Eye Spy

As you just read, excessive blinking is often a sign of lying; disrupted eye contact is another. When a child can’t look you in the eye while he’s telling you his version of the truth. It’s because he’s afraid of being caught or ashamed of what he’s done, or both. When he stares into your eyes (and makes his own eyes as large as possible), it’s an attempt to say, “I’m looking right at you so you can see I have nothing to hide.”

Another classic sign of anxiety is a flushed face. Some kids turn red faster and more easily than others, so if your child is prone to blushing when someone looks at him the wrong way, then just your accusation could be enough to make his cheeks and neck burn bright red. However, if he’s red in the face as he’s telling you he’s off to play next door, you might want to check on him in about five minutes. There’s good chance he’s really headed down to creek where he’s been forbidden to play.

Fact

Most kids don’t perfect the art of lying until they’re around middle-school age, and even then, unless they’re completely devoid of emotion, they’re likely to give away one or two nonverbal cues when they’re trying to pull the wool over their parents’ eyes.

De-coding Dress Codes 101

Want to Know If Someone Likes You?

Published on May 21, 2011 by Norman Li, M.B.A., Ph.D. in The Bottom Line

Ever wondered if someone you're attracted to likes you or not, whether someone is your friend or foe, or whether your employees respect you? There's an easy way to find out... try to make them laugh. If the laughter comes easy, the answer is likely yes. If it doesn't, the answer is likely no.

In my bachelor days, I spent many years slowly learning about the ins and outs of the mating market. Somewhere along the way, I noticed one fairly consistent dynamic: whenever a woman I recently met and was talking to would say to me, "You're really funny!", she would always be up for going out with me. In contrast, if I asked someone out who had not laughed at my ever-so-witty remarks, I would often hear about a mysterious boyfriend or busy schedule.

In my first corporate job, I was working on a project team for a few months where I didn't really like my two supervisors all that much. Although I never explicitly told them that, I may have nonetheless communicated my disdain: I didn't laugh at their jokes. To me, they were mostly lame, sometimes offensive. However, the other guys on the project team would always laugh as if the supervisors were highly skilled entertainers. The implications became clear on the day that we all received our performance reviews. While those other guys were smiling at their glowing reviews, I was left wondering whether my subpar appraisal might've been better had I laughed at any of those jokes.

Many years later in grad school (my advisor was Prof. Douglas Kenrick -- now, there's a truly funny guy), I transformed these and many related observations into a psychological theory on humor. I proposed that humor may have evolved as a way to indicate interest toward potential and existing relationships with romantic partners, friends, allies, family members, etc. That is, people initiate humor and gauge the reaction in order to test the social waters. And, just as you're more likely to dab your foot into the pool if you're actually contemplating a swim, you are more likely to be interested in some kind of relationship with a person if you initiate any kind of humor towards them. If the other person is also interested, they should be more likely to perceive you as humorous and respond favorably (laugh), even if you're objectively not all that funny. However, if they're really not interested, then they probably won't find humor in what you say, even if it's your best material.

When we meet new people, it may take a while to figure out whether a relationship (of any kind) is desirable. By initiating humor and responding to it, we can indicate the direction of our interest a little at a time. Similarly, for ongoing relationships, people may have a need to monitor how the relationships are going. Humorous exchange among existing partners or friends allows people to indicate whether they are satisfied or aligned with each other. For example, while working on this theory back in 2002, I noticed one day that my romantic partner was no longer laughing at some of the silly little things that I said or did that used to make her laugh. I told her all about the theory but she insisted that her lack of laughter had nothing to do with dissatisfaction -- she was just worried about other things. Well, a few months later, the relationship crumbled: we separated and never got back together. It turns out that the time when she started not laughing at my jokes was exactly when she started confiding in others.

Humor may serve many functions, but the "interest indicator" theory says that an important one is to indicate relationship interest, whether among potential or ongoing mates, friends, and allies, or among family members. In this way, a humorous exchange feels good because it indicates that the people who we like also like us. On the flipside, a failed humor attempt can sting not necessarily because our joke is being rejected but because we are being rejected.

My colleagues and I ran three studies to test this theory in the mating domain (Li, Griskevicius, Durante, Jonason, Pasisz, & Aumer, 2009). Take a look for more details or listen here. In the meantime, take notice of who makes you laugh and who you are able to make laugh. Just as importantly, beware of those who aren't laughing.

Acing The Interview: How To Score That New Job

Body Language by Telenor Mobile

How to communicate with babies and toddlers

(By pbsparents.org)

Babies don’t always understand words. But you can still communicate with your baby using tone of voice, touch and body language. 

Touch, cuddle and sing softly to your baby. These are first forms of communication. When babies cry, you can reassure them with your presence and a comforting, soothing tone. Babies respond to the emotions you’re communicating through what they see, hear and feel. They react to your sadness, tension, happiness or satisfaction.

Be aware that tone and body language make a difference. When babies hear ‘Stop!’ they’ll sometimes cry. This is because they’re reacting to the sharpness and volume of your command. In the same way, a soft, loving ‘good night’ when you’re tucking your baby into bed will comfort your child because of the soothing tone.

Stay physically connected. This is another way to communicate. Babies like being close to their parents. Holding them next to your body communicates reassurance and comfort. A carrier or sling also allows you to move around and carry on with your life.

Don’t be surprised if your baby cries when you’re on the phone. A baby knows when you’re not paying attention. Baby also knows how to get that attention back. Wailing can come at inconvenient times, but being aware of what’s causing your baby’s reactions might help you stay patient and deal with your baby in the moment.

Turn baby talk into a two-way conversation. Invite responses from your baby. Singing and chanting nursery rhymes are good ways to play with sound. They invite your baby to make a pleasing stream of sounds that eventually lead to talking.

Extend sounds and words to help children develop language skills. If your toddler says ‘Go home’, you might extend this thought by saying, ‘You want to go home. We can leave in a few minutes’.

Even if you’re not sure how much your child understands, talk anyway! Just like holding and kissing, words are an important way of staying in contact with your baby. They’ll help your baby begin to attach feelings and thoughts to sounds.

Play a sound game 

Babies learn to communicate not only through the words you say, but by what you do, how you hold and touch them and respond to their needs. If you hear your baby make a sound like ‘Oh’ you might echo and extend it with an ‘Oh, ah, oh’. Soon you will be having a back-and-forth game of sound.
– Gillian McNamee, PhD, Director of Teacher Education, Erikson Institute

Three Ways to Listen. Remember the Three Monkeys?

You remember the three monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.  Well, we propose an alternative: see to reveal, hear to reveal and speak to reveal.

See To Reveal or Listen With Your Eyes

When you see the person who is speaking, the attendant facial expressions often clarify what you hear. On the other hand, you’ve probably noticed when you are conversing over the phone, that it’s easy to unintentionally talk over the person on the other end.  When the speaker is kidding, you can’t see the twinkling eyes that cue you that the statement is meant as a joke.  Likewise, when the speaker is trying to choke back tears, you miss the strong feeling behind the message.

When you have the opportunity to converse face-to-face, pay attention to the facial expressions, as well as other signals that can be sent by the stance or gesture and posture. If you think listening means only hearing words, you ignore the rich part of the message that comes to you non-verbally. See what you hear.  See what is revealed.

Hear to Reveal or Listen With Your Ears

This sounds obvious, but it’s actually problematic.  Often we hear but don’t listen.  Perhaps background noise inhibits our ability to hear.  Sometimes we hear but we let our minds wander, so we may hear without listening. Sometimes, we psychologically block out messages that we find uncomfortable. We are particularly guilty of hearing words but not the feelings behind the words. We miss the vocal tones and feelings the words express. See how much is revealed when you hear both words and feelings.

Speak to Reveal or Listen With Your Mouth

Listen with your mouth? Doesn’t that sound like an oxymoron?  Weren’t you told to “shut your mouth and listen?” Psychologists Dr. Carl Rogers and Dr. Thomas Gordon developed the concept of “active listening.” That means that after we listen, we respond with words from our mouth that assure the speaker that we understood. It usually encourages the speaker to say more.

Sometimes the words are simple, like “I see,” “Oh,” or “That’s interesting.”  Using our mouths can further the “art of listening” by asking a clarifying question: “Are you saying that…?” or “I think you’re saying . . ., is that right?” It is most powerful when we use our mouths to let the speaker know we’ve heard the feelings behind the words (sometimes only communicated non-verbally), as in “That’s scary, isn’t it?” or “I sense that your uncomfortable about this assignment.”  Speak to the speaker and reveal what you have heard.

That’s it for today.  Try these ideas and give us YOUR thoughts.

Carolyn Shadle, PhD, and John Meyer, PhD

What You Wish You'd Know Before Your Job Interview

Nose Rubbing

You’re on vacation and you’ve just checked into your hotel, only to find that your “super-luxury” accommodations are nothing more than a shoebox filled with plastic furniture. You traipse to the lobby and demand the room the room that you booked- the one you saw on the hotel’s website. While the desk clerk tells you the hotel is sold out and there isn’t a thing she can do for you, she rubs the front of her nose a good up-and-down rub. What’s going on here? Does working for such a shady operation make her nose itch?

That nose rub is a self-touch, a means of claiming the nerves of a person who isn’t being entirely truthful. In this example, there’s a good chance that employee is discouraged from handling out room upgrades… but that doesn’t mean that she can’t do it.

Does the nose rub have any other purpose? Well, sure. As you already read, rubbing the nose can be a response to an actual itch or sense of discomfort. But it can also be a sign that someone’s not being honest with you.

If your date keeps rubbing his nose, what does that mean to you? First, make sure he isn’t allergic to something in the area. If he insists he’s feeling fine, then the excessive touching or rubbing of the nose might indicate he’s feeling uncomfortable. Now, this could be a good thing or a bad thing for you, depending on what’s making him feel uneasy. If he worried because he likes you a lot and he’s sure he’s making a fool of himself, then that’s not so bad. But if he’s squirming in his seat because he can’t wait for the date to end, that’s obviously another story. How can you tell the difference? By reading the rest of his non verbal cues, of course. Is he angling himself toward you and away from you? How his eye contact? Have the two of you touched at all during the course of the evening?

Obscene Gestures From Around The World

Rude hand gestures from all around the world! Be sure to avoid these while abroad.

Leapin's leg

Every spring you see those commercials where people are surprised by a team of folks bearing a million-dollar prize. The winners’ behavior is the most entertaining thing about these ads- people jump, twirl, faint… it’s enough to make you want to practice your own reaction to incredible news just in case someone shows up on your doorstep with an oversized check.

Speaking of leaping limbs, you can see body language in action in traditional ballet. When the story line is happy and light hearted, the dancers prance all over the stage; when the action takes a turn toward tragedy, you’ll see more grounded, down-to-earth moves. You don’t need to know the story behind the dance; you’ll know instinctually what’s happening just by watching the movements of the men and women on stage.

Laughing

What place does laughter have in body language? People either find something amusing and they laugh at it, or they don’t. How can you read into that, other than to say that some people have a more developed (or more immature) sense of humor than others?

A person with a great laugh is generally perceived to be a friendly sort. He’s often the hit of any gathering, simply because people love to hear his chuckle – it makes them feel good because it makes them laugh, too. Now, there’s the crux of laughter – the way it spreads. And it doesn’t spread the way a fad does – people don’t simply copy one another’s laugh attacks, they actually experience real amusement at watching someone else guffaw. Everyone’s experienced this sort of thing, and usually at the absolute worst time.

Perhaps in your fourth-grade classroom, your teacher sat down in her chair and it made a most unflattering squeaking sound. You did your best to ignore it, but then you saw your best friend trying to stifle his own laughter. Pretty soon, the two of you were watching each other trying not to laugh and finding it more difficult to keep a straight face. At this point, the laughter was as much about the laughter itself as it was about the teacher’s indignity. (If only you’d been able to articulate this to the principle).

A person doesn’t laugh often is thought of as being uptight, even if she merely happens to have a very reserved sense of humor. Just as boisterous laughter makes a person appear sociable, a complete absence of laughter can make people think you’re a humorless hermit type. If you don’t laugh much, at least learn to smile at the appropriate times – and make sure that smile appears genuine!

The moral of the story: When people want to know what’s on your mind, they’ll look to your mouth, so give your public what they’re looking for. It’s hard to mistake authentic movements of the mouth, so don’t be surprised if people are suddenly reading your communications a lot more clearly. It’s not that you’ve become a great orator – you’ve just learned to put your message where your mouth is.

All Chewed up

Does your office mate chomp on his pencils from 9 to 5? Some experts might say that he become “ stuck” in this oral phrase of life, that he never found a more mature way to soothe himself and that he continues to chew on his shirt collar, toothpicks, and chunks of paper because he needs this kind of soothing to get through his day.

Now, if you happen to be very close to someone who chews on everything in sight, you might try explaining this concept to him and suggest other ways for him to deal with stress. The problem is that an adult chewer is very set in his ways and he can't really avoid the very thing that he relies on.  His mouth is always right there, after all. If you can get a pencil chewer to switch to gum, that's an acceptable compromise. 

So no one really chews on his own gums, but lots of people chew on their own lips, tongue, and the insides of their cheeks. If you're not one of these people, you might be wondering why anyone would do such a things – doesn't it hurt? Probably not. Chewing on the mouth is usually a way to relieve stress or boredom. Most people don't bite themselves hard enough to cause any harm, though in times of extreme upset, a person might accidentally bite down harder than he intended and draw blood. 

Handy Ways to Get in Trouble

Because the hands are so highly visible and because they do so much “talking” they get a lot of attention. They might help you make some foreign friends, or they might toss you into international hot water. Consider the potential for trouble in these situations:

• You’re meeting with a Japanese client. You hand him your business card. He looks taken aback. Why?

• You walk into an English pub and order two pints. The barkeep boots you out into the street. What have you done?

• You’re vacationing in Greece, watching the women on the beach. You give one particularly beautiful lady the thumps-up sign. She grasps, grabs her boyfriend, and two of them begin marching in your direction. Do they want to make your acquaintance, or should you start running?

• In Brazil, your pedicurist wants to know if she’s done a pleasing job on your toes. You’re on your phone, so you give her the symbol to indicate, “Okay.” She bursts into tears. Was she hoping for a thumbs-up sign?

You’ve just offended four lovely people without realizing it. Your errors were:

• With the Japanese businessman, perhaps you flippantly tossed the card his way. The Japanese usually pass business cards with both hands. When they accept them, it’s also with both hands, and they treat them as though they’re a gift.

• In the pub, you made the mistake of ordering by holding up two fingers with your palm facing towards you. This is an insult, akin to flashing your middle finger, so it’s no wonder you were bounced out into the night.

• Your intended friendly gesture on the beach carried just the opposite message; thumbs-up means “Up yours!” in Greece (and in Western Africa, South America, Iran, Russia, and Sardinia).

• In Brazil (and Greece, Turkey, Italy, and Russia), the sign Americans use to mean “Okay” is actually a grave insult. Better start gushing about how your toes have never looked better, or this girl might never return to the salon.

Are all of your favourite hand signals off limits overseas? Of course not! You can walk around London and Paris all day long flashing people the thumbs-up sign. They may find you highly irritating, but no one’s likely to take great offense at your gesture.