BODY language is mostly unconscious – and highly important to how we function. For example, did you know that using body language correctly can help you with surgery? And your ability to pack the boot of your car with even more stuff?
Body language is the subtle (or not so subtle), often unconscious moving of our body parts in response to our thoughts, emotions and experiences. It encompasses the gestures we make as we speak, the angle we lean our bodies at, the way we cross our legs – and a whole host of other large and small movements.
I have heard about this before…
Popular literature often refers to Mehrabain’s research from 1967 that stated that in communication words account for 7% of the message, the tone for 38% and body language for 55%.
Unfortunately, that is just misquoted research and only true for very specific situations where you are liking or not liking something based on one word communication (see panel).
There is, however, significant research that demonstrates the importance of body language in communication.
We can roughly divide body language into three different areas:
- facial expressions;
- gestures; and
- whole body posture.
Facial expressions
When people speak with each other, they will spontaneously synchronise their facial expressions. This is often called emotional contagion and refers to different classes of consciously seen and “unseen” stimuli.
When pictures of bodily or facial expressions were presented either to the intact or blind visual field of two patients with unilateral destruction of the visual cortex and ensuing blindness, they responded faster to unseen stimulus, indicating that emotional contagion occurs also when the triggering stimulus cannot be consciously perceived. This supports the theory that the majority of synchronising facial expressions happen on an unconscious level.
Gestures
Gestures are the hand movements we make while we think or we speak. There is even a name for the gestures we use when we are in a silent, non-communicative, problem-solving situation – e.g. when we are looking at the dog and planning the surgical approach we want to take or packing that aforementioned car – which is co-thought gestures.
Interesting research has demonstrated how people who gesture while they think or speak have a higher solution rate for solving spatial problems.
Results indicated that when people have difficulty in solving spatial visualisation problems, they spontaneously produce gestures to help them, and gestures not only improve the performance but also become internalised, so with time the number of gestures reduces while leaving the ability to solve the problems intact.
So next time you need to think about how best to rotate an organ, fit a piece of furniture through the door or fit everything into your wardrobe, try standing back and wave your arms around in a purposeful fashion – you might be surprised at the results.
On a more serious note, gestures also assist and support the words we speak. Research with autistic adolescents3 demonstrated that when people tell a story where their gestures are “off” in respect to timing, the story comes across as less clear and engaging. Gestures also assist us in interpreting facial expressions and correctly identify emotions.
Whole body posture
Similarly to the research done on facial expressions, work with patients with cortical blindness demonstrated that even body posture can be picked up “unseen” – that the perception of body posture registers in distinctly different parts of the brain depending on the underlying emotion the body is signalling.
What does this mean?
Research has clearly demonstrated an unconscious, non-vision related effect of both facial expressions and whole body posture and supporting effects from gestures. What this means is that body language has a powerful effect on us – whether we are conscious of it or not.
Even when we are not paying attention or when we are caught up in
something else, the body language of the people around us will have the potential to affect us and provide us with information.
Have you ever noticed that something was “off” about one of your colleagues or your partner? Or had someone else ask you if you were OK on a day where you were deep in your thoughts? T
he likelihood is that you and they have picked up on the unconscious clues that we both send out and perceive. We can call it intuition – or we can recognise it as a brain-activation on a different level.
Once we understand the power body language has, we can start to consider how we can use body language consciously to help us in our everyday interactions, with partners, team members and clients.
- Next month, we will look more closely at using body language consciously – until then, it might be interesting to start noticing what you are already picking up….
- Tamietto, M. et al. (2009) Unseen facial and bodily expressions trigger fast emotional reactions. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 106 (42):17,661-6
- Chu, M. and Kita, S. (2011) The nature of gestures’ beneficial role in spatial problem solving. J Exp Psychol Gen 140 (1):102-116.
- deMarchena, A. and Eigsti, I. M. (2010) Conversational gestures in autism spectrum disorders: asynchrony but not decreased frequency. Autism Res 3 (6): 311-322.
- De Gelder, B. and Hadjikhani, N. (2006) Non-conscious recognition of emotional body language. Neuroreport 17 (6): 583-586
