What are these faces saying?

How good are you at reading faces?

Dogs read faces just like babies

New research published in Current Biology reveals what many dog lovers already knew - Dogs can read faces just like babies. In particular, dogs rely on more than just verbal cues to communicate and anticipate our desires.

Jozsef Topal, a researcher at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and co-author of the study stated, "Dogs are receptive to human communication in a manner that was previously attributed only to humans.

29 canines were included in the study that looked at different aspects of communication. They were shown videos of a woman who first had verbal communication along with eye contact, then verbal communication without eye contact. The results showed that dogs followed the woman's gaze only when she looked directly at them and not when she just had verbal communication without eye contact.

What do you "read" in Newt Romney's Face?

Take a look at these faces.  What do you see?  Is it Confidence? Concern? Annoyance?  Arrogance?  Contempt?

Reading Proactive and Passive from Demeanor and Language

I've talked in earlier posts about reading people by the words they use. One of the ways we do this is by recognizing mental filters from language. Mental filters (also known as meta programs in NLP) are preferences or tendencies. I tend to be Passive, while my husband Mike generally operates at the Proactive side of this filter continuum.

How do you read or recognize this particular aspect of personality?  Sentence structure provides us with some interesting clues. Proactive people typically use short, direct sentences with an active verb structure. I made. I ran. I wrote. Passive people tend to use passive verbs and longer, often convoluted sentences. Mike says, "I read minds."  Pam says, "I have been helping people learn how to read and connect for more than two decades." See the difference?

Passive people also use passive words like thinking, deciding, planning, understanding. Notice the lack of action in those words.  They are "thinking about it" words.

Proactives are also active, meaning they tend to move about a lot, while Passives are more likely to stay stationary. Proactives tend to lean forward, while Passives tend to lean back.

So now that you know how to recognize Proactives and Passives, what can you do with that knowledge?  If you're selling or trying to convince a Passive to do something, what do you think they might need to do before they're ready to buy?  Think about it!  Understand it!  How about the Proactive?  They are ready to jump right in and get it done, so the last thing you want to do is overload them with details or steps that get in the way of them taking action.

What about Proactives and Passives in the workplace? Who would you want in a dangerous front-line situation where you had to react quickly?  Who would you want in a job that required lots of research, planning and design?

In our classes we often use the Ready-Aim-Fire analogy to distinguish between the two. The Proactive version of this is - Fire! The Passive variant is Aim-Adjust the site, Aim, Re-adjust, Re-think the trajectory, Redesign the site.....

Tight-lipped Boehner speaks volumes

This clip of House Minority (now Majority) Leader John Boehner was the cover photo for a Wall Street Journal video about yesterday's midterm elections. Mr. Boehner shows a "thumbs up" but it seems his tight-lipped mouth has something else to say. His gesture and his facial expression are incongruent. When this is the case, trust the face to tell you how the person really feels.

I'll talk more on what tight lips "say" in a subsequent post.

The Best of Body Reading

I've just finished reading Joe Navarro's book - What Every Body is Saying. I confess that when I first picked it up I wasn't expecting much, not because of the author, but because there are so many crappy books on body language out there. I was pleasantly surprised and I highly encourage you to pick up a copy of Joe's book.

Navarro's work is based on the reactions of the limbic brain and the freeze-fight-flight response. The way we sit or stand, what we do with our hands, our feet, our face, all signal where we are on the comfort-discomfort scale. Discomfort doesn't necessarily mean lying, but it does offer up some important clues.

Here are a couple of interesting points from the book:

• People tend to distance themselves from those with whom they feel uncomfortable. They'll lean away, point their feet away or put something between themselves and the other person. They'll create artificial barriers with either their shoulders and arms or with inanimate objects in front of them.

• Pacifying behaviors, such as rubbing of the forehead or touching the neck or cheek are automatic responses to the brain's "Please help me feel comfortable again" request. The brain asks and the hands respond.

• When you cross one leg in front of the other while standing, you reduce your balance significantly. If there was a threat you wouldn't be able to respond quickly. For this reason the limbic brain allows us to perform this behavior only when we feel comfortable or confident.

• Confident and higher status people claim as much physical territory as possible (with both their body and their things), while less confident people tend to shrink.

• The human brain is programmed to sense the slightest hand and finger movement. In fact, our brains give a disproportionate amount of attention to the wrists, palms, fingers and hands. Hiding your hands creates a negative impression, makes people suspicious.

• When individuals carry their thumbs high, it is a sign they think highly of themselves.

• Research tells us liars tend to gesture less, touch less and move their arms and legs less than honest people (Vrij, 2003). This is consistent with limbic reactions. In the face of a threat (for example having a lie detected, we move less or freeze so as not to attract attention.

Easier to fake a smile than originally thought

For years psychologists believed that a real smile was signaled by upturned lips and crinkly eyes. This genuine smile is named after the French physician Duchenne, who passed electrical currents through live subjects and took photos of their weirdly contorted faces.

It was believed that fewer than 20% could fake a smile that would trick others because we don't have voluntary control over the muscles around our eyes which signal the Duchenne smile.

But now it seems that exactly the opposite is true. Writing in a recent issue of the journal Emotion, Krumhuber and Manstead found that 83% of the people in their study produce fake smiles that others mistook for the real thing in photographs.

The researchers also explored how people perceived genuine and fake smiles when they saw videos rather than just static pictures. Then it emerged that fake smiles were easier to spot, but the supposedly crucial crinkling around the eyes didn't help much. Instead, telling a real from fake smile relied more on dynamic processes such as how long people hold it, the symmetry of the expression and whether conflicting emotions are communicated by other facial areas.

So the Duchenne smile has taken a bit of bashing in this research, which suggests that most people can fake crinkly eyes. Not only that but the crinkly eyes aren't as crucial for us in judging the sincerity of a smile as other factors. Rather than just the crinkly eyes, it's the whole movement of the face which tells a tale either of deception or of genuine, felt emotion.

Stay tuned for more on facial symmetry.....

How to read people by the words they use

You can learn a lot about a person by simply listening to the words they use.

For purposes of this discussion, let's use the four personality types: Driver, Analytical, Amiable and Expressive. Based simply on the words I'm using in this post, what type do you think I am? OK, I'll give you some more information, because I want you to be able to figure this out on your own. You may need to think through it a couple of times, but I know you'll make sense of it. The mere fact that you're at this site and reading this post means you're curious and you want to learn more.

Figure it out yet? OK, I'll give you a way to compare. Let's imagine that you are interviewing my husband and co-author Michael and me on the same topic. Let's use our book Face Values as an example. You ask this question:

How did you choose this topic to write about?

Pam: After studying NLP and researching different Myers-Briggs and other personality profiling programs, we realized that although each of these programs had merit, there were serious flaws in the logic and serious usability issues. All of them required people to take a test in order for you to know what the other person's personality type is and that simply doesn't make sense if you're one-on-one with someone trying to figure them out.

Michael: I wanted to be more effective communicating with people. I wanted to figure them out. I wanted to understand. I wanted to connect. The psychology excites me. It's hard to fun with people you don't understand.

See the differences in response? Not only in the words used but also in the sentence structure. Mine is long and convoluted, Michael's is short and sweet. Michael is "I" focused, I am "thing" focused (programs, processes, etc.).

Now let's look at the words. Here is a summary of the words and phrases I used:

figure out
think through
make sense
study
know
logic
curious

Now let's look at Michael's words

I (I want to.... I am.....)
understand
communicate
connect
excite
fun

Now can you identify which type each of us is? One of us is Analytical, the other is Expressive.

If you've enjoyed this post consider reading a copy of our book Face Values: How to read people and connect with them in less than 3 minutes.

How real recollection differs from a fabrication

Aldert Vrij of the University of Portsmouth in England uses a method called Criteria-Based Content Analysis to help police identify whether the retelling of an incident is truthful. The method is based on research indicating that a story of a real recollection differs from a fabrication in specific ways.

According to Vrij, actual experiences have the following properties:

1. They are coherent and consistent but generally not in chronological order.
2. They contain a lot of detail and include unusual and superfluous elements.
3. They depict personal interactions and reiterate speech and conversation.
4. They describe feelings and thoughts - the narrator's and in many cases those the storyteller ascribes to the perpetrator.
5. They contain spontaneous corrections, the admission of memory gaps and doubts about the believability of the story.

How to Recognize a Narcissist

There were and continue to be no shortage of verbal assaults on the good character of Barack Obama. Most are so absurd as to not even merit rebuttal. One that did catch my attention recently, however, was an email that claimed Mr. Obama was the poster boy for narcissism. I couldn't let this one pass, primarily because nothing is further from the truth. In fact, Obama displays far fewer narcissist tendencies than most of his political counterparts. Let's take a look at some of the clues that help us recognize a narcissist and you can judge for yourself.

Big, loud and braggadocios. The narcissist displays an air of superiority and haughtiness in both posture and speech. His body language and verbal language are typically loud, big and braggadocios. His speech is peppered with "I", "my", "myself", and "mine". No matter how he describes himself (which he does quite a lot) it is always in the extreme - richer, smarter, more creative more successful and so on. If he has struggled in life, it will always be a bigger and more profound struggle than anyone else.

Only interested in self. The narcissist likes to talk about himself and only about himself. He's not interested in others or what they have to say, unless he perceives them as helpful to him getting what he wants. He is impatient, easily bored, and has strong attention deficits – unless and until he is the topic of discussion. He can become disdainful, even angry, if he feels that others are intruding on his time and space.

Expects special treatment. The narcissist expects and often demands special treatment. To be served first, to pay less or get more, to talk directly to authority figures (and not to their assistants or secretaries), to be granted special payment terms, to enjoy custom tailored arrangements.

Is very class and rank conscious. The narcissist sees himself at the top of the food chain and also sees a very defined pecking order. He tends to react with rage and indignation when denied his wishes and if treated equally with others whom he deems inferior. Ever witness someone in a restaurant or shop vehemently dress down the waiter or sales clerk in front of everyone? That's your narcissist.

Jekyll and Hyde - Idealizes or Humiliates. The narcissist is not without compliments for those he sets his sites on. He can flatter, admire, woo, even idealize. But, like most things with the narcissist the extremes are always in play. His admiration is over the top, exaggerated, overdone, and therefore it's sincerity questionable. He can turn it on and off very quickly. Just watch the change when the target leaves the room. Or when the target rejects him. He can move from adoring to hostile in a moments notice. And the hostile jabs will be equally exaggerated and over the top.

All hat and no cattle. Ever been around someone who claims to be in the know on virtually every topic discussed? The person who's mastered every trade, climbed every mountain, and is friends with every powerful person? That's the narcissist. The narcissist never admits to ignorance in any field. He would have you believe he can do and already has mastered everything there is to master. But it's all show and no substance. One of the most effective methods of exposing a narcissist is by trying to delve deeper. With just a little bit of digging you can quickly expose the narcissist.

Impersonal. The Narcissist avoids emotions and emotional issues, preferring to intellectualize, rationalize and detach. Narcissists often refer to themselves in third person.

Lack of empathy. Think about someone you know who is naturally empathetic, able to connect with different kinds of people in a profound and meaningful way. Now imagine the opposite kind of person. That's a narcissist. A narcissist is unable (or certainly unwilling) to get out of themselves and into the lives and emotions of other people.