The Ultimate Body Language Book
Chapter 2 – The Basics Of Understanding Body Language Age, Age Gaps, Status And Its Affect On Body Language Since we’ve isolated women as the best readers of body language, it’s time to weed out the rest of the bad apples from the bunch. In fact, many other factors, aside from our sexes, play into our ability to read and use body language. The first such factor is our age. Children first learn to communicate through nonverbal channels by using posture, gestures and proximity to influence the behaviour of the adults around them. If this doesn’t work they will resort to crying but for the most part this is non-directional and unsophisticated. In children, it is their body language which helps us to figure out their true desires. Before they can signal nonverbally, we are simply left guessing so thankfully children have relatively simple and predictable needs. Once they figure out the use of words, their nonverbal gestures quickly diminish and eventually get mostly left by the wayside. Children who first begin to speak will show more interest in speaking then other channels even if it means they need to interact more with their adult counterparts versus other children of the same age. At the age of three, most children have lost or dropped almost all of their nonverbal communication and are fully into verbal speech. Age also plays another more important role in reading body language. Those people that are closest to our age are the easiest to read. Our ability to accurately read others is much lower with people who are much younger and much older then ourselves and easiest amongst our own peer group. We spend the most amount of time with our peer group so familiarity could be a factor, however, more importantly is our ability to relate and empathize. So the take-away message is that our ability to empathize with the needs, desires and emotions of others is a key part in reading body language. Empathy is the ability to put ourselves in the shoes of others and to feel what they feel. The greater the gap in age between the reader and the target, the greater is the discrepancy in accuracy. If you’ve ever watch siblings of similar age, you know that they have an uncanny ability to interpret and understand each other. It’s particularly interesting to watch small children decipher each others seemingly nonsensical gibberish and random movements. Naturally it follows that teenagers and seniors are difficult to read by the middle aged and children are poor readers of all adults (or at least do a good job pretend to be). Older faces are difficult to read naturally, even for other seniors. Older faces have weaker muscle tone, and so produce less exaggerated expressions. What expressions are made are then covered by wrinkles disguising them even more. Status and occupational differences that we see everyday at work, also make it difficult for us to read others. Upper management dealing with lower management in a company or teachers dealing with students must deal with cohort differences daily and it can become stressful. Higher status people might lack the interest to associate with lower status people and low status people might sense this and so return less eye contact feeling not cared about. This lack of empathy spirals into each party caring less and less about each other. Lower status employees may also feel envious of higher status employees and share less information with them make it difficult to develop empathy. Health care workers that spend a lot of time with seniors can develop skills and read them more accurately, but only if they empathize with them. To be a good body language reader, you have to be able to put yourself in someone else’s position, and see the world as they do.
Chapter 2 – The Basics Of Understanding Body Language Body Language Of Children Babies are almost entirely dependant on nonverbal communication in their first few months, that is, if we discount crying! As children age, they still rely, as adults do, on nonverbal language such as pointing at a toy rather then asking for it, pushing other children aside when it suites them, or even hugs to show affection and exaggerated pouting to garner sympathy. Babies as young as nine month’s old, who lack verbal language, can even begin using sign language to convey desires showing just how rooted non-verbal communication is all of us. When young children lie they often have troubles making eye contact or they might hang their head, appear tense or they might even quickly pull both hands up and cover their mouths as if to shove the lie back in from where it came from. Even some adults will perform these gestures if they let slip a secret or particularly juicy piece of gossip in the wrong circle. However, at other times, both children and adults are not as obvious. A 2002 study by Victor Talwar and Kang Lee out of the University of Queens, Canada, however, showed that children as young as three are naturally adept at controlling their nonverbal language as it applies to deception. In the study, children were able to fool most of the evaluators of their deception as a videotape showing the lie was replayed. Children are not particularly skilled at lying through verbal channels though, and they slip up easily revealing inconsistencies in their stories, so this is where you can really catch them. We will cover deceptive body language at lengths later on. Other emotional body language emitted by children is much more prevalent. For example, children use slouching and pouting to show that they are upset and disappointed but as we age, we drop our nonverbal cues in favour of verbal expression. We naturally become more adept at repressing what our bodies do and tend to use more conscious thought and spoken words since it is more direct and less easily misinterpreted. What starts off as a quick mouth slap movement to the mouth when lying (or swearing) in children, slowly becomes a touch to the corner of the mouth. Later, restraint forces the finger to the side even further and then instead of touching the mouth it touches the side of the nose
- Page 25 and 26: mind and create positive or negativ
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- Page 31 and 32: after years apart, or when someone
- Page 33 and 34: these class of neurons might be rel
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- Page 37 and 38: keep the conversation going. They
- Page 39 and 40: Subconscious facial expressions can
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- Page 43 and 44: arricades to block ourselves from v
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- Page 47 and 48: accurately judge a person. The rule
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- Page 51 and 52: We regularly place more importance
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- Page 55 and 56: on the spot, and in real time. Chap
- Page 57 and 58: idiosyncrasy. Does this mean that e
- Page 59 and 60: to be compare to a baseline as they
- Page 61 and 62: such as postures and signals or in
- Page 63 and 64: than simple observation. While Wats
- Page 65 and 66: Millions of years ago, we gave up q
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- Page 73 and 74: We rarely catch women checking men
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- Page 83 and 84: Asymmetrical posture shows a lack o
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Chapter 2 – <strong>The</strong> Basics Of Understanding <strong>Body</strong> <strong>Language</strong><br />
<strong>Body</strong> <strong>Language</strong> Of Children<br />
Babies are almost<br />
entirely dependant on nonverbal communication in their first few months, that is, if we discount crying!<br />
As children age, they still rely, as adults do, on nonverbal language such as pointing at a toy rather then<br />
asking for it, pushing other children aside when it suites them, or even hugs to show affection and<br />
exaggerated pouting to garner sympathy. Babies as young as nine month’s old, who lack verbal<br />
language, can even begin using sign language to convey desires showing just how rooted non-verbal<br />
communication is all of us.<br />
When young children lie they often have troubles making eye contact or they might hang their head,<br />
appear tense or they might even quickly pull both hands up and cover their mouths as if to shove the lie<br />
back in from where it came from. Even some adults will perform these gestures if they let slip a secret<br />
or particularly juicy piece of gossip in the wrong circle. However, at other times, both children and<br />
adults are not as obvious. A 2002 study by Victor Talwar and Kang Lee out of the University of<br />
Queens, Canada, however, showed that children as young as three are naturally adept at controlling<br />
their nonverbal language as it applies to deception. In the study, children were able to fool most of the<br />
evaluators of their deception as a videotape showing the lie was replayed. Children are not particularly<br />
skilled at lying through verbal channels though, and they slip up easily revealing inconsistencies in<br />
their stories, so this is where you can really catch them. We will cover deceptive body language at<br />
lengths later on.<br />
Other emotional body language emitted by children is much more prevalent. For example, children use<br />
slouching and pouting to show that they are upset and disappointed but as we age, we drop our<br />
nonverbal cues in favour of verbal expression. We naturally become more adept at repressing what our<br />
bodies do and tend to use more conscious thought and spoken words since it is more direct and less<br />
easily misinterpreted. What starts off as a quick mouth slap movement to the mouth when lying (or<br />
swearing) in children, slowly becomes a touch to the corner of the mouth. Later, restraint forces the<br />
finger to the side even further and then instead of touching the mouth it touches the side of the nose
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