The Ultimate Source for Self Understanding

Reading body language

A research was held at the University of Pennsylvania to determine to what extent a person's body language can affect the impression people make of him/her. The shocking result was that people build their impressions of you based on:

• 55 percent body form, postures and movements.
• 38 percent on the tone of your voice (tempo and frequency).
• Only 7 percent on what you say.

That makes a total of 93 percent for body language(which comprises Bodily gestures and voice tones) and only 7 percent for speech. This means that 93 percent of what you want to say is not uttered in words but emitted from your body language and postures.

Isn't 93 percent for body language such a big percent?

If you think about it for awhile, you will find that this actually makes a lot of sense. In any society, there is the liar, the imposter and the one who can't express his feelings. Based on this research, researchers started studying human feelings and how they could be tied to a person's postures. What they discovered was this, whenever there was a change in emotions, there was a corresponding change in postures and tone of voice.

How to interpret body language

Researchers have succeeded in identifying a lexicon of feelings and their corresponding postures. Anyone with enough information can effectively read people’s feelings through their body language. Learning to interpret body language is not a hard task; you just need to know the familiar postures in body language and their associated emotional states, then link them together.

The Uses of body language

Body language is now widely used in politics, investigations of all kinds (where the suspect’s body language is analyzed), sales, negotiations and other situations where communication between people is involved. Body language is not only used in understanding the emotional states of others, but it can also help you have others perceive you the way you want them to. For example, you can have someone perceive you as very confident when you’re actually terrified. In my book How to make someone fall in love with you i explained how you can use body language to appear more attractive to someone so that you increase the chance of making him fall in love with you.

Want to know more?

Great, now teach me how to read body language.

What do you mean by “showing the emotional state that I want”?

I know all about body language; give me something more advanced