Body language pease ebook

Evaluation and deceit signals -- Lying research -- The three wise monkeys -- How the face reveals the truth -- Women lie the best and that's he truth -- Why it's hard to lie -- Eight of the most common lying gestures -- Evaluation and procrastination gestures -- Boredom -- Evaluation gestures -- The lying interviewee -- Chin stroking -- Stalling clusters -- Head rubbing and slapping gestures -- Why Bob always lost at chess -- The double meaning -- 8.

Eye signals -- The dilating pupils -- Take the pupil test -- Women are better at it, as usual -- Giving them the eye -- The eyebrow flash -- Eye widening -- The "looking up" cluster -- How men's fires get lit -- Gaze behavior, where do you look? Space invaders, territories and personal space -- Personal space -- Zone distance -- Practical applications of zone distances -- Who is moving in on whom? How the legs reveal what the mind wants to do -- Everybody's talking about a new way of walking -- How feet tell the truth -- The purpose of the legs -- The four main standing positions -- Defensive, cold, or "just comfortable"?

The thirteen most common gestures you'll see daily -- The head nod -- Why you should learn to nod -- How to encourage agreement -- The head shake -- The basic head positions -- The head duck -- Picking imaginary lint -- How we show we're ready for action -- The cowboy stance -- Sizing up the competition -- The legs-spread -- Leg-over-the-arm-of-chair -- Straddling a chair -- The catapult -- Gestures that show when a person is ready -- The starter's position -- Summary -- Mirroring, how we build rapport -- Creating the right vibes -- Mirroring on a cellular level -- Mirroring differences between men and women -- What to do about it if you're female -- When men and women start to look alike -- Do we resemble our pets?

The secret signals of cigarettes, glasses, and makeup -- The two types of smokers -- Differences between men and women -- Smoking as a sexual display -- How to sport a positive or negative decision -- Cigar smokers -- How smokers end a session -- How to rad glasses -- Stalling tactics -- Peering-over-the-glasses -- Wearing glasses on the head -- The power of glasses and makeup -- A little lippy, lady?

How the body points to where the mind wants to go -- What body angles say -- How we exclude others -- Seated body pointing -- Foot pointing -- Summary -- Courtship displays and attraction signals -- The emergence of the colorful male -- Graham's story -- Why women always call the shots -- Differences between men and women -- The attraction process -- The thirteen most common female courtship gestures and signals -- What men look at in women's bodies -- How beautiful people miss out -- Is he a butt, boobs, or leg man?

Ownership, territory, and height signals -- Body lowering and status -- He's a big man around town -- Why some people seem taller on TV -- Try the floor test -- The downsides of height -- How body lowering can sometimes raise status -- How TV politicians can win votes -- How to placate angry people -- What's love got to do with it? Interviews, power plays, and office politics -- Why James Bond looked cool, calm, and collected -- The nine golden keys to making great first impressions -- When someone keeps you waiting -- Fake it till you make it?

Putting it all together -- How well can you rad between the lines? There are no reviews yet. Like the Palm-Down Thrust, the Stiff-Arm Thrust tends to be used by aggressive types and its main purpose is to keep you at a distance and away from their personal space.

It's also used by people raised in rural areas, who have larger personal space needs and want to protect their territory.

A popular choice of power players and common cause of watering eyes and, in extreme cases, torn ligaments. This is the father of the Bent-Arm-Pull-In, and involves forcefully grip- ping the receiver's outstretched palm, then simultaneously applying a sharp reverse thrust, attempting to drag the receiver into the initiator's territory.

This results in loss of balance and gets the relationship off on the wrong foot. The Socket-Wrencher Pulling the receiver into the initiator's territory can mean one of three things: first, the initiator is an insecure type who feels safe only within his own personal space; second, the initiator is from a culture that has smaller space needs; or third, he wants to control you by pulling you off balance.

Either way, he wants the encounter to be on his terms. With strong rural overtones, the pumper grabs the hand of the pumpee and commences an energetic and rhythmic series of rapid vertical strokes. While up to seven pumps is acceptable, some pumpers con- tinue to pump uncontrollably as if they are trying to draw water from the pumpee.

The act of being physically connected seems to weaken our resolve to retreat. Being somewhat vegetarian in approach, this handshake has its origins in the Netherlands, where a person can be accused of 'Geeft 'n hand als bosje worteljes' meaning 'Giving a hand- shake like a bunch of carrots'. It's a distant relative of the Wet Fish but stiffer and less clammy to the touch. Take the time to practise handshake styles with your friends and colleagues and you can quickly learn how to deliver a positive handshake every time.

Bob gazed across the room and locked eyes with an attractive brunette. She seemed to smile at him and, not being slow on the uptake, he swiftly crossed the room and began a conver- sation with her. She didn't seem to talk much but she was still smiling at him so he persisted. One of his female friends sauntered past and whispered, 'Forget it Bob But she was still smiling at him!

As with most men, Bob didn't understand the nega- tive significance of the tight-lipped, no-teeth-visible female smile. Children were often told by their grandmothers to 'put on a happy face', 'wear a big smile' and 'show your pearly 'whites' when meeting someone new because Grandma knew, on an intuitive level, it would produce a positive reaction in others.

He analysed the heads of people executed by guillotine to study how the face muscles worked. He pulled face muscles from many different angles to catalogue and record which muscles caused which smiles.

He discovered that smiles are controlled by two sets of muscles: the zygomatic major muscles, which run down the side of the face and connect to the corners of the mouth and the orbicularis oculi, which pull the eyes back. The zygo- matic majors pull the mouth back to expose the teeth and enlarge the cheeks, while the orbicularis oculi make the eyes narrow and cause 'crow's feet'. These muscles are important to understand because the zygomatic majors are consciously con- trolled - in other words, they are used to produce false smiles of fake enjoyment to try to appear friendly or subordinate.

The orbicularis oculi at the eyes act independently and reveal the true feelings of a genuine smile. So the first place to check the sincerity of a smile is to look for wrinkle lines beside the eyes. A natural smile produces characteristic wrinkles around the eyes - insincere people smile only with their mouth. In the enjoyment smile, not only are the lip corners pulled up, but the muscles around the eyes are contracted, while non- enjoyment smiles involve just the smiling lips. This needs no further expla- nation.

President Clinton is, in fact, the key figure in the shot because of his unobstructed centre posi- tion, extra height and Arms-Spread-Open-Palms gesture, reminiscent of a god presiding over his people. Clinton's Half- Moon, Lips-Sucking smile shows the emotional restraint he either felt or faked. Yitzhak Rabin left holds his ground using a Stiff-Arm Thrust to resist being pulled forward as Yassar Arafat attempts a Bent-Arm-Pull-In In this famous shot, both men keep their feet firmly planted on the ground and attempt to force the other out of his territory- Yitzhak Rabin assumed the power position on the left side of the picture and used a Stiff-Arm Thrust and leaned forward to keep Arafat out of his personal space while Yassar Arafat stood absolutely erect and attempted to counter with a Bent- Arm-Pull-in.

Genuine smiles are generated by the unconscious brain, which means they are automatic. When you feel pleasure, signals pass through the part of your brain that processes emotion, making your mouth muscles move, your cheeks raise, your eyes crease up and your eyebrows dip slightly.

Photographers ask you to say 'Cheese' because this word putts back the zygomatic major muscles. But the result is a false smile and an insincere looking photograph. Lines around the eyes can also appear in intense fake smiles and the cheeks may bunch up, making it look as if the eyes are contracting and that the smile is genuine. When a smile is genuine, the fleshy part of the eye between the eyebrow and the eyelid - the eye cover fold - moves downwards and the end of the eyebrows dip slightly.

Smiling Is a Submission Signal Smiling and laughing are universally considered to be signals that show a person is happy. We cry at birth, begin smiling at five weeks and laughing starts between the fourth and fifth months.

Babies quickly learn that crying gets our attention - and that smiling keeps us there. Recent research with our closest primate cousins, the chimpanzees, has shown that smiling serves an even deeper, more primitive purpose. To show they're aggressive, apes bare their lower fangs, warning that they can bite. Humans do exactly the same thing when they become aggressive by dropping or thrusting forward the lower lip because its main function is as a sheath to conceal the lower teeth.

Chimpanzees have two types of smiles: one is an appeasement face, where one chimp shows submission to a dominant other. In this chimp smile - known as a 'fear face' - the lower jaw opens to expose the teeth and the corners of the mouth are pulled back and down, and this resembles the human smile. In both cases, these smiles are used as submission gestures.

The first communicates 'I am not a threat because, as you can see, I'm fearful of you' and the other says 'I am not a threat because, as you can see, I'm just like a playful child'. This is the same face pulled by a chimpanzee that is anxious or fearful that it may be attacked or injured by others.

The zygomatics pull the corners of the mouth back horizontally or downwards and the orbicularis eye muscles don't move. And it's the same nervous smile used by a person who steps onto a busy road and almost gets killed by a bus. Because it's a fear reaction, they smile and say, 'Gee I almost got killed! It tells another person you are non-threatening and asks them to accept you on a personal level. Lack of smiling explains why many dominant individuals, such as Vladimir Putin, James Cagney, Clint Eastwood, Margaret Thatcher and Charles Bronson, always seem to look grumpy or aggressive and are rarely seen smiling - they simply don't want to appear in any way submissive.

And research in courtrooms shows that an apology offered with a smile incurs a lesser penalty than an apology without one.

So Grandma was right. Happy, submissive or about to tear you limb from limb? Professor Ulf Dimberg at Uppsala University, Sweden, con- ducted an experiment that revealed how your unconscious mind exerts direct control of your facial muscles.

Using equip- ment that picks up electrical signals from muscle fibres, he measured the facial muscle activity on volunteers while they were exposed to pictures of both happy and angry faces. They were told to make frowning, smiling or expressionless faces in response to what they saw. Sometimes the face they were told to attempt was the opposite of what they saw - meeting a smile with a frown, or a frown with a smile.

The results showed that the volunteers did not have total control over their facial muscles. While it was easy to frown back at a picture of an angry man, it was much more difficult to pull a smile. Even though volunteers were trying consciously to control their natural reactions, the twitching in their facial muscles told a different story - they were mirroring the expres- sions they were seeing, even when they were trying not to.

Professor Ruth Campbell, from University College London, believes there is a 'mirror neuron' in the brain that triggers the part responsible for the recognition of faces and expressions and causes an instant mirroring reaction. In other words, whether we realise it or not, we automatically copy the facial expressions we see.

This is why regular smiling is important to have as a part of your body language repertoire, even when you don't feel like it, because smiling directly influences other people's attitudes and how they respond to you. Science has proved that the more you smile, the more positive reactions others will give you. How a Smile Tricks the Brain The ability to decode smiles appears to be hardwired into the brain as an aid to survival.

Because smiling is essentially a sub- mission signal, ancestral men and women needed to be able to recognise whether an approaching stranger was friendly or aggressive, and those who failed to do this perished.

Do you recognise this actor? When you look at the above photograph you'll probably iden- tify actor Hugh Grant. When asked to describe his emotions in this shot, most people describe him as relaxed and happy because of his apparent smiling face. When the shot is turned the right way up, you get a completely different view of the emotional attitude conveyed.

Not only can it do that, but the brain can separate the smile from every other part of the face. This illustrates the powerful effect a smile has on us. Practising the Fake Smile As we've said, most people can't consciously differentiate between a fake smile and a real one, and most of us are content if someone is simply smiling at us — regardless of whether it's real or false. Because smiling is such a disarming gesture, most people wrongly assume that it's a favourite of liars.

Research by Paul Ekman showed that when people delib- erately lie, most, especially men, smile less than they usually do. Ekman believes this is because liars realise that most people associate smiling with lying so they intentionally decrease their smiles.

A liar's smile comes more quickly than a genuine smile and is held much longer, almost as if the liar is wearing a mask. The half of the brain's cortex that specialises in facial expressions is in the right hemisphere and sends signals mainly to the left side of the body. As a result, false facial emotions are more pronounced on the left side of the face than the right. In a real smile, both brain hemispheres instruct each side of the face to act with symmetry.

When liars lie, the left side of the smile is usually more pronounced than the right Smugglers Smile Less We were commissioned by Australian Customs, in , to help create a programme to increase the number of seizures of illegal contraband and drugs being smuggled into Australia- Until that time, it had been assumed by law enforcement offi- cers that liars increased their frequency of smiling when they were lying or under pressure.

Our analysis of film of people who were intentionally told to lie showed the opposite - when the liars lied, they smiled less or not at all, regardless of culture. People who were innocent and telling the truth increased their smiling frequency when being honest. Because smiling is rooted in submission, the innocent people were attempting to appease their accusers while the professional liars were reducing their smiles and other body signals. This highlights how fake smiling is controlled and should always be considered in the context of where it occurs.

Five Common Types of Smiles What follows is a summary and an analysis of the common types of smiles that you're likely to see every day: 1. The Tight-Lipped Smile The lips are stretched tight across the face to form a straight line and the teeth are concealed.

It sends the message that the smiler has a secret or a withheld opinion or attitude that they will not be sharing with you. It's a favourite of women who don't want to reveal that they don't like someone and is usually clearly read by other women as a rejection signal. Most men are oblivious to it.

Conversely, Richard Branson is always seen sport- ing a wide toothy smile and is happy to explain the exact details of his success because he knows that most people won't do it anyway. Tony and Cherie Blair were 'tight lipped' about Cherie's last pregnancy 2. The Twisted Smile This smile shows opposite emotions on each side of the face. In picture A below, the right brain raises the left side eyebrow, the left zygomatic muscles and left cheek to produce one type of smile on the left side of the face while the left brain pulls the same muscles downwards on the right side to produce an angry frown.

When you place a mirror down the middle of illustration A, at an angle of 90 degrees to reflect each side of the face, you produce two completely different faces with opposite emotions. Mirroring the right side of the face reveals picture B, which has a cheesy grin, while mirroring the left side picture C reveals an angry frown.

The Drop-Jaw Smile This is a practised smile where the lower jaw is simply dropped down to give the impression that the person is laughing or playful. This is a favourite of people such as The Joker in Batman, Bill Clinton and Hugh Grant, all of whom use it to engender happy reactions in their audiences or to win more votes. Sideways-Looking-Up Smile With the head turned down and away while looking up with a Tight-Lipped Smile, the smiler looks juvenile, playful and secretive.

This coy smile has been shown to be men's favourite everywhere, because when a woman does it, it engenders parental male feelings, making men want to protect and care for females. This is one of the smiles Princess Diana used to captivate the hearts of people everywhere. Not surprisingly, this smile is a regular in men's courtship repertoire for attracting men as it's read by as seductive and is a powerful 'come-on' signal.

This is the same smile now used by Prince William, which not only has the effect of winning people's affection, it also reminds them of Diana. Ray Birdwhistell found that smiling among middle-class people is most common in Atlanta, Louisville, Memphis, Nashville and most of Texas.

Bush is a Texan and they smile more than most other Americans. As a result, in Texas, an unsmiling individual might be asked if he was 'angry about something', while in New York, the smiler might be asked, 'What's so funny? This worried the Northerners who feared that he knew something they didn't. Smile constantly. Everyone will wonder what you've been up to. Why Laughter Is the Best Medicine As with smiling, when laughter is incorporated as a permanent part of who you are, it attracts friends, improves health and extends life.

When we laugh, every organ in the body is affected a positive way. Our breathing quickens, which exercises the diaphragm, neck, stomach, face and shoulders. Laughter creases the amount of oxygen in the blood, which not only helps healing and improves circulation, it also expands the blood vessels close to the skin's surface.

This is why people go in the face when they laugh. It can also lower the heart rate, dilate the arteries, stimulate the appetite and burn up calories. Professor William Fry at Stanford University reported that laughs will give your body an aerobic workout equal to that of a ten-minute session on a rowing machine. Med- ically speaking, this is why a damn good laugh is damn good for you. The older we become, the more serious we become about life.

An adult laughs an average of 15 times a day; a preschooler laughs an average of times. Why You Should Take Laughter Seriously Research shows that people who laugh or smile, even when they don't feel especially happy, make part of the 'happy zone' in the brain's left hemisphere surge with electrical activity.

In one of his numerous studies on laughter, Richard Davidson, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, hooked subjects up to EEG electroencephalograph machines, which measure brain wave activity, and showed them funny movies. Smiling made their happy zones click wildly.

He proved that intentionally producing smiles and laughter moves brain activity towards spontaneous happiness. Arnie Cann, professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, discovered that humour has a positive impact in counteracting stress. Cann led an experiment with people who were showing early signs of depression. Two groups watched videos over a three-week period. The group that watched comedy videos showed more improvement in their symptoms than did a control group that watched non-humor- ous videos.

He also found that people with ulcers frown more than people without ulcers. If you catch yourself frowning' practise putting your hand on your forehead when you talk, to train yourself out of it. Chimpanzee laughter sounds like panting, with only one sound made per outward or inward breath. It's this one-to-one ratio between breath cycle and vocalisation that makes it impossible for most primates to speak.

When humans began walking upright, it freed the upper body from weight-bearing functions and allowed better breath control. As a result, humans can chop an exhalation and modulate it to produce language and laughter. Chimps can have linguistic concepts, but they can't physically make the sounds of language. Because we walk upright, humans have a huge range of freedom in the sounds we make, including speech and laughter. How Humour Heals Laughter stimulates the body's natural painkillers and 'feel good' enhancers, known as endorphins, helping relieve stress and heal the body.

When Norman Cousins was diagnosed with the debilitating illness ankylospondylitis, the doctors told him they could no longer help him and that he would live in excru- ciating pain before he died. Cousins checked into a hotel room and hired every funny movie he could find: the Marx Brothers, Airplane and The Three Stooges, etc. He watched and re- watched them over and over, laughing as hard and loud as he could.

After six months of this self-inflicted laughter therapy, the doctors were amazed to find that his illness had been com- etely cured - the disease was gone! This amazing outcome led to the publishing of Cousins' book, Anatomy of an Illness, and the start of massive research into the function of endor- phins.

Endorphins are chemicals released from the brain when you laugh. This explains why happy people rarely get sick and miserable but complaining people often seem to be ill. Laughing Till You Cry Laughter and crying are closely linked from a psychological and physiological standpoint.

Think of the last time someone told you a joke that made you buckle up with laughter and you could hardly control yourself. How did you feel afterwards? You felt a tingling sensation all over, right? Your brain released endorphins into your system that gave you what was once described as a 'natural high' and is the same experience that drug addicts get when they take dope.

People who have trouble with laughing at the tough things in life often turn to drugs and alcohol to achieve the same feeling that endorphin- induced laughter produces. Alcohol loosens inhibitions and lets people laugh more, which releases endorphins. This is why most well-adjusted people laugh more when they drink alcohol, while unhappy people become even more despondent or even violent.

People drink alcohol and take drugs to try to feel how happy people feel normally. Paul Ekman found that one of the reasons we are attracted to smiling and laughing faces is because they can actually affect our autonomic nervous system.

We smile when we see a smiling face and this releases endorphins into our system. If you are surrounded by miserable, unhappy people you are also likely to mirror their expressions and become morose or depressed.

How Jokes Work The basis of most jokes is that, at the punch line, something disastrous or painful happens to someone. In effect, the unex- pected ending 'frightens' our brain, and we laugh with sounds similar to a chimp warning others of imminent danger. Even though we consciously know that the joke is not a real event, our laugh releases endorphins for self-anaesthesis as if the joke was a real event.

If it was a real event, we may go into crying mode and the body would also release its endorphins. Crying is often an extension of a laughing bout and is why, in a serious emotional crisis, such as hearing about a death, a person who cannot mentally accept the death may begin laughing.

When the reality hits, the laughter turns to crying. The origin of human laughter is as a primate warning signal The Laughter Room the s, several American hospitals introduced the concept of the 'Laughter Room'. Patients were then exposed to to minute sessions each day. The result was impressive - a dramatic improvement in patient health and shorter average hospitalisa- tion time per patient.

The Laughter Rooms also showed a decrease in the number of painkillers required by those in pain and patients became easier to deal with.

So you could say that the medical profession now take their laughter seriously. He who laughs, lasts. Smiles and Laughter Are a Way of Bonding Robert Provine found that laughing was more than 30 times as likely to occur in participants in a social situation than in a solitary setting. Laughter, he found, has less to do with jokes and funny stories and more to do with building relationships. In Provine's studies, participants were more likely to speak to themselves when alone than they were to laugh.

Participants were videotaped watching a humorous video clip in three dif- ferent situations: alone, with a same-sex stranger and with a same-sex friend. Laughter has more to do with bonding. Even though no differences existed between how funny the par- ticipants felt the video clip was, those who watched the amusing video clips alone laughed significantly less than did those who watched the video clip with another person present, whether it was a friend or a stranger.

Laughter occurred much more frequently during social interaction. These suits demonstrate that the more social a situation is, the more often people will laugh and the longer each laugh will last. Humour Sells Karen Machleit, professor of marketing at the University of Cincinnati's College of Business Administration, found that adding humour to advertisements increases sales.

She found that humour makes it more likely that consumers will accept an advertiser's claims and increases source credibility, so that a funny ad with a famous person becomes even more readily accepted. The Permanent Down-Mouth The opposite to pulling up the corners of the mouth to show happiness is pulling both corners downward to show the Down-Mouth expression. This is done by the person who feels unhappy, despondent, depressed, angry or tense.

Unfortu- nately, if a person holds these negative emotions throughout their lifetime, the corners of the mouth will set into a perma- nent down position.

In later life, this can give a person an appearance similar to a bulldog. Studies show that we stand further away from people who have this expression, give them less eye contact and avoid them when they are walking towards us. If you dis- over that the Down-Mouth has crept into your repertoire, practise smiling regularly, which will not only help you avoid looking like an angry canine in later life, but will make you feel more positive.

It will also help you avoid frightening little chil- dren and being thought of as a grumpy old cow. Our intuition tells us to stay away from those with a Down-Mouth expression. Smiling Advice For Women Research by Marvin Hecht and Marianne La France from Boston University has revealed how subordinate people smile more in the presence of dominant and superior people, in both friendly and unfriendly situations, whereas superior people will smile only around subordinate people in friendly situa- tions.

This research shows that women smile far more than men in both social and business situations, which can make a woman appear to be subordinate or weak in an encounter with unsmiling men.

Some people claim that women's extra smiling is the result of women historically being placed by men into subordinate roles, but other research shows that by the age of eight weeks, baby girls smile far more than baby boys, so it's probably inborn as opposed to learned. The likely explanation is that smiling fits neatly into women's evolutionary role as pacifiers and nurturers.

It doesn't mean a woman can't be as authoritative as a man; but the extra smiling can make her look less authoritative. Social psychologist Dr Nancy Henley, at UCLA, described a woman's smile as 'her badge of appeasement' and it is often used to placate a more powerful male. An experiment using 15 photographs of women showing happy, sad and neutral faces were rated for attractiveness by respondents.

The women with the sad expressions were considered the least attractive. Pictures of unsmiling women were decoded as a sign of unhappiness while pictures of unsmiling men were seen as a sign of dominance. The lessons here are for women to smile less when dealing with dominant men in business or to mirror the amount of smiling that men do. And if men want to be more persuasive with women, they need to smile more in all contexts. Laughter In Love Robert Provine found that in courtship, it's also women who do most of the laughing and smiling, not men.

Laughing in these contexts is used as a way of determining how success- fully a couple is likely to bond in a relationship. Simply put, the more he can make her laugh, the more attractive she will find him. This is because the ability to make others laugh is perceived as a dominant trait and women prefer dominant males, while males prefer subordinate females. Provine also round that a subordinate person will laugh to appease a supe- rior person and the superior person will make subordinates laugh - but without laughing himself — as a way of maintain- ing his superiority.

This explains why having a sense of humour is near the top of women's priority list of what they look for in a man. When a woman says 'He's such a funny guy - we spent the whole night laughing together' she usually means that she spent the night laughing and he spent the night making her laugh.

From a man's perspective, saying that a woman has a good sense of humour doesn't mean she tells jokes; it means she laughs at his jokes.

On a deeper level, men seem to understand the attraction value of being humorous and spend much of their time with other men competing to tell the best joke to enhance their own status. Many men also become annoyed when one man dominates the joke-telling, especially when women are present and are also laughing. Men are likely to think the joke-teller is not only a jerk but he isn't particularly funny either, come to think of it - despite the fact he has all the women in fits of laughter.

The point for men to understand is that humorous men look more attractive to most women. Fortunately, you can learn to be humorous. How a woman sees a man: the picture on the left is how a woman perceives the man who doesn't make her laugh.

Studies prove that most encounters will run more smoothly, last longer, have more pos- itive outcomes and dramatically improve relationships when you make a point of regularly smiling and laughing to the point where it becomes a habit. Evidence shows conclusively that smiles and laughter build the immune system, defend the body against illness and disease, medicate the body, sell ideas, teach better, attract more friends and extend life.

Humour heals. As children, we hid behind solid objects such as tables, chairs, furniture and mother's skirt whenever we found ourselves in a threatening situation. As we grew older, this hiding behaviour became more sophisticated and by the age of about six, when it was unacceptable behav- iour to hide behind solid objects, we learned to fold our arms tightly across our chests whenever a threatening situation arose.

During our teens, we learned to make the crossed-arms gesture less obvious by relaxing our arms a little and combin- ing the gesture with crossed legs. As we grow older, the arm-crossing gesture can evolve to the point where we try to make it even less obvious to others.

The arms fold neatly across the heart and lungs regions to protect these vital organs from being injured, so it's likely that arm-crossing is inborn. Monkeys and chimps also do it to protect themselves from a frontal attack.

One thing's certain: when a person has a nervous, negative or defensive attitude, it's very likely he will fold his arms firmly on his chest, showing that he feels threat- ened. A group of volunteers was asked to attend a series of lectures and each student was instructed to keep his legs uncrossed, arms unfolded and to take a casual, relaxed sitting position.

At the end of the lectures each student was tested on his retention and knowledge of the subject matter and his attitude towards the lecturer was recorded.

A second group of volunteers was put through the same process, but these volunteers were instructed to keep their arms tightly folded across their chests throughout the lectures.

The second group also had a more critical opinion of the lectures and of the lecturer. When you fold your arms your credibility dramatically reduces. We conducted these same tests in with delegates during 6 different lectures and recorded almost identical results. It's for this reason that training centres should have chairs with arms to allow the attendees to leave their arms uncrossed. But I'm Just 'Comfortable' Some people claim that they habitually cross their arms because it's comfortable.

Any gesture will feel comfortable when you have the corresponding attitude; that is, if you have a negative, defensive or nervous attitude, folded arms will feel comfortable. If you're having fun with your friends, folded arms will feel wrong. Remember that with all body language, the meaning of the message is also in the receiver, as well as the sender.

You may feel 'comfortable' with your arms crossed and your back and neck stiffened, but studies have shown that others' reactions to these gestures is negative. So the lesson here is clear - avoid crossing your arms under any circumstances unless your intention is to show others you don't agree or don't want to participate. You may feel arm-crossing is simply comfortable but others will think you're not approachable. Gender Differences Men's arms rotate slightly inwards while women's arms rotate slightly outwards.

These rotation differences have enabled men to aim and throw more accurately, while women's splayed elbows give them a wider, more stable position for carrying babies. One interesting difference is that women tend to keep their arms more open when they are around men they find attractive and are likely to fold their arms across their breasts around aggressive or unattractive men.

There are many arm-folding positions and we'll discuss here the most common ones you're likely to see. Crossed-Arms-on-Chest is universal and is decoded with the same defensive or negative meaning almost everywhere.

It is commonly seen among strangers in public meetings, in queues or cafeteria lines, elevators or anywhere that people feel uncer- tain or insecure. The develop- ers sat to one side of the room and their opponents, the 'greenies', sat on the other. This shows how most people will take an arms-folded position when they disagree with what they're hearing.

Many speakers fail to communicate their message to their audience because they haven't seen the crossed-arms position of their listeners. Experienced speakers know that this gesture means a good 'ice breaker' is needed to move their audience into a more receptive position that will change their attitude from negative to positive.

When you see someone take the arms-crossed position, it's reasonable to assume that you may have said something with which they disagree. It may be pointless continuing your line of argument even though the person could be verbally agree- ing with you. The fact is that body language is more honest than words. As long as someone holds an arms-folded position, a negative attitude will persist. In Digital Body Language, Erica Dhawan, a go-to thought leader on collaboration and a passionate communication junkie, combines cutting edge research with engaging storytelling to decode the new signals and cues that have replaced traditional body language across genders, generations, and culture.

In real life, we lean in, uncross our arms, smile, nod and make eye contact to show we listen and care. Online, reading carefully is the new listening. Writing clearly is the new empathy. And a phone or video call is worth a thousand emails. Digital Body Language will turn your daily misunderstandings into a set of collectively understood laws that foster connection, no matter the distance.

Dhawan investigates a wide array of exchanges—from large conferences and video meetings to daily emails, texts, IMs, and conference calls—and offers insights and solutions to build trust and clarity to anyone in our ever changing world.

Body language by Allan Pease is just what you require to know those feelings which people often try to hide. You'll also learn how your body language can influence what your boss, family, friends, and strangers think of you. Read this book and send your nonverbal intelligence soaring.