ShareThisBy ALISON apROBERTS
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
If you want to be a mind reader, you need to learn the vocabulary of the body first.
It's not psychic ability that lets people read others like a book. Rather, it's a kind of physical literacy that allows us to decipher nose twitches, ear grabs, crossed arms, raised eyebrows and other gestures.
"A lot _ about 93 percent _ of human communication is non-verbal," says William Morrissette, a forensic psychophysiologist. "If you look at the human face, there are about 20,000 different expressions that can be generated."
Morrissette cracks the code of some of these expressions in a series of three popular classes based on body language offered through the Learning Exchange in Sacramento, Calif. "The Art & Science of Reading People," "The Psychology of Influence" and "Communications _ Interrogator Style" are designed to give participants a basic primer in nonverbal communication.
Those who enroll range from poker players to people working in sales to fiction writers who want to capture the physical aspects of a character.
Many of them hope to become lie-proof, whether in work or romance. And many feel they flunk when it comes to body-language fluency, but then most of us do.
"A lot of them have a perception that everybody else is better at this than they are, but the average person (has) no better than a guess," Morrissette says.
That's right, most of us can figure out someone is lying no more than about 50 percent of the time. You might as well flip a coin.
Morrissette says deception is generally accompanied by stress (except for the rare sociopath). And stress usually displays itself in some physical manner, including defensive postures such as crossing arms with palms hidden across the center of the body, turning away from a questioner, and nervous gesturing, particularly touching the face, as well as bouncing legs and fidgeting of the fingers.
Reading body language answers a basic human curiosity about others. Popular interest in the notion of body language _ and the term itself _ got a boost into the mainstream with the publication in 1970 of "Body Language" by Julius Fast. The library of popular books on the topic continues to add titles, with ever more illustrations and research behind them, including "The Definitive Book of Body Language" by Barbara and Allan Pease, published in the United States last year (Bantam, $23, 400 pages).
Although experts agree that we all can learn to be better body readers, some people really have a talent for the task.
Maureen O'Sullivan is a professor of psychology at the University of San Francisco who seeks such people out.
She calls them wizards _ people who are able to discern deception close to 100 percent of the time. She has found about 47 such people out of more than 15,000 people evaluated.
She says it takes a combination of talent, motivation and practice to become a wizard.
O'Sullivan has developed training to help people become better body-language readers, particularly in the recognition of what are called "micro-expressions," fleeting physical responses to emotional states. When it comes to deception, some of the common micro-expressions by liars include the nose wrinkle, the nose rub and the covering of the mouth with fingers or hands.
"About 85 percent (of people) can improve their accuracy at recognizing emotions in about 20 minutes of training," she says.
O'Sullivan says she is not one of the especially gifted readers of people, in part because she chooses to believe others are generally honest in their words.
"I'm not a wizard; I'm quite good at nonverbal behaviors, but I really have rose-colored glasses on," she says. "That's a choice that you make in life."
David Givens isn't interested in busting liars. He just loves watching people and figuring out what they mean.
"It started in high school for me. I was a real people-watcher," he says. In college, he discovered his staring could be turned into scholarship, and he started taking anthropology courses, studying all sorts of behavior cues. He has a doctorate in anthropology and has written a book about body language and romance, "Love Signals: A Practical Field Guide to the Body Language of Courtship" (St. Martin's Griffin, $13.95, 256 pages). He says his next, "Crime Signals," will deal with body language and crime and will be out this year.
"A lot is invested in facial mobility, and it's an evolutionary trend," he says. The purpose of all that mobility is largely communicative, in his view. But many of us are tone-deaf when it comes to the nonverbal.
"The problem for humans with deception is we're so invested in the verbal channel; it gets in the way of seeing," he says. "You have to get out of the verbal mode. Like with the TV, you have to turn the sound off."
To get you started on tuning into the body-language channel, Givens has posted a remarkable nonverbal dictionary online, which has more than 230 entries, from "Adam's Apple Jump" to "Zygomatic Smile." (Check out members.aol.com/nonverbal2/diction1.htm.)
There's a big body of knowledge waiting out there.
(Alison apRoberts can be reached at aaproberts(at)sacbee.com.)
