The Definitive Book of Body Language - Barbara Pease [9]
So how did we do? Did we read you accurately? Studies show that the information in this “reading” is more than 80 percent accurate for any person reading it. Throw in an excellent ability to read body-language postures, facial expressions, and a person's other twitches and movements, plus dim lighting, weird music, and a stick of incense, and we guarantee you can even amaze the dog! We won't encourage you to become a fortune-teller, but you'll soon be able to read others as accurately as they do.
Inborn, Genetic, or Learned Culturally?
When you cross your arms on your chest, do you cross left over right or right over left? Most people cannot confidently describe which way they do this until they try it. Cross your arms on your chest right now and then try to quickly reverse the position. Where one way feels comfortable, the other feels completely wrong. Evidence suggests that this may well be a genetic gesture that cannot be changed.
Seven out of ten people cross
their left arm over their right.
Much debate and research has been done to discover whether nonverbal signals are inborn, learned, genetically transferred, or acquired in some other way. Evidence has been collected from observation of blind people (who could not have learned nonverbal signals through a visual channel), from observing the gestural behavior of many different cultures around the world, and from studying the behavior of our nearest anthropological relatives, the apes and monkeys.
The conclusions of this research indicate that some gestures fall into each category. For example, most primate babies are born with the immediate ability to suck, showing that this is either inborn or genetic. The German scientist Eibl-Eibesfeldt found that the smiling expressions of children born deaf and blind occur independently of learning or copying, which means that these must also be inborn gestures. Ekman, Friesen, and Sorenson supported some of Darwin's original beliefs about inborn gestures when they studied the facial expressions of people from five widely different cultures. They found that each culture used the same basic facial gestures to show emotion, which led them to the conclusion that these gestures must also be inborn.
Cultural differences are many, but the basic
body-language signals are the same everywhere.
Debate still exists as to whether some gestures are culturally learned and become habitual, or are genetic. For example, most men put on a coat right arm first; most women put it on left arm first. This shows that men use their left brain hemisphere for this action while women use the right hemisphere. When a man passes a woman in a crowded street, he usually turns his body toward her as he passes; she instinctively turns her body away from him to protect her breasts. Is this an inborn female reaction or has she learned to do this by unconsciously watching other females?
Some Basic Origins
Most of the basic communication signals are the same all over the world. When people are happy, they smile; when they are sad or angry, they frown or scowl. Nodding the head is almost universally used to indicate “yes” or affirmation. It appears to be a form of head lowering and is probably an inborn gesture because it's also used by people born blind. Shaking the head from side to side to indicate “no” or negation is also universal and appears to be a gesture learned in infancy. When a baby has had enough milk, it turns its head from side to side to reject its mother's breast. When the young child has had enough to eat, he shakes his head from side to side to stop any attempt to spoon-feed him and, in this way, he quickly learns to use the Head-Shaking gesture to show disagreement or a negative attitude.
The Head-Shaking gesture signals “no”
and owes its origin to breastfeeding.
The evolutionary origin of some gestures can be traced to our primitive animal past. Smiling, for example, is a threat gesture for most carnivorous animals, but for primates it is done in conjunction with nonthreatening gestures