Psychology

Psychology: Body Language

By Madison Nef

In this day and age, verbal communication plays a large part in our interactions with each other. However, studies have shown that this verbal communication makes up ONLY 7% of our entire communication perception. The other 93% is given through tone of voice, facial expression, gestures, posture, and many other types of body language. This is why body language is so crucial to learn, use, and be able to understand CORRECTLY.

However, while it seems simple… body language is actually quite complex and is often confused when people with little to no experience try to interpret it. Nervousness can easily be passed off as confidence, and lies as the truth when you know what you’re doing. However, even professional fakers cannot hide how they truly feel as EVERYTHING is conveyed in body language, whether you realize it or not. In the video I watched, many popular public figures were used as examples.

Throughout it, I learned to detect nervousness and lies. While I learned a great deal more from the video, I’d like to just touch upon my two favorite topics covered in the video in a bit more detail below.

Signs of nervousness

Some of the key signs of being nervous are quite obvious. The first sign is supporting yourself. If you’re a public speaker, you may be seen gripping the podium tightly with both hands, with your arms locked and pushing you away from the audience to which you are speaking. This shows that you’re defensive, since you are pushing yourself away from the audience.

The second sign that points toward nervousness is the “self-touch” method. This method is signified when you hold your hands/wrist behind your back, or maybe hold your upper arm while talking. If you have high anxiety, you may also be slowly rubbing your hand or arm with your thumb, almost reassuring yourself that everything will be ok and that you can make it through whatever is stressing you.

The third and perhaps most important factor that shows nervousness is how you react at the end of whatever you end up saying. This holds true for anyone; not just public speakers. Those who back or shy away from conversation after saying what is needed to say are often-times nervous, and/or lying. They will fold their arms, take a few steps back, or even purely walk away without another word. Yeesh. This leads us to our second body language:

Lies and how to detect them

Liars are some of the easiest to detect… in my opinion. However, since lies are so common in pop culture and current-day media, apparently not enough people can spot them. Some of these I learned from the video… but some I have learned elsewhere. Here is a neat little list of things people tend to do when they are lying.

·        Failing to make direct eye contact. People who are lying have trouble maintaining eye contact with the person they are lying to because they know it’s wrong.

·        Fidgeting. People who are lying will often times nervously move their hands or shuffle their feet in a subconscious effort to distract the person from the apparent lie.

·        Lack of shaking the head. When someone lies, they will sometimes shake their heads no while saying it because they know that they’re speaking and untruth. On the other hand, if a liar tells the truth about something such as saying “No, I didn’t do that” and shakes their head in agreement with what they are saying, but FAILS to shake their head at another negative statement… the statement they failed to shake their head at was a lie.

Aside from that… I learned a lot more from the video… but those key points were what I really found to be useful. I will DEFINITELY use them in life… especially with my friends. Very good. This is why I take such an interest in psychology; it is one thing that all humans have in common and is something that can be used no matter the gender, race, language, ANYTHING of a person. It is even common in most animals… it is universal and will never be irrelevant.

Maddie