Do You Speak Body Language? Mastering the Art of Nonverbal Communication Key in Interrogations

By Jan Hargrave

Most individuals focus only on the verbal part of an encounter; yet, during an average 30-minute meeting, approximately 800 different nonverbal messages are exchanged. Some interrogators make decisions based only on the tone of the speaker’s voice, and some take literally each spoken word.  Obviously, these are all necessary areas of interest, but further investigations need to be made to get the full meaning of the message. In the past, people who were aware of the importance of body language focused primarily on the voice and on facial expressions, but those are only part of the picture. The entire body—posture, gait, eye movements, gestures, feet, legs, torso, arms, hands, head, facial expressions, and mannerisms—needs to be analyzed to get the true meaning of a message.  These subtle messages that are conveyed without words reveal a person’s true emotions.
The more instances in which leading newspapers, magazines, or television shows ask me to comment on an individual’s body language, the more committed I become in my belief about the endless amount of information that one can gather from watching another person. Politicians, Hollywood actors, and the regular guy in the street are all vying to find out what their bodies are communicating to the world around them. During Bill Clinton’s televised deposition, it was not unusual for the New York Post to contact me several times a week for my take on his body language. They asked, “Is he hiding something? What does it mean when he bites his lower lip? What about when he crooks his eyebrow? And that finger point, what does it say about him?”

Lately it seems that almost all inquiries concern the politicians competing for nomination. “Why does Senator John McCain constantly play with his wedding band? Is Senator Hillary Clinton’s smile genuine? Standing with her arms straight down on her sides, what does that mean? Why does Senator Barack Obama place his left hand in his trouser pocket when he says ‘Once I become President of the United States’? Why does Governor Mike Huckabee constantly unbutton and tug at his jacket?” 

“Is Roger Clemens telling the truth? Do Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise have a sincere relationship? Who killed Jon Benet Ramsey? Did O.J. do it?” Questions, questions, questions; all can be explained and answered through the careful study and forensic analysis of nonverbal communication.

History of Body Language
Since man’s appearance on earth, he has communicated with body language. Babies easily “speak” to their parents through nonverbal communication. Even though parents sometimes accept the child’s message incorrectly, it is still a form of early communication. Body language is a key to the inner psychological and emotional state of an individual. Not surprisingly, research indicates that the human body can produce more than 7 million unique movements.

As far as the technical study of nonverbal communication goes, perhaps the most influential pre-twentieth-century work was that of Charles Darwin in 1872. His research generated the modern studies of facial expressions and body language. Current researchers around the globe have since validated Darwin’s findings and observations. Dr. Albert Mehrabian, a noted researcher in the field of nonverbal communication, found that the total impact of a message is about 7 percent verbal (words only), 38 percent vocal (including tone of voice, inflection, and other sounds), and a mammoth 55 percent nonverbal. Professor Ray Birdwhistell made similar conclusions as to the amount of nonverbal communication that takes place among humans. He estimated that the average person actually speaks words for a total of 10 or 11 minutes a day and that the standard sentence takes only about 2.5 seconds. Like Mehrabian, he found that the verbal component of a face-to-face conversation is less than 35 percent and that more than 65 percent of communication occurs nonverbally.

Researchers in the field of body language generally agree that individuals use the verbal channel primarily for conveying information, while the nonverbal channel negotiates interpersonal attitudes and, in some cases, substitutes for verbal messages.  Regardless of culture, words and movements occur together with such predictability that Birdwhistell concluded that a well-trained interrogator should be able to tell what movement a person is making by simply listening to his voice.

Charlie Chaplin and many other silent movie actors, also pioneers of nonverbal communication skills, used this means to entertain and amuse many of us on the screen. Audiences classified each actor as good or bad depending upon the extent to which he could use gestures and other body signals to connect effectively.

In 1970, Julius Fast published a summary of all nonverbal communication research done by behavioral scientists. His noted research is regarded as the catalyst for influencing people of the existence and importance of body language.

Three Steps to Increased Nonverbal Reading Power
Reading an individual’s body language is not the only goal in mastering nonverbal communication.  Understanding your own body language is of the utmost importance. Expertise in this area is usually gained, in phases, with time and practice. As far back as 1985, Gerhard Gschwandtner informed the world of the three stages of awareness and skill that are necessary before one becomes competent in nonverbal communication.

Awareness of the Other Person: This stage involves learning the five major nonverbal communication channels (body angle, face, arms, hands, and legs) and interpreting the listener’s nonverbal signals. It is a quick method for scanning a client for clusters of gestures. Instead of looking for specific movements or postures that indicate that the client is bored, defensive, or angry, a group of gestures from the five channels needs to be analyzed. These groups of gestures can indicate whether a person is open and receptive or whether there are obstacles to the interrogation strategy that warn the questioner to exercise caution. These gesture clusters can alert the negotiator to stop and redirect his approach entirely.

Awareness of Self: Your own nonverbal movements and expressions can make or break an encounter. Ask yourself, “How can I communicate to display confidence in myself? How does the other person see me? How can I avoid communicating nervous or negative nonverbal signals?”  Constructive criticism from peers and videotaping yourself will show you how you look and act when your mind is concentrating on what you are saying.  Once you understand your own nonverbal behavior, and how you use it to interact with clients, you are more aware of your impact on others.

Management of Self and Others: Once absorption of nonverbal skill in self management and people management is reached, one can apply the universal change process. Nonawareness, awareness, internalizing, and integration are the four behavioral concepts involved to reach this stage. When interpreting nonverbal signals becomes second nature, one has fully incorporated the concept of people reading. Awareness and examination of another person can give one the ability to perform the following: 

  • Detect negative nonverbal signals early in the negotiation
  • Respond faster and more accurately to the other person’s nonverbal signals
  • Increase your ability in managing your own nonverbal expressions
  • Intensify your skill to combine verbal and nonverbal skills

 

            Body language means communicating with the movement or position of the human body. It can be conscious or unconscious. Using nonverbal communication, a person is visually revealing when he is unsure, needs additional information, wants a chance to ask questions, or has strong objections.  Your own nonverbal responses can reveal if you are anxious or bored. If a client asks a question and you feel hesitant about how to answer, your body will be the messenger of your uncertainty.

The moment you meet a prospective client, he judges you by what he sees and feels. The process takes less than 10 seconds, but the impression is permanent. Whether you make a positive impression or not can literally depend on the silent signals that you send during this first contact. Being friendly but assertive, reassuring, and understanding, both verbally and nonverbally, allows you to exercise all 100 percent of your communication’s impact.

Inborn, Genetic, or Learned
Research and debate has been conducted to discover whether nonverbal signals are inborn, learned, genetically transferred, or acquired in some other way.  Confirmation collected from observation of blind and/or deaf people who could not have learned nonverbal signals through the auditory or visual channels has occurred. Scrutinizing the gestures and behavior of different cultures around the world has also aided in the findings.

Discoveries in this research indicate that some gestures fall into each category. For example, most children are born with the instantaneous ability to suck, indicating that this gesture is either inborn or genetic. The smiling gestures of children born deaf and/or blind occur independently of learning or copying, meaning that these gestures also must be inborn. Additionally, when researchers 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. This research also led to the conclusion that these gestures must be inborn.

Concerning inborn gestures, when crossing your arms on your chest, do you cross left over right or right over left? Most people are uncertain about which way they do this until they try it. If one way feels comfortable, the other feels completely wrong.  Confirmation suggests that this may be a genetic gesture that cannot be changed. 

We can conclude that much of our basic nonverbal behavior is learned and the meaning of many movements and gestures is culturally determined.  Most basic communication gestures are the same all over the world. When people are happy they smile; when they are sad or angry, they frown or grimace.  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, as deaf and blind people also use it. Shaking the head from side to side to indicate “no” is also universal and may well be a gesture that is learned in infancy. The young child who has had enough to eat shakes his head from side to side to stop his parent’s attempt to spoon feed him, and in this way he quickly learns to use the side-to-side head shaking gesture to show disagreement or a negative attitude.
Gesture Clusters and Similarities
The most serious mistake a novice in body language can make is to interpret a solitary gesture in isolation from other gestures or other circumstances. Similar to any other language, body language consists of words, sentences, and punctuation. Each gesture is similar to a single word, and a word may have several different meanings. It is only when a word exists in a sentence with other words that an individual can fully understand its significance. Gestures come in sentences and invariably tell the truth about a person’s feelings or attitudes.  A “perceptive” person is one who can read the nonverbal sentences and accurately match them against the person’s verbal sentences.

Incongruence of gestures occurs when an audience observes a speaker standing behind a lectern with his arms tightly folded across his chest (defensive) and chin down (critical and hostile), while telling them how receptive and open he is to their ideas. Or, a speaker may attempt to convince the audience of his warm, compassionate approach while running his hands through his hair or tugging at his left ear.  Sigmund Freud noted that while a patient was verbally expressing happiness with her marriage, she was unconsciously slipping her wedding ring on and off her finger. Freud was aware of the significance of the incongruence of gestures with her words and was not surprised when marriage problems began to surface. 

Observations of gesture clusters and congruence of the verbal and nonverbal channels are the keys to accurate interpretation of body language. In addition to looking for gesture clusters and congruence of speech and body movements, all gestures should be considered in the context in which they occur. If, for example, someone is sitting at a bus stop on a chilly winter day with his arms and his legs tightly crossed and with his chin down, it would most likely mean that he is cold, not defensive. If, however, a person uses these same gestures while seated in a negotiation, it could be correctly interpreted as meaning that the person is negative or defensive about the situation.

Phony Body Language
Since the goal in criminal investigation is to get to the heart of the matter, a commonly asked question is, “Is it possible to forge your own body language?” The general answer to this question is “no” because of the lack of congruence that is likely to occur in the use of the main gestures, the body’s micro signals, and the spoken words. For example, direct eye contact is associated with honesty, but when the faker tells a lie, his micro gestures give him away. His pupils may contract, his nostrils might widen, or the corner of his mouth could twitch. These micro signals contradict the direct eye contact and the sincere smile resulting in the receiver tending not to believe what he is hearing. Thankfully, the human mind seems to possess a fail-safe mechanism; a gut feeling informs the listener that he has just received a series of incongruent messages. 

We use the face more often than any other part of the body to cover up lies. We use smiles, ear pulls, eye pulls, nose touches, and winks in an attempt to cover up and distract the listener. It is difficult to fake body language for a long period of time. The complication with lying is that our subconscious mind acts automatically and independently of our verbal lie, so our body language gives us away. The term describing this occurrence is “leakage.” Because it is difficult to fake sincere body language for a long period of time, the body eventually leaks out its true feelings and emotions. Therefore, people who rarely tell lies are easily caught, regardless of how convincing they may sound. The moment a person begins to lie, his body sends out negative micro signals. These signals give us our feeling that the person is not telling the truth. During the lie, the subconscious mind sends out nervous energy that appears as a gesture that can contradict what the person has just said.  People whose jobs involve lying, specifically actors and poker players, have refined their body gestures to the point where it is difficult to see their lies. Thus, onlookers believe their stories.

To deter us from spotting their lies, actors refine their gestures in one of two ways. First, they practice what “feels” like the right gestures when they tell the lie. This is only successful when they have practiced telling the lie numerous times over long periods of time. Second, as difficult as it is to do, some liars (poker players) eliminate almost all of their gestures while they are relaying the lie or posing the bluff.

Psychologists have long known that some deception is a normal, healthy part of human behavior, often starting in children as young as 5 or 6. In adulthood, most people lie routinely, usually harmlessly, throughout the day. Robert Feldman, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, reveals that the average fib rate is three for every 10 minutes of conversation. Even when a liar consciously suppresses major body gestures, he still will transmit numerous micro expressions. These micro gestures include facial muscular twitching, expansion and contraction of pupils, sweating at the brow, flushing of the cheeks, increased rate of eye blinking, and numerous other microscopic gestures that signal deceit and occur within a split second. They are difficult to spot, and usually only trained professional negotiators see them. Results show that the most successful interviewers are those who have developed the automatic ability to read the micro gestures during their face-to-face encounters with other people.

To be able to lie successfully, a person almost has to have his body hidden or out of sight. Police interrogation involves placing the suspect on a chair in the open or placing him under lights with his body in full view of the questioner. With everything out in the open, the suspect’s lies are much easier to see. Sitting behind a desk where the body is partially hidden helps to “cover up” secreted information. The easiest way to lie is through text messages, over the telephone, or on the Internet.

Signals, Cues, and Symbols
Most people have felt the need to warn companions at a party that a dreaded character has just entered the room and is heading their way. In such a situation, the informer does not simply point or shout; he raises his eyebrows at his companions, jerks his head a bit in the direction of the dreaded person, and purses his lips to warn his conversation partner to be quiet. These signals, actions without words, are movements a person uses to communicate needs, desires, and feelings. Signals are a form of expressive communication.

A cue is a type of receptive communication used to let someone know what is expected of him. An adult might gently pull a child’s arm upward by holding his wrist to cue the child to lift his arm during a dressing routine. A gentleman holds a woman’s coat open to cue her that he is willing to help her put it on. A negotiator lets others know of his desire to speak by nodding his head three times.

Symbols are representative of an event, action, object, person, or place. Symbols are useful for both receptive and expressive communication. The American flag is a symbol that communicates freedom, integrity, and the spirit of a nation. A Rolls Royce automobile symbolizes an object that is quite expensive.

Do You Speak Body Language?
Most people are already fluent in the dialect of body language because the subconscious mind is already an expert. Training to look for more nonverbal messages involves trusting your intuition to make your impressions more accurate. A thorough understanding of body language allows an individual to be able to modify his own reactions and thus improve his negotiating skills.