Decoding the Silent Language: A Comprehensive Guide to Body Language Learning
People communicate through many forms: verbally, using sign language, or communication devices. However, a significant portion of our communication is nonverbal, conveyed through body language. This article explores the multifaceted world of body language, delving into its components, its impact on communication, and how to improve your understanding and utilization of these silent cues.
The Essence of Body Language
Body language is the use of physical behavior, expressions, and mannerisms to communicate nonverbally, often done instinctively rather than consciously. Whether you’re aware of it or not, when you interact with others, you’re continuously giving and receiving wordless signals. All of your nonverbal behaviors-the gestures you make, your posture, your tone of voice, how much eye contact you make-send strong messages. In fact, it’s not the words that you use but your nonverbal cues or body language that speak the loudest. They can put people at ease, build trust, and draw others towards you, or they can offend, confuse, and undermine what you’re trying to convey. These messages don’t stop when you stop speaking either.
In some instances, what comes out of your mouth and what you communicate through your body language may be two totally different things. If you say one thing, but your body language says something else, your listener will likely feel that you’re being dishonest. If you say “yes” while shaking your head no, for example. When faced with such mixed signals, the listener has to choose whether to believe your verbal or nonverbal message. Your nonverbal communication cues-the way you listen, look, move, and react-tell the person you’re communicating with whether or not you care, if you’re being truthful, and how well you’re listening. When your nonverbal signals match up with the words you’re saying, they increase trust, clarity, and rapport.
Components of Nonverbal Communication
Nonverbal communication is a rapidly flowing back-and-forth process that requires your full focus on the moment-to-moment experience. If you’re planning what you’re going to say next, checking your phone, or thinking about something else, you’re almost certain to miss nonverbal cues and not fully understand the subtleties of what’s being communicated. Several key components contribute to body language.
Facial Expressions
The human face is extremely expressive, able to convey countless emotions without saying a word. And unlike some forms of nonverbal communication, facial expressions are universal. Look at their eyes and mouth for cues. Are they looking away a lot, letting their eyes wander as you speak?
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Body Movement and Posture
Consider how your perceptions of people are affected by the way they sit, walk, stand, or hold their head. The way you move and carry yourself communicates a wealth of information to the world.
Gestures
Gestures are woven into the fabric of our daily lives. You may wave, point, beckon, or use your hands when arguing or speaking animatedly, often expressing yourself with gestures without thinking. However, the meaning of some gestures can be very different across cultures. While the “OK” sign made with the hand, for example, usually conveys a positive message in English-speaking countries, it’s considered offensive in countries such as Germany, Russia, and Brazil.
Eye Contact
Since the visual sense is dominant for most people, eye contact is an especially important type of nonverbal communication. The way you look at someone can communicate many things, including interest, affection, hostility, or attraction.
Touch
We communicate a great deal through touch. Is there any physical contact? Is it appropriate to the situation?
Space
Have you ever felt uncomfortable during a conversation because the other person was standing too close and invading your space? We all have a need for physical space, although that need differs depending on the culture, the situation, and the closeness of the relationship.
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Voice
It’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it. When you speak, other people “read” your voice in addition to listening to your words.
The Significance of Congruence
It’s crucial that your nonverbal signals align with your spoken words. For example, they may instruct you on how to sit a certain way, steeple your fingers, or shake hands in order to appear confident or assert dominance. But the truth is that such tricks aren’t likely to work (unless you truly feel confident and in charge). That’s because you can’t control all of the signals you’re constantly sending about what you’re really thinking and feeling. However, that doesn’t mean that you have no control over your nonverbal cues. For example, if you disagree with or dislike what someone’s saying, you may use negative body language to rebuff the person’s message, such as crossing your arms, avoiding eye contact, or tapping your feet.
What you communicate through your body language and nonverbal signals affects how others see you, how well they like and respect you, and whether or not they trust you. Unfortunately, many people send confusing or negative nonverbal signals without even knowing it.
Common Pitfalls in Nonverbal Communication
Some people struggle to connect with others because their body language sends the wrong message.
Jack believes he gets along great with his colleagues at work, but if you were to ask any of them, they would say that Jack is “intimidating” and “very intense.” Rather than just look at you, he seems to devour you with his eyes. And if he takes your hand, he lunges to get it and then squeezes so hard it hurts.
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Arlene is attractive and has no problem meeting eligible men, but she has a difficult time maintaining a relationship for longer than a few months. Arlene is funny and interesting, but even though she constantly laughs and smiles, she radiates tension. Her shoulders and eyebrows are noticeably raised, her voice is shrill, and her body is stiff. Being around Arlene makes many people feel anxious and uncomfortable.
Ted thought he had found the perfect match when he met Sharon, but Sharon wasn’t so sure. Ted is good looking, hardworking, and a smooth talker, but seemed to care more about his thoughts than Sharon’s. When Sharon had something to say, Ted was always ready with wild eyes and a rebuttal before she could finish her thought. This made Sharon feel ignored, and soon she started dating other men. Ted loses out at work for the same reason.
These smart, well-intentioned people struggle in their attempt to connect with others.
Enhancing Your Body Language Skills
Improving your understanding and use of body language involves several key steps:
Managing Stress
Stress compromises your ability to communicate. When you’re stressed out, you’re more likely to misread other people, send confusing or off-putting nonverbal signals, and lapse into unhealthy knee-jerk patterns of behavior. And remember: emotions are contagious. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by stress, take a time out. Take a moment to calm down before you jump back into the conversation. The fastest and surest way to calm yourself and manage stress in the moment is to employ your senses-what you see, hear, smell, taste, and touch-or through a soothing movement. By viewing a photo of your child or pet, smelling a favorite scent, listening to a certain piece of music, or squeezing a stress ball, for example, you can quickly relax and refocus.
Developing Emotional Awareness
In order to send accurate nonverbal cues, you need to be aware of your emotions and how they influence you. You also need to be able to recognize the emotions of others and the true feelings behind the cues they are sending. Many of us are disconnected from our emotions-especially strong emotions such as anger, sadness, fear-because we’ve been taught to try to shut off our feelings. But while you can deny or numb your feelings, you can’t eliminate them. They’re still there and they’re still affecting your behavior. By developing your emotional awareness and connecting with even the unpleasant emotions, though, you’ll gain greater control over how you think and act.
Observing Inconsistencies
Once you’ve developed your abilities to manage stress and recognize emotions, you’ll start to become better at reading the nonverbal signals sent by others. Pay attention to inconsistencies. Nonverbal communication should reinforce what is being said. Is the person saying one thing, but their body language conveying something else?
Considering the Whole Picture
Look at nonverbal communication signals as a group. Don’t read too much into a single gesture or nonverbal cue. Consider all of the nonverbal signals you are receiving, from eye contact to tone of voice and body language. Be sure to teach the big picture - someone may be standing with their hands on their hips, which alone may seem like an angry stance, but they may have a smile on their face and have relaxed posture. Taking these four components into account will help your students read and understand their peers’ body language.
Trusting Your Instincts
Don’t dismiss your gut feelings. Eye contact - Is the person making eye contact? Facial expression - What is their face showing? Posture and gesture - Is their body relaxed or stiff and immobile? Timing and place - Is there an easy flow of information back and forth?
Body Language in Education
Watson’s educational consultants created a social skills module for educators to use when teaching this topic. A pre and post lesson assessment is included in each lesson. permission of Watson. Body language is very important for both listening and speaking. It gives a lot of information to others about how you are feeling, if you are concentrating and if you are interested, among other things. Non-verbal communication can make up a high proportion of what you communicate. Clearly body language is something you should be very aware of when you are speaking to other people.
Body Language Cues: ESL (Eye Blocking, Shoulder Shrugging, and Lip-Locking)
Janine Driver, author of You Say More Than You Think, outlines three vital body language cues we often see in daily interactions--eye blocking, shoulder shrugging, and lip-locking (ESL)--as ones for us to particularly pay attention to. According to Driver, when someone who’s typically comfortable holding eye contact uses their hand to block their eyes, this indicates there is sensitive information they’re trying to protect or something they don’t want you to see. Eye blocking could be a sign they’re not ready to tread the vulnerable waters of the subject matter, or feeling overwhelmed or ashamed. Clocking this cue is an opportunity to pause the conversation, gently bring attention to their distress, and offer a chance to open up more or provide a safe exit strategy. Something like, “Hey, if this is too much, it’s okay. I only want you to share what you’re comfortable with.
In Driver’s observations, shoulder shrugging is a sign of uncertainty. Someone’s words may be positive or agreeable on the surface, “That restaurant sounds great” or “No, no. Noticing this small cue is a chance to offer additional options, more time, or to reassure them they don’t have to do anything they don’t want to.
Driver shares a story of how she noticed her mother lip-locking in response to the simple question, “How are you?” one day. When her mom replied, “Fine!” but her lips disappeared, Driver noticed. She coaxed her mother into answering more honestly, creating a moment where her mom received permission to share her true feelings. Driver’s prompting led her mom to open up, sobbing as she shared how overwhelmingly anxious she felt about a pending medical diagnosis.
The Embodied Nature of Communication
Spoken language is an innate ability of the human being and represents the most widespread mode of social communication. The ability to share concepts, intentions and feelings, and also to respond to what others are feeling/saying is crucial during social interactions. A growing body of evidence suggests that language evolved from manual gestures, gradually incorporating motor acts with vocal elements. In this evolutionary context, the human mirror mechanism (MM) would permit the passage from “doing something” to “communicating it to someone else.” In this perspective, the MM would mediate semantic processes being involved in both the execution and in the understanding of messages expressed by words or gestures.
Thus, the recognition of action related words would activate somatosensory regions, reflecting the semantic grounding of these symbols in action information. Here, the role of the sensorimotor cortex and in general of the human MM on both language perception and understanding is addressed, focusing on recent studies on the integration between symbolic gestures and speech. All these points provide evidences in favor of an integrated body/verbal communication system mediated by the mirror mechanism (MM).
It is well known that our thoughts are verbally expressed by symbols that have little or no physical relationship with objects, actions and feelings to which they refer. Knowing how linguistic symbols may have been associated with aspects of the real world represents one of the thorniest issues about the study of language and its evolution. According to the classical “amodal approach,” the concepts are expressed in a symbolic format. The core assumption is that meanings of words are like a formal language, composed of arbitrary symbols, which represent aspects of the word; to understand a sentence, words are led back symbols that represent their meaning. In other terms, there would be an arbitrary relationship between the word and its referent.
Neuropsychological studies provide interesting evidence for the amodal nature of concept. In Semantic Dementia, for example, a brain damage in the temporal and adjacent areas results in an impairment of conceptual processing. In contrast, the embodied approaches to language propose that conceptual knowledge is grounded in body experience and in the sensorimotor systems that are involved in forming and retrieving semantic knowledge. These theories are supported by the discovery of mirror neurons (MNs), identified in the ventral pre-motor area (F5) of the macaque.
MNs would be at the basis of both action comprehension and language understanding, constituting the neural substrate from which more sophisticated forms of communication evolved. The MM is based on the process of motor resonance, which mediates action comprehension: when we observe someone performing an action, the visual input of the observed motor act reaches and activates the same fronto-parietal networks recruited during the execution of the same action, permitting a direct access to the own motor representation. This mechanism was hypothesized to be extended to language comprehension, namely when we listen a word or a sentence related to an action (e.g., “grasping an apple”), allowing an automatic access to action/word semantics.
The sensorimotor activation in response to language processing was demonstrated by a large amount of neurophysiological studies. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies demonstrated that seeing action verbs activated similar motor and premotor areas as when the participants actually move the effector associated with these verbs. This “somatotopy” is one of the major argument supporting the idea that concrete concepts are grounded in action-perception systems of the brain. However, one of the major criticism to the embodied theory is the idea that motor system plays an epiphenomenal role during language processing.
To address this point, further neurophysiological studies using time-resolved techniques such as high-density electroencephalography (EEG) or magnetoencefalography (MEG) indicated that the motor system is involved in an early time window corresponding to lexical-semantic access, supporting a causal relationship between motor cortex activation and action verb comprehension. Another outstanding question is raised by the controversial data about the processing of non-action language (i.e., “abstract” concepts). According to the Dual Coding Theory, concrete words are represented in both linguistic and sensorimotor-based systems, while abstract words would be represented only in the linguistic one.
Neuroimaging studies support this idea showing that the processing of abstract words is associated with higher activations in the left IFG and the superior temporal cortex, areas commonly involved in linguistic processing. The Context Availability Hypothesis instead argues that abstract concepts have increased contextual ambiguity compared to concrete concepts. While concrete words would have direct relations with the objects or actions they refer to, abstract words can present multiple meanings and they needed more time to be understood. This assumes that, they can be disambiguated if inserted in a “concrete context” which provides elements to narrow their meanings.
Researches on action metaphors (e.g., “grasp an idea”) that are involved in both action and thinking, found an engagement of sensory-motor systems even when action language is figurative. In a recent TMS study, De Marco et al. tested the effect of context in modulating motor cortex excitability during abstract words semantic processing. The presentation of a congruent manual symbolic gesture as prime stimulus increased hand M1 excitability in the earlier phase of semantic processing and speeded word comprehension.
One of the major contribution in support of embodied cognition theory derived from the hypothesis of the motor origin of spoken language. Comparative neuroanatomical and neurophysiological studies sustain that F5 area in macaques is cytoarchitectonically comparable to Brodmann area 44 in the human brain (IFG), which is part of Broca’s area. This area would be active not only in human action observation but also in language understanding, transforming heard phonemes in the corresponding motor representations of the same sound. In this way, similarly to what happen during action comprehension, the MM would directly link the sender and the receiver of a message (manual or vocal) in a communicative context.
Gentilucci and Corballis showed numerous empirical evidence that support the importance of the motor system in the origin of language. Specifically, the execution/observation of a grasp with the hand would activate a command to grasp with the mouth and vice-versa. On the basis of these results the authors proposed that language evolved from arm postures that were progressively integrated with mouth articulation postures by mean of a double hand-mouth command system.
Nowadays, during a face-to-face conversation, spoken language and communicative motor acts operate together in a synchronized way. The majority of gestures are produced in association with speech: in this way the message assumes a specific meaning. Nevertheless, a particular type of gesture, the symbolic gesture (i.e., OK or STOP), can be delivered in utter silence because it replaces the formalized, linguistic component of the expression present in speech. A process of conventionalization is responsible for transforming meaningless hand movements that accompany verbal communication (i.e., gesticulations, McNeill, 1992) into symbolic gestures, as well as string of letters may be transformed into a meaningful word. Symbolic gestures therefore represent the conjunction point between manual actions and spoken language.
In line with the embodiment view of language, the theory of integrated communication systems (McNeill, 1992, 2000; Kita, 2000) is centered on the idea that gestures and spoken language comprehension and production are managed by a unique control system. At the opposite, the theory of independent communication systems (Krauss and Hadar, 1999; Barrett et al., 2005) claims that gestures and speech can work separately and are not necessarily integrated each other. Communication with gestures is described as an auxiliary system, evolved in parallel to language, that can be used when the primary system (language) is difficult to use or not intact. In this view, gesture-speech interplay is regarded as a semantic integration of amodal representations, taking place only after processing of the verbal and gestural messages have occurred separately.
This hypothesis is primary supported by neuropsychological cases which reported that abnormal skilled learned purposive movements (limb apraxia) and language disorders (aphasia) are anatomically and functionally dissociable. However, limb apraxia often co-occuring with Broca’s Aphasia and difficulty in gesture-speech semantic integration was reported in aphasic patients.
Evidence in favor of the integrated system theory came from a series of behavioral and neurophysiological studies that have investigated the functional relationship between gestures and spoken language. The first evidence of the reciprocal influence of gestures and words during their production came from the study by Bernardis and Gentilucci (2006), who showed how the vocal spectra measured during the pronunciation of one word (i.e., “hello”) was modified by the simultaneous production of the corresponding in meaning gesture (and vice-versa, the kinematics resulted inhibited).
Neurophysiological studies showed controversial evidences about the core brain areas involved in gestures and words integration, that include different neural substrates as M1 (De Marco et al., 2015, 2018) IFG, MTG and superior temporal gyrus/sulcus (STG/S) (Willems and Hagoort, 2007; Straube et al., 2012; Dick et al., 2014; Özyürek, 2014; Fabbri-Destro et al., 2015). However, IFG virtual lesion showed to disrupt gesture-speech integration effect, in accordance with the idea of human Broca’s area (and so the mirror circuit) as the core neural substrate of action, gesture and language processing and interplay.
In conclusion, a good amount of results evidenced a reciprocal influence between gesture and speech during their comprehension and production, showing overlapping activation of the MM neural systems (IFG) involved in action, gesture and language processing and interplay (see Table 1). Speech evolved from arm postures that were progressively integrated with mouth gestures and vocalization by mean of a double hand-mouth command system. Gestures and speech evolved independently. They are functionally dissociated and processed separately, or eventually integrated as amodal concepts).
The majority of studies that investigated the neural mechanism of hand gesture processing focused on the overlapping activations of words and gestures during their semantic comprehension and integration. However, it was shown that, gestural stimuli can convey more than semantic information, since they can also express emotional message. A first example came from the study of Shaver et al. (1987) which tried to identify behavioral prototype related to emotions (e.g., fist clenching is involved in the anger prototype). However, beyond hand gestures investigations, emerging research about the role of motor system in emotion perception dealt with the study of mechanisms underlying body postures and facial gestures perception.
Of note, specific connections with limbic circuit were found for mouth MNs, evidencing the existence of a distinct pathway linked to the mouth/face motor control and communication/emotions encoding system. These neural evidences are in favor of a role of MM in the evolution and processing of emotional communication through the mouth/facial postures. Nevertheless, a limitation emerges about experimental protocols which studied language in isolation, without considering the complexity of social communication. In other words, language should be considered always in relation to some backgrounds of a person mood, emotions, actions and events from which the things we are saying derive their meanings.
tags: #body #language #learning
