second thought.
o

Sees overt emotion as a weakness and something to distrust.

Needs facts, numbers, and details. Will seek out more information.

Usually known for being a perfectionist, hates to make errors. Doesnt forgive
mistakes easily in themselves or others. Seen as intolerant.

Great problem solving skills. Wants to be admired for their problem solving
abilities.

Likes organization and structure. Will sometimes hold to rules even when results
suffer.

Soft voice, reserved. Not directly confrontational. Lets the data speak for itself.
Expects others to agree based on facts and logical arguments.

Gets frustrated when people dont see the right answer as clearly as they do.

Usually doesnt get bored internal life (thinking about stuff) keeps them
occupied when outside stimulus is low.

Analyticals are usually pretty easy to spot because of their neatness, structure, and
sensitivity of minute detail. Dealing with an Analytical sounds quite simple, but actually
requires you to provide an extensive amount of data, graphs, references, and anything
else with numbers, facts, and figures.
Are you an Analytical? Have you encountered an experience with an extreme Analytical?

The Amiable Personality Type

During the last few days, Ive shown you 3 of the 4 personality types. I cant tell you how
many times people have told me that they are not just 1 personality type, but 2 or even
3! Let me clarify: Everyone on this planet is dominantly 1 out of the 4 different
personality types. It is certainly possible for you to have traits of other personalities, but
you are still just 1, not 2 or 3. Each personality type has their advantage and
disadvantage.
Personality Type: Amiable (Im not sure if we should do itum.)
Have you ever had a friend in your life who was very caring and supportive? They were
always there for you and did everything to make sure you were happy. There is a good
chance your friend is Amiable. Amiables are very reliable and trustworthy. These people
are very loyal employees and amazing people to have on your team. Amiable are usually
not in very high level executive positions but just remember that this doesnt mean if
youre an Amiable, you cant become a leader. In fact, there are leaders of major Fortune
500 companies who are Amiables, Drivers, Expressives, and Analyticals. Being an
Amiable doesnt mean youre automatically not going to be a leader, it means that it is
without a doubt harder to be one by following the characteristics listed below. Amiables
also tend to be very high in emotion and make decisions slowly.
o

Team player, looks for an everybody wins result.

Warm and friendly, but sometimes cloying.

Doesnt hide from feelings, expressing and listening. Caring, nurturing come
easily.

Soft spoken, goes along to get along. Uncomfortable when they dont know how
the group feels about something. Doesnt like independent activities and decisionmaking.

Rarely sticks up for their position in the face of strong opposition. Prefers
compromise.

Its quite simple to talk with people who are Amiable because they aim to please. They
have a tendency to make sure that everyone likes them. When dealing with an Amiable,
be sure to be very sincere, ask about their family, friends, and themselves. If you trying
to close some kind of deal with them, tell them of how whatever your selling (including
yourself) will impact the people around them after they buy (they care about others).
Are you an Amiable? Have you encountered an experience with an extreme Amiable?

The Pain and Pleasure Principle

Every single human being is motivated 1 of 2 ways: move away from pain or go towards
pleasure. For a very simplistic example, in most religions, there is the Heaven and Hell
concept

People who are motivated by pleasure:

A person lives their life to go to Heaven. This means that the thought of going to Heaven
(pleasure) motivates them to be a good person.

People who are motivated by pain:

A person lives their life to stay away from Hell. This means that the thought of going to
Hell (pain) motivates them to be a good person.
Since many (not all) religions use it asa type of leverage, this principle has been a
deciding factor amongst people for a very long time. This is also why goals are a great
thing to have, but dont work for many people (away from pain people).
To find out if you or your the person youre talking to is away from pain or towards
pleasure, ask the following questions:
What do you want? (it doesnt have to be materialistic)
Whats important to you about doing/having?
And what will that do?

People who are away from pain will answer with the
following:
o

financially free

it will make life easier

make you stress free

prevent

avoid

remove

People who are toward pleasure will answer with the

following:
o

feel good

make you happy

accomplish

attain

include

achieve

How to use it to be a persuasive communicator:

Self-motivation is a very powerful tool that unfortunately most people dont have. Most
people rely on external factors which wont necessarily always be there.
People that are toward pleasure should always create goals and then find friend, family,
co-workers etc. to hold them accountable to them. Doing so will allow them to keep them
focus and help them be reminded and re-reminded of what they want to achieve.
Try this: Create a vision board. Cut out some pictures of the things you want and put
them on piece of paper you can hang on a wall. Its very simple and yes it works.
People who are away from pain must simply think about what they dont want. For
example, if you are thinking of not going into work today:
If I dont go to work, I might get fired. If I get fired, Ill have no money. If I have no
money, then I cant pay my mortgage. If I cant pay my mortgage, Ill have to live on the
streets. I should probably just go to work.

Other ways this concept can work in your

advantage
The concept obviously remains the same as if you were to do this to yourself. Scenarios
of using the pain and pleasure principle on others would be:
o

Employees -reward employees for working hard or warn them about what
happens if you dont

Sales have prospects buy your product/service for what it can do or have them
buy to avoid what happens if they dont

Kids Tell your kids to clean up their room and do their homework so you can
take them to get ice cream or if they dont, youll take away their TV.

Surely youre starting to realize the vast amount of leverage youll acquire by using the
pain and pleasure principle.
Its very simple to apply as long as you pay close attention to which direction the person
youre communicating with is going. Practice by writing down the words I listed above
and listen for them when you talk with someone.

The Fear of Rejection Explained

In theory, communication is simple. You send a message and the recipient receives it and
acts accordingly to the content of the message in practice, communication is a far cry
from its theory. Each and every day you cant help witnessing people who are either
unable to express themselves in a clear way or deliberately avoid doing so, out of
whatever reason. Communication, by its very meaning, has always had to do with
passing a message to another entity but obscure communication takes the essence out of
it: The information shared. Instead of making oneself understood amongst others,
misunderstandings inevitably are aroused the root of most conflicts.
There is one major reason that dominates all others why people opt to deliberately blur
information clarity:
Fear.
Probably the most common type of fear associated with unclear communication is the
fear of rejection. The probability that your counterpart will disagree with or get hurt by
the information you are about to transmit is often enough sufficient to drive people to
withhold information.
The percentage of information transmitted is directly related to the level of selfacceptance and self-love. The more the person is in touch with itself, the less the damage
an undesired answer can deal. A person with a high level of self-worth is hard to hurt in
any case, this person will have realized that any level of interpersonal incongruence has
no impact on his or her worth and the level of validity of his or her perspective. A person
with little self-worth that is out of touch with itself however is easy to hurt. Even small
levels of incongruence in interpersonal communication will directly translate to a
diminished experience of self-worth and a devastated validity of the persons perspective.
Translated to real life experiences, the brink of a conflict sparked by incongruence in
communication will be experienced much different. There are four major characteristics,
when it comes to dealing with incongruence.

The Aware
A person that is very much in touch with itself will most probably reply: Okay. Were out
of congruence in this point. I have reasons to believe that my perspective holds true as
much as you will have. Could you therefore help me understand why your perspective is
correct? The dominating mind-set here is acceptance of the own perspective and
understanding for the others perspective awareness that all perspectives are equivalent.
This mind-set is growth-oriented and enables the person to experience new insights. The
possibility that he or she might be wrong is none of a threat cooperation and learning
better is the goal of communication.

The Egomaniac

A person, whose ego is really blown-up, will most probably reply: I dont see why your
point makes any sense. My perspective has to be closer to truth than yours, because so
and so. Forcing the opponent into congruence is the dominating mind-set for the egodriven person. In reality, this person also experiences fear fear of not being right. In
order to avoid being wrong, the person is very keen on its own perspective and would
never allow the opponents perspective to hold true (which would mean defeat). This
way, the person keeps itself from learning about new insights and while he or she may be
able to convince his or her opponent by force, the discussion is ended with a mind-set of
conflict and concurrence instead of a mind-set of cooperation. Ego-driven people often
become hugely successful in life, from a perspective of monetary or other mundane
riches, but often lack true friends and a loving relationship and hence are far from being
happy or satisfied with what they have achieved.

The Preacher
A person with a lack of self-worth but a pile of knowledge will most probably reply: But
see, my perspective has a point because so and so. Please understand. The underlying
phrase this person communicates is to beg for acceptance and praise. While generally
open for other perspectives, this person experiences just too much fear to be able to give
in in the belief that they would lose themselves by doing so. Occasionally, such a
person can be confused for an arrogant one because of the persistence of their
arguments, even if proved wrong. The opponent to this person is like a life-threatening
danger. This type of person is normally very well-educated and intelligent but has a hard
time being respected and finding real friends. The pseudo-arrogant outside blocks the
revelation of a lovable inside.

The Follower
A person with a lack of self-worth and mediocre knowledge will most probably reply: I
see that I am wrong here. Sorry for being wrong. Thanks for clarification. He or she will
never defend his or her perspective and willingly give in to whatever criticism comes
along. Due to the lack of self-worth, this person will have no faith in the correctness of its
own opinion the circumstance that others always know better is the dominating mind-set.
Even if right, these people will have no faith in what they do or believe unless they are
encouraged by others thereby making them dependent on their consent. This person is
the archetype of the follower a person without own opinion that accepts whatever opinion
the currently chosen leader has. For this kind of person it is normal to regularly change
the leader in search for protection from the former leader as these individuals are easily
abused when straying from their former leaders opinion.
It only is the Aware that has the ability to communicate information just as it is:
Acceptance of the own perspective and openness for the other persons. All the others
have problems either to accept the others opinion, the own opinion or both and therefore
are driven to conflict-laden communication and therefore problematic relationships.
Many people share the problems of the Egomaniac, the Preacher and the Follower in an
age that is infested with so much information that conflict is almost pre-programmed,
regardless of what we do or say. The probability that our own behavior is against
someone elses norm is steadily approaching one with a rising number of people around

so conflict is practically inevitable it is a key ability to be able to deal with the fear of
clear communication.
In order to become a human being that is able to safely navigate through these rough
times, it is important to achieve a level of self-worth and self-acceptance that enables
you to accept your opinion, even when faced with harsh opposition. Interestingly, your
opposition can easily transform to an alliance from the moment you at least try to
understand their perspective. Furthermore, people usually start to accept your
perspective from the moment you wholeheartedly mean it people pick up on the slightest
trace of self-doubt, so make sure that there is no more of it.
For all those who havent yet achieved this goal, the way towards it is the key. There are
numerous ways to increase your level of self-acceptance. One of the easiest options to
implement in daily life is choosing situations where you show self-acceptance in spite of
the fact that they require a little bit more than you normally have. Thereby, you move
out of your comfort zone into the so-called learning zone, where you experience
discomfort without panicking. This way, you can gradually grow to become more selfconfident situations that you have once mastered will be easy to handle in future.
A lot of small steps form a long way. If you are persistent, you will achieve what you
want. If you are already there: Congratulations. You are amongst the souls that this
planet is in high need of Be yourself and trust yourself.
About the Author: Simon Voggeneder studies the fields of mental power, healthy nutrition
and natural training. Read his blog and improve your life now: ishina.info. Learn about
training, nutrition, media, spirituality and self growth.

What Gets Buyers to Say Yes, Ill Buy?

When we agree to an idea or proposal, its because theres something in it for us. Its
hard to influence people who cant see whats in it for them. Sounds one-sided, but it is
true. Call it self-interest, selfishness or whatever. It is only human nature to ask, What
am I getting from this?
People will say yes to your ideas if they meet their needs or match their view of life in the
following areas:
o

Principles and values

Beliefs and opinions

Needs and wants

So Give People What They Want & Need

People agree to ideas and suggestions that match their needs or views of life.
Underpinning all our lives are certain principles and values that we hold to be true. These

become guidance for how we conduct our lives. They influence and mould our behavior.
They can differ greatly from person to person and successful influencers always take
principles and values into account.
But how?
Notice what principles and values drive other people
Ask questions and invite comment and reaction
Check with those who know them well
Some examples of principles:
o

Integrity and fairness are an integral part of business dealings.

I think that older people deserve courtesy and consideration.

Moral behavior is part of the fabric of daily life.

It would be unproductive to spend time attempting to dislodge these deep-seated

principles. Instead, harness them to add leverage to your suggestions

Beliefs & Opinions

Beliefs and opinions can be transient or short-term. Remember when you used to believe
in Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy, giants, and witches? Proof can easily dislodge a
belief. So too can time.
An early step on the road to influencing others may include having to change lingering
beliefs or convictions before you can proceed further.
o

I think that BubbleClean washing machines break down more often than the
Tumbling system range.

I think that all politicians are corrupt.

I never make decisions on the 13th.

Each of these beliefs can be dealt with by logical questioning or providing proof or data.

Needs & Necessities

These are fundamental requirements they have to be met if you are to influence others.
Typical needs include: reliability, security, achieving a deadline, meeting a budget,
keeping up to date.
o

Because of increasing competition, it is essential that we maintain an image and

at the same time keep up to date.

My team members are under great pressure, so it important to maintain their

morale.

The system must not only be reliable but secure, as well.

Having uncovered needs, you may have to mould or reshape your ideas to dovetail with
the requirements of others. Often, people have a hierarchy of needs, so it may be
important to discover and use this:
Which is most important to you reliability or security?

Wants & Wishes

Wants and wishes are not essentials, just a wish list: Wouldnt it be lovely if only. But
their fulfillment can be the cherry on your influencing trifle, placed on top with a flourish,
after the other person has agreed to your proposal.

Depends Whats on Offer

Question: How will your suggestions benefit the other person?
The person or people you are influencing will interpret the benefits of your suggestions in
different ways. Some will be interested in the features the fine details, the nitty gritty of
ideas. Others will say how will I benefit? Others will seek out the advantages of
proposals how the benefits are different.

Features, Benefits & Advantages

No doubt you are familiar with the differences between features, benefits and
advantages, but it is worth re-iterating.

Features
These are built-in aspects of your idea or suggestion timing, costs, resources etc. They
will remain locked up in your idea whether the other person agrees or not.

Benefits
These are far more important than the features of your proposal. They translate boring
old features into exciting statements which show clearly how others will gain.
This new hardware is made in Germany (feature) which means that we will save time
and money on spare parts (benefit).

Advantages
These are comparative benefits e.g. Increased revenue, greater savings, and faster turnaround.

In Summary: The Benefit Balance Sheet

Most people do not agree whole-heartedly to an idea. There is usually something that
niggles, however well youve addressed their concerns.
In the end, when we finally say yes to a proposal, it is because the benefits outweigh any
disadvantages.
As you plan and prepare your influencing case, list all the benefits and advantages of
your suggestions. Use them to tip the balance in favor of yes.

The Art of Spinning a Conversation

One of the most challenging professions you can get into is the industry of Public
Relations. The challenge isnt necessarily a physical difficulty, but a psychological one. PR
people, sometimes referred to as Spin Doctors, are responsible for preventing any
type of damage to their clients reputation. They possess the linguistical talent to sway
you to believe whether something is right or wrong, powerful isnt it.
For example, if a celebrity was arrested for drinking and driving, then it would be up to
the spin doctor to persuade the public that it wasnt the celebritys fault, it was because
of all the pressure from the paparazzi that influenced this celebrity to alcohol addiction.
The celebrity goes to a rehabilitation center and the blame is now turned around to the
paparazzi, even though it was the celebrity who was drinking and driving in the first
place. Just recently, after Kanye Wests little blunder, his Spin Doctors probably
advised him to put the blame on his mothers passing. It didnt do that well, but it did
take some heat off of his stupidity. Wait a few months and everyone will love him again.
Another great example is from the movie Thank You for Smoking. This is an awesome
movie about a guy whose job is to defend the tobacco companys reputation. Not an easy
task, but he manages to do it.
Most of you reading this have no use to hire your own Spin Doctor, but learning how
they do it can take you out of the most difficult of scenarios.

Never Directly Disagree

People will challenge your ideas, concepts, products, beliefs etc, but you should never
directly tell them that theyre wrong. Here are some phrases to use when someone says
something to you before you shift the conversation:

Thats a valid concern

Thats right

I agree

Thats true

I can appreciate that

youre right

I understand

youre absolutely right

Example 1:
Them: You have too little experience for me to give this job.
You: Thats a valid concern
So whatever it is the person is accusing you of, acknowledge it, repeat and then
continue.

Starting your Spin

Here are phrases you need to use after you acknowledge them for what they said. These
phrases will allow you to make a smooth transition from something pointed at you to
persuading them to believe what you say is actually right:
o

So what I hear you saying is

What I sense

So if I understand correctly, youre saying

What I think your feeling is

What Im noticing you say is

What it sounds like your saying is

What it looks like your saying is

I believe that youre really trying to say

Sounds like to me that youre

What I think youre saying

Example 2:
Them: You have too little experience for you to get this job.
You: Thats a valid concern and it sounds like to me that youre looking for someone who

will get the job done in the time you want it, arent you? Most of my clients feel that way
too before they CHOOSE ME and give me the chance. If I can get this job done for you in
X days, would that work for you?
In this example, you spun the conversation from them talking about you having little
experience to getting the job they want done, faster.

Example 3:
Them: Ive never heard of your company before
You: I understand and what I think your saying is that youre looking to find the best
deals possible right? As we talk about making this happen, Im sure you starting to feel
comfortable knowing that Ill save you more money and the get the job done in less time,
does that work for you?
In this example, you spun the conversation from them feeling insecure about your
companys reputation to feeling comfortable knowing that they will be saving money by
choosing you.

Final Thoughts
You cant control what other people say about you, your products, services, or company,
but you can persuade them to change their mind.
Has there ever been a time when you needed to use this technique?

Are You an Information Junkie?

I can take a guess and bet that most of you who read my blog and the other blogs out
there on personal development get some sort of high with every new article. When I
say high, I mean in the sense of empowerment. To go even further, you feel as if you
are doing yourself a favor by learning about new ways to take your life to the next level.
Now, the obvious question is, are you? After you read one of my powerful articles, do you
really go back to reality and take action on this new information you just learned
about? Has there even been a time when you read an article, then just forgot about it?

Forget it about it
Chances are that youve read dozens and dozens of articles on the web about how to do
this, what to do with that, and 18 million steps to be something, etc. Do you ever
get an empty void type of feeling that tells you, I need more? The truth of the matter
is that most of the stuff you read, whether it be online, in a book, or at a seminar, you
will forget about within 1 hour to give or take a few days. You, like most other people,
just have that feeling inside that tells you to keep reading, keep studying, and wait until
you have everything single bit of information you need, before you take action. Why is

that? The answer lies in the fear department. It could be you fear of failure, rejection,
success or a number similar issues. So let me start by saying that the average person
will usually forget almost 80% of the information they learn every day. Chances
are by the end of this day, you will probably forget most of what youre learning from this
article. Well its wasnt necessarily your fault in the past, but it will be after you finish
reading this

Take Action
The most successful people on the planet can take bits and pieces of information from a
few pages in a book and implement it in their business right a way. Not only that, but
these types of people are not afraid of failing. In fact, one must fail forward fast if your
interest is in growing and moving forward.
Here are different ways we learn according to the William Glassers Institute.
o

10% What we READ

20% What we HEAR

30% What we SEE

50% What we SEE and HEAR

70% What we DISCUSSED with OTHERS

80% What we EXPERIENCED PERSONALLY

95% What we TEACH TO SOMEONE ELSE

Obviously the best way for you to retain information is by teaching someone, but how
can one teach someone something they havent done themselves. So what the statistics
above should tell you is that the sooner you learn something new, the faster you better
take action on it, since the quicker you do, the better youll understand it. As you begin
to shift your mindset to this new style of thinking, I want you to go back to a time when
someone told you to do something and you did it. What happened? Were you instantly
satisfied with the results? Lets take the time you learned to drive a car. You read about
it, you took action and followed through with what you read and then you practiced it.
Sooner or later after that moment, you practically mastered it or at least allowed yourself
to do it as if it were second nature. Pretty powerful, isnt it?
Since your beginning to understand the urgency of this issue, I need you trust me and
pay attention to what I have to say. After you read this article, I want you to read one of
my previous articles immediately take action. Its very simple guys and gals, learn
something new and do it right away. If you dont, then consider yourself to be as useful
as a computer, full of information, but you probably wont make a dime off of it. I
guarantee that if you do what I say, youll see better results than you would by reading 5
books back to back.
To recap, read an article of mine or even someone elses for all it matters and figure out a
way to apply it in your life seconds or even moments after your finish reading it. Write a
comment and share your experiences with me below.

The Expressive Personality Type

Have you ever paid attention to how people interact with one another? Im betting that
most of you dont. After you increase your level of awareness, youll gain a better
understanding of how people generally work. Increasing your awareness levels means
that you are consciously paying attention to what is going on around you most of the
time.
Having the ability to tell what type of personality someone is within only 30 seconds or so
of conversation is probably one of the best communication tools you can learn. Having
the know how to detect what a person is allows you to transform the way you should be
interacting with that particular client. Since your first few minutes of interaction is the
most vital, pay close attention to what they say and how they say it.

Personality Type: Expressive (Lets do it!)

Now that youre familiar with the quick and assertive Driver, we move on to the can you
shut up already Expressive. Have you ever noticed that every time you go to a party,
function, or gathering, there is always this one person who everyone swarms around
(maybe its you)? Expressive people absolutely love being in the spotlight. Their
workplaces are normally messy compared to a neat Analytical. Even though their
workplaces, cars, or rooms tend to be messy, they would still be able to find what their
looking for through their memory (they dont necessarily lose everything). Expressive
people love to talk, so let them. They generally have very high emotion and make
decisions rather quickly. There are generally excited to see what happens next.

Here are the characteristics of an Expressive:

o

Tends to run late, lots of commitments and rushed lifestyle.

Desires to be center of attention. Will attempt to draw focus of a group.

Cant stand being bored, impatient. Will get stressed and fidget in lines, looks for
distractions.

Generally have brightly colored clothing/cars/houses. Values flash.

They are animated and lively when they speak or tell stories. Sometimes seems
loud.

As a special note, since many people misinterpret Expressives as people who talk a lot,
avoid placing someone in 1 of the 4 personality types by the length in time they talk to
you. Analyticals and Amiables also tend to talk a lot after they feel comfortable around
someone, so the amount of time they take talking is irrelevant. You must use the other
criteria Ive listed above to determine if one is Expressive or something else.

How to Sell to an Expressive

When dealing with Expressives, all you need to do is let the them talk and slowly steer
the conversation in the direction you want to take it by taking control and asking the
right questions. Expressives tend to get off topic very quickly so be patient.
Im not sure if I was always an expressive or that I recently just became one. I
questioned which personality I was because it can be difficult to determine it at a young
age. Im certain, now that Im 23, but I originally started thinking about this when I was
17-18 and I had no clue what I was, most people didnt. Many times youll hear people
saying that theyre Expressives because Expressive people usually get most of the
attention. Also, since Im in the sales industry, people like to say that they are
Expressives because they are led to believe that all great sales people are Expressives.
Obviously this is false and just a common misconception or excuse that people use
because they cant yet achieve the success they want.

Selling as an Expressive
Dealing with an Expressive person from the other personality types point of view is
relativity easy, but as an Expressive, you need to learn how to tone it down. Its
important for you to realize and understand when your your stories go off on a tangent.
Are you an Expressive? If not, what experiences have you had with an expressive?

The Driver Personality Type

We can generally place girls in 1 of 4 personality types: Driver, Analytical, Expressive,
and Amiable. Each girl falls under only one of the listed types. They typically hold to that
personality type and live their lives within those bounds.
Girls usually dont change personality types except under times of great stress (More so
in business scenarios).
As you begin to understand the differences in personality types, well go over the skills
that allow you to become versatile in any situation.

Personality Type: Driver (Whats your point?)

Girls who fall into the Driver personality type tend to be very controlling and possibly
demanding. They know what they want and they arent afraid to let you know. They
normally have little to no emotion and make decisions quickly and assertively.

To quickly sum up the characteristics of a driver:

o

Demands control or will take it when available. Looks for opportunity to be in

charge.

Will get things done, likes goals and achieving them. Frames life as a sequence of
I did this.

Straight to the point, looks for the bottom line. Dislikes complexity or ambiguity.

Little patience for the small details that arent clearly in line with goal seeking.

Doesnt like situations where they have no say in whats happening.

Appears to be arrogant and standoffish. Can seem overly aggressive, especially in

the heat of a project. Will see people as obstacles or allies.

Can appear as the female version of an Alpha male

Drivers may appear intimidating, however, you must remember to put your emotions
aside and not take things personally. Since I would say that Im an extreme expressive, I
find myself to be a very emotional person. By emotional, I mean that I pretty much wear
my mood on my shoulders.
There are times when you approach women who appear to be completely uninterested in
what you have to say. Be careful when you categorize these women as drivers because
some women, regardless of their personalities dont want to even give you the time of
day. Being a driver doesnt mean they talk less, they just want to have control. The
secret to dealing with these type of women are to give them the perception that theyre
in control when they really arent.

How to deal with a Driver:

When talking to a Driver, avoid too many stories that involve beating around the bush.
Keep it short, simple, and sweet.

The Difference Between Being Influenced and

Brainwashed
Ever feel like youre being brainwashed? And by the way Im not suggesting that you
totally agree with everything in this article because Im a nice guy and have your best
interests at heart. Its just that you know there are times when you find yourself
suddenly craving a big Mac or salivating about that new GM muscle car or the new Ford
mustang or just absolutely have to have those special tooth whitening strips so youll be
more attractive And moments before you watched the commercial or read the ad, you
werent even thinking about it. The question is are you being brainwashed?
Or just influenced?
According to my secret sources in the US Military, for brainwashing to be present all 5 of
the following conditions must be met. So ask yourself now
o

Have you been removed from your normal environment of influence or

confined to the compound and not allowed to leave no contact with outside?

Have you been deprived of sleep getting less than 6 hours per night? (psst are
your children brainwashing you?)

Are you given emotional, physical or psychological pain or punishment if

you disagree?

Do you get pleasure or rewards if you agree to get with the program?

Has your bio-chemistry been forcibly changed through diet or drugs?

Now maybe one or two of these elements are present in your marriage, your job, your
sports team, church, chamber of commerce, fraternity or sorority, etc.
But remember, all 5 elements must be present for more than a weekend. After all it
may take a bit of time to be internalized into your unconscious mind.
Now, you dont have to think about army basic training or boot camp unless of course
you want toBut if you were to think about it, imagine this:
o

You are far from home and confined to some sweltering, mosquito infested base

You are woken up at the crack of dawn every day by scratchy recording of a bugle
playing reveille. When you least expect it they wake you up in the middle of the
night for drills.

If you dont get with the program you are shouted at, made to do extreme
physical penance (give me 50 push-ups worm) and are subject to other
emotional and psychological punishment.

If you get along and follow orders and are a good little soldier you get praise,
awards, medals, shore leave, extra dessert etc.

Think about the food in the military! Just eating S.O.S and mountains of potatoes
every day will change your bio chemistry.

I dont know why, but all of a sudden Im thinking about this Christian summer camp I
went to with my church youth group for a week the summer between 9th and 10 grade.
Hmmm.
o

I wasnt in my normal environment. It was way nicer. A beautiful camp on a

pristine lake in the mountains.

They kept us up late singing songs and woke us up really early. Averaged about 5
hours a night.

They didnt shout or use overt physical pain. But they made us feel guilty as hell
about all the impure thoughts we were having about the opposite (or same) sex.
And all the sin we were carrying around with us. It felt painful to me. Very painful.
So very, very painful. Forgive me Father for I have SINNED.

If you gave your life to Jesus you got applause and that special feeling of getting
with the program. Plus some of the cutes girls were serious bible thumpers and I
wanted in with them for more SIN for which I must feel shame and guilt!

Damn! No drugs or bizarre food. The food was good. For some people it was
better than home. Nobody was made to drink actual cool-aid or eat bugs.

So even though 4 out of 5 is pretty darn close, I managed to survive Christian summer
camp with all my skepticism and doubts intact. Never underestimate the power of bad
food or at least very different food to tip the brainwashing scales. Its all in the details.
Now lets talk about TV.
o

You are not isolated from your normal environment of influence. When youre
watching the tube you are most definitely in a zombie like trance but you are
usually sitting on your own couch.

Youre sleep patterns are not interrupted. In fact many people prefer to fall asleep
watching TV. There seem to be few reports of people sleep walking into a Hummer
dealership with a bag of cash after falling asleep in front of the telly.

A really good commercial may remind you of the pain you are already in and may
anchor pleasure to the idea that you can get out of pain by making a decision and
taking action. Think about your hard earned dollars sneaking out your leaky,
inefficient old windows pain

A master influencer will definitely link pleasure to his or her idea or outcome for
you. now think about how wonderful the snug, tight, energy efficient thermal
windows will be as they save you bushels of cash over the next 30 years

An argument could be made that McDonalds food will change your body chemistry
and get you hooked. Or all those pharmaceutical ads for the weight loss drug (with
the rectal leakage side effect) could get you hooked and change your bio
chemistry. But youre still in your own home and they have yet to figure out how
to get the TV to dispense their stuff. Plus, the other elements of brainwashing
must also be present and you can always turn off the TV.

So in a nutshell, TV advertising, is not brainwashing. Ads may be powerful. They may be

insidious. They may be persuasive. They get stuck like a sappy love song in your
rostromedial pre-frontal cortex and play over and over again. They may be hugely
influential. They may not always be a force for good in our lives.
But you can always hit the off button so it aint brainwashing.
Now I know you didnt totally agree with everything Ive said in the past or right now or
in the future so if there are other things you agree with me on feel free to leave a
comment below or just think of me as a genius for the next few moments thats right.

How to be a Dominant Alpha Male

So I have had a flood of requests from the male readers among you asking recently how
to appear and come off as more powerful and in control. It really is a terrific question and
this article is hopefully going to help you to bring out your true self. You see, we are all

powerful just in different areas. (The computer programmer who seems timid and meek
when talking with women suddenly becomes a powerhouse of confidence when put in
front of a computer and told to program!) So this article is about taking that confidence
and teaching you how to project it in all situations of your lives.

The Body is a Temple

We all hate the words body language. Assuredly you had some stupid seminar in high
school or read a boring book assigned to you that explained how you should act and give
off good body language. Well, lets make this a little more fun than that shall we? Here
are my top four tips for using your body to appear confident and in control.

1) Take Up Space
You should never be standing less than about a shoulder width and a half apart. The best
stance to take up is legs spread apart. (But be aware that this may seem aggressive so
make sure to compliment this stance with a relaxed or even smiling expression.)

2) Shoulders Back and Relaxed

Dont hunch and let your shoulders relax. We are very good at picking up when people
are tense and the two places where we tense the most (in uncomfortable situations) are
the jaw and shoulders. If you have a problem relaxing your shoulders take your hands
and put them behind your back. Walk that way. It is considered elegant and powerful and
will automatically broaden your shoulders and chest.

3) Smile
Confident people are smiling because they arent worried and are comfortable in that
situation. Now I dont mean a wide ear to ear grin like a flaming idiot, but rather a gentle
relaxed smile of acknowledgment when interacting with another person. Seriously, work
on your smile and get one that compliments your face. Yes, as lame as it sounds, stand
in front of a mirror and work on a smile that you feel makes you look confident.

4) Chin Up
Confident people have their heads up (exposing their necks slightly. The reason we see
this as confident is because evolutionarily we are programmed to protect our necks, a
confident man who knows he can take care of himself isnt going to be worried about that
and will have no problem exposing his neck.) Be careful not to have your head in the sky
however, everything in moderation gentlemen.

5) Limit Large Hand Motions

A certain amount of hand motions are good, it adds to the story and makes it easier for
people to follow you, however at a certain point it becomes overboard. Studies have
continuously shown that people who are higher class and more confident severely limit
their hand motions when they are having an interaction. Keep this in mind- if you are
reminding people of Chandler when you talk it might be time to change.

Powerful Interactions
So confident body language is really only the first step although it is a huge one!
(Furthermore, studies by Paul Ekman have shown that if you adopt a certain body
language your mindset will change to reflect your body language. So if you are
uncomfortable in a certain setting, but your body language is confident, you will actually
feel more confident!) However, here are some further tips that are going to really help
you to be seen as confident and charismatic.

1) Speak Slowly
There are two reasons why people speak quickly: a) They are uncomfortable, b) They are
very comfortable but their cognitive process is particularly fast and therefore they speak
quickly to try to get everything out that is on their minds. Sadly, only psychologists (and
now you) know about reason b. Everybody else assumes that if you are speaking quickly
it is because you are nervous!

2) Pause
This is considered a really hypnotic technique and it is used by pretty much every
professional speaker in the world. They pause at certain points in order to continuously
capture and keep your interest. Use this. (You can even take a quick drink in the middle
of a sentence! You are SO (takes drink) Funny!

3) Walk as if You are Busy

You can always tell an important person by the way they walk! When you are walking
about town move with purpose and precision and I promise you this will cause people to
sit up and pay attention.

4) Lean Back
The person who is the most leaned back is the person who is the most powerful in that
situation so the more leaned back you can be do it. This includes leaning back against a
wall, allowing yourself to relax in a chair, the key thing here is to be relaxed! Remember,
relaxed people are confident and powerful people!

Active Power
Now for the fun part of the article:

1) The Handshake
Make sure that when you shake somebodys hand, your palm is to the floor. This will
make somebody automatically feel dominated (which will make them automatically
adhere to what you say with amazing accuracy!)

2) Verbal Power
There is something called conversational dominance which is a way of making sure that
you arent conversationally dominated by another person. Basically, powerful
businessmen (and women) will try to dominate you by asking you a string of questions,
the more you answer, the more under their spell you shall fall. So how do you protect
against it?
Well when somebody is trying to dominate you conversationally they will ask you
questions and expect you to answer them very quickly. (Now this is not to be mistaken
for genuine curiosity.) I remember I was at a hotel networking event with my father and
we met an old friend of my fathers. The man was very dominant, very hocker (Yiddish
for salesman) like and he immediately asked me, How old are you? and I came right
back and said, How old do you think I am? and the man went, Whoaaaa! We got a
slick one here!
He had tried to dominate me and I didnt let it happen, I deflected it by not answering
but not insulting him at the same time. People will try to dominate other people by
quickly asking them lots of questions and the more you answer the more under that
persons control you will fall. (Psychologically and unconsciously of course. Not physically.)
So how does it work? Well, during the first five minutes of an interaction, when you are
asked a question like, Where are you from? What do you do? How old are you? you
are going to answer in one of two ways:
o

By making them answer a question for you first: Meaning, you can absolutely tell
the person how old you are! But first make them guess! Make them do something
for you before you do something for them. This is very important and it will start
allowing you to be seen as attractive to women and powerful to men!

Answer in a fun way: Where are you from Im actually from a little cardboard
box on the side of the road etc. (Credit: Erik Von Markovick).

If you are ever at a loss or dont have something particularly witty to say just say,
Guess. If you say this with conviction and confidence then people will guess for you and
therefore you have successfully taken control of their subconscious minds.

Using Your Body Language to Persuade

Ever listen to someone speaking and realize that something about that person just did
not ring true? Something about the way he carried himself conflicted with his words.
Maybe, it was his inability to look you in the eye. Perhaps, his hands distracted you. Or
maybe it was the facial expressions that just did not quite match what he was saying?
No, now you realize it was his stance; focused, truthful people just dont carry
themselves that way. As you will see, the body tells its own story. Often you can
o

read someone and

reassure yourself whether that person is trustworthy or someone you are right to
run away from right now.

Lets look more closely at body language.

1. The Eyes Dont Lie

Have you ever conversed with someone who would not look at you directly? The person
looked over your shoulder, above your head, at the floor, or even at someone else
everywhere but at you. What did you think? The person probably made you uneasy. Most
likely, you doubted that persons interest, honesty, and confidence. Or perhaps you felt
ignored. Eye contact plays a major role in how people perceive one another, and, as a
speaker, you should pay special attention to it. If you make eye contact with your
listeners, theyll think you are sincere, credible, friendly, and honest. These feelings have
a great impact on how listeners receive your message.
o

Eye contact has other benefits:

o

It allows you to establish a bond with listeners.

It holds their attention.

It demonstrates you are speaking honestly.

It conveys self-confidence.

It shows you are listening.

It acknowledges people.

When speaking in front of a group of people:

o

Look at your audience before you launch your speech.

Scan from one side to the other before you speak.

Contact and connect with one person at a time.

Hold your eye contact for 3 to 4 seconds for each person.

Use the 4 contact, connect, communicate, and continue.

Eye contact to avoid includes:

o

Staring too long at one person

Looking above peoples heads

Looking up at the ceiling, or out the window

2. Hand Gestures Show Conviction and Enthusiasm

Hand gestures are the most expressive part of body language. To be most effective,
make your hand gestures above your elbow and away from your body. They should be
vigorous and definite to show conviction and enthusiasm. A sweeping wave of your arm
to show distance will add more to your message than a half-hearted hand wave. Hand

gestures also should be full and varied rather than partial and repetitious; making the
same movement over and over is distracting. Make your hand gestures larger for large
audiences to ensure that even people in the back of the room can see them.
o

Some basic hand gestures show:

o

Size, weight, shape, direction, and location

Importance or urgency

Comparison and contrast

Hand gestures to avoid include:

o

The parents pointing figure

The fist anger and stress

The karate chop looks violent

Sample hand placements include:

o

Hands cupped, one holding the other at the waist

Hand at side ready to make a gesture

Hand placements to avoid include:

o

Touching the face

Hands in the pocket

Fig leaf position

Prayer position

Arms crossed at the chest

Same placement for too long

3. Make Sure Your Facial Expression Supports Your Words

Your face unwittingly conveys cues about how your listeners are supposed to react or
feel. If you are talking about a terrible automobile accident, yet you are smiling and
nodding, your audience will be confused, not sad. Your facial expression must be
consistent with the feelings or information you are communicating.

4. Assume the Rooted Position to Convey Confidence

o

The stance you assume while standing still is important because it indicates your
confidence and comfort level. If you slouch your shoulders and fix your eyes on
the floor, your audience will think you are shy and weak. If you repeatedly shift
your weight from one foot to another, you appear uncomfortable and nervous, and
your movement may distract your audience. But when you stand straight, with
your feet shoulder-length apart and your weight evenly distributed on each foot,
and look directly at your listeners, you convey confidence and poise.

This is called the rooted position. Imagine your feet have roots buried deeply in
the ground. It will be impossible for you to sway or get off balance. This is the
position of power and strength.