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Pictures from Patti's Recent Keynote and Breakout Session

Pictures of Patti's recent Keynote and Breakout Session
in Pittsburg, PA
Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at http://PattiWood.net. Also check out the body language quiz on her YouTube Channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

Patti in Scottsdale, AZ

 Scottsdale, AZ where I did a program for OMEGA


Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at http://PattiWood.net. Also check out the body language quiz on her YouTube Channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

Patti Will Be On ShowBiz Tonight at 11 pm Analyzing Robert Pattinson's Body Language During His Recent Interviews


Robert Pattinson talks Kristen Stewart and Cosmopolis
 on Good Morning America and John Stewart Show

 A body language read by Patti Wood
Body Language Expert Patti Wood will be on ShowBiz Tonight at 11 pm giving her in-depth analysis of Robert Pattinson’s body language on John Stewart’s show on August 14th and his Good Morning America Interview today on August 15th.  Below are Patti Wood’s body language rough notes on Robert’s body language in those two interviews as well as his interview on ShowBiz last night.
John Stewart’s Show and Good Morning America Interviews
Feet and legs are down and flexed in the ready to jump up out of the chair and run flexed position. Robert makes a joke, he comforts him, does a head protection comfort cue head scratch.  He doesn’t like what’s going on hand over the groin to partial fig leaf protection.
He’s given a cereal box and he has fun for a moment.  His body language is playful. Then he puts both hands in his lap like a school boy about to be reprimanded.

How are you doing, “
He does an avoidance cluster of cues, his body turns away, he goes for the coffee and you see a micro facial cue of sadness he looks down and eyes partially closed and down.
Then he hand blocks with coffee instead of grabbing the handle so he tries to cover his mouth and curls and presses in his lips to suppress what he is really feeling, a mixture of sadness in his eyes and anger at the mouth. As he puts down the cup the anger cluster is emphasized with a tongue thrust that says I am mad at you for asking that question ‘He says, “I mean…pauses he shakes his head no, he shakes again not just his head but his whole body. He avoids the question looking at his fans. They seem pretty excited about it.  And he laughs, this time his head comes down and the laugh and smile show an effort to reduce tension, (laughter and anger cover deception or withholding of information)
I can see where this works for him.  His next laugh brings his body up out of his seat as if he wants to escape or this gives him the chance to escape.  He sits back in the chair relaxes and crosses his legs. He is ready to be there.  

What drew you to this role?  Look at the dramatic shift to centered still body relaxed voice.
And though he does another head scratch when they come back to him after showing the suggestive sex scene, he follows it with a flirty showing of the palm and impish grin. And now when he laughs he comes more naturally up and out of his chair.

ShowBiz Tonight Interview
Asked “So how are you doing”
Look at the immediate cluster of withdrawal avoidance mixed with forced attention cues
He lowers his head and shutters his eye, holds his own hand, and comforts whipping off the sweat move. Then forces his eyes wide to pretend he’s paying attention. 
“Because the world wants to know?
He leans over to get his coffee and goes off camera.    He uses the coffee cup as a shield between himself and the interviewer. Then does a tongue cleanse to clean off how he is truly feeling then says in a low stressed voice, “Yeah” gives the host an micro facial cue of awkward smiling grimace showing he’s mad he has to answer this question. Then laughs but look and listen to the laugh - characteristic award laugh but more forced. One with a tighter throat and vocal chords and instead of the head going up as it usually would in a laugh his head moves swiftly down. And then grabs the outside of the cup swinging his body again away from the interviewer to block and  brings the coffee cup way up to cover as much of his face as possible and again used the exaggerated open eyes to show that he is ok and only gives a sideways glance to the interviewer.
“Difficult to hear all the reporting about you” he actually brings his brows together in slight scowl.
“Reports about you drinking” he does his fast blink (the only fast blink thus far in the interview.)
Wallowing in misery …but you look absolutely fine,  “ He gives another forced laugh bringing his head down. And he does almost a snarl smile closing his eyes and turning his head away.
Then he looks at the directory.  He says, “Since the first twilight.” And brings his whole hand up in a nose cleanse all the fingers whipping under his nose not once not twice but three times as he says, “you enter a realm where you get”  
Interesting the look to the director helps then the directory visibly comforts him he gets comforted by the director then once the director starts speaking Robert begins to relax he is still using the cup.
“Do you just laugh it off. “  He gets a sour face and looks down again and makes an audible tongue cleanse, looks away scowls a bit.
Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at http://PattiWood.net. Also check out the body language quiz on her YouTube Channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

Cost of Anger in the Workplace



Joe, a participant in my workshop, was upset when he came in this morning and in the first exercise shared his frustration. “I don’t understand why I was sent to this interpersonal skills workshop. I am a great manager. I am at work before everybody and I am the last one to leave. I walk around I tell my employees over and over again what they need to do to complete their work. I am there for them. I have an open door policy. They can talk to me anytime they want. But, everyone is walking around tense and they don’t do their work. Joe’s classmates that day already knew what could be the problem. Joe was yelling out his frustration and gesturing at us with his fist. They were scared of him. Joe needed to see how his behavior was affecting his body language and his health and his anger's impact on everyone he worked with.

”Workplace anger is costly to the employee, the company, and coworkers. Studies show that up to 42% of employee time is spent engaging in or trying to resolve conflict.  This results in wasted employee time, mistakes, stress, lower morale, hampered performance, and reduced profits and or service.

In 1993 the national Safe Workplace Institute released a study showing that workplace violence costs $4.2 billion each year, estimating over 111,000 violent incidents. Further, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, about 500,000 victims of violent crime in the workplace lose an estimated 1.8 million workdays each year.

Clearly, poorly handled anger, frustration and resentment will sabotage business productivity.

One solution for your workplace anger is to “Check In” on your behavior. Anger can be recognized by certain facial and body language cues. Notice what you are showing about your behavior.
Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at http://PattiWood.net. Also check out the body language quiz on her YouTube Channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

Why Men Look Angry and Women Look Happy


People are quicker to see anger on men's faces and happiness on women's. Is this research finding  a simple case of gender stereotyping, or something more deeply rooted? When I was conducting research on smiling my clients assumed that women always smiled more than men. Women do smile more than men, when they are in public. We like our women to smile that makes all of us men and women feel safe. There are more interesting insights in the following article by Beth Azar.

By Beth Azar
April 2007, Vol 38, No. 4
Print version: page 18

It might not be surprising that people find it easier to see men as angry and women as happy. Women do tend to be the nurturers and men--well--men do commit 80 to 90 percent of all violent crimes. More surprising, perhaps, is new research suggesting that the connection between men and anger and women and happiness goes deeper than these simple social stereotypes, regardless of how valid they are.

Our brains automatically link anger to men and happiness to women, even without the influence of gender stereotypes, indicate the findings of a series of experiments conducted by cognitive psychologist D. Vaughn Becker, PhD, of Arizona State University at the Polytechnic Campus, with colleagues Douglas T. Kenrick, PhD, Steven L. Neuberg, PhD, K.C. Blackwell and Dylan Smith, PhD. They even turned it around to show that people are more likely to think a face is masculine if it's making an angry expression and feminine if its expression is happy. In fact, their research, published in February's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol. 92, No. 2, pages 179-190), suggests that the cognitive processes that distinguish male and female may be co-mingled with those that distinguish anger from happiness, thereby leading to this perceptual bias.

Becker proposes that this bias may stem from our evolutionary past, when an angry man would have been one of the most dangerous characters around, and a nurturing, happy female might have been just the person to protect you from harm. Evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides, PhD, agrees.

"If it's more costly to make a mistake of not recognizing an angry man, you would expect the [perceptual] threshold to be set lower than for recognizing an angry female," says Cosmides, of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).

More than a stereotype

Becker first noticed that people find it easier to detect anger on men and happiness on women a couple years ago while working on his dissertation at Arizona State. He was testing whether viewing an angry or happy expression "primes" people to more quickly identify a subsequent angry or happy expression. Becker confirmed his initial hypothesis, but when he ran an additional analysis to test whether the gender of the person making the facial expression affected his results, he found that gender was, by far, the biggest predictor of how quickly and accurately people identified facial expressions.

Becker couldn't find any mention of this gender effect in the literature. So he set out to confirm that people more quickly link men to anger and women to happiness and figure out why that might be.

In the first of a series of studies, 38 undergraduate participants viewed pictures of faces displaying prototypical angry and happy expressions. They pressed "A" or "H" on a computer keyboard to indicate whether the expression was angry or happy, and the researchers recorded their reaction times. As expected, participants were quicker to label male faces "angry" and female faces "happy."

The researchers then used a version of the "Implicit Association Test" to uncover unconscious biases that study participants may have linking men to anger and women to happiness. The well-documented test allows researchers to examine the strength of connections between categories, which lead to unconscious stereotypes. Becker tested whether study participants unconsciously linked male names with angry words and female names with happy words. Most did.

However, 13 students showed the opposite association (male-happy, female-angry), implying that their unconscious gender stereotypes run counter to those of the general public. It was an ideal opportunity to determine whether gender stereotypes are at the heart of the emotion/gender bias. They weren't: Just like the main group of participants, this subgroup more quickly and accurately categorized male faces as angry and female faces as happy.

"While gender stereotypes clearly influence perception, the implicit association test results made us think the effect is not solely a function of stereotypes," says Becker.

Overlapping signals

Since gender stereotypes don't seem to be the culprit, Becker looked toward more deeply rooted causes.

For example, perhaps we see more men with angry faces--on television, in movies--than we see women with angry faces, so our brains are well practiced at recognizing an angry expression on a man. To investigate this possibility, one of the co-authors, Arizona State University graduate student K.C. Blackwell, suggested they flip the experiment around. Instead of asking people to identify facial expressions while the experimenters manipulated gender, they asked them to identify whether a face was male or female while manipulating facial expressions.

"While you can argue that the majority of angry faces we see are male, it's tough to argue that the majority of male faces we see are angry," says Becker. So, if the relationship between emotional expression and gender is simply a matter of how frequently we see anger on men and happiness on women, the effect should disappear when researchers flip around the question. What they found, on the contrary, was that people were faster to identify angry faces as male and happy faces as female.

To follow-up on this finding, they conducted another study in which they used computer graphics software to control not only the intensity of facial expressions, but also the masculinity and femininity of the facial features, creating faces that were just slightly masculine or feminine. As predicted, people were more likely to see the more masculine faces as angrier, even when they had slightly happier expressions than the more feminine faces.

These findings suggest that the brain begins to associate emotions and gender very early in the cognitive process, says Becker. One possible explanation is that the brain has an "angry male detection module" enabling fast and accurate detection of what would have been one of the most dangerous entities in our evolutionary past. But Becker thinks there's a more parsimonious explanation.

"I'm more inclined to think that we've got a situation where the signals for facial expressions and those for masculinity and femininity have merged over time," he says.

In particular, features of masculinity --such as a heavy brow and angular face--somewhat overlap with the anger expression, and those of femininity--roundness and soft features--overlap with the happiness expression.

To test this hypothesis, Becker and his colleagues used computer animation software to individually manipulate masculine and feminine facial features of expressively neutral faces. As predicted, a heavier brow caused participants to see faces as both more masculine and more angry, implying that the mental processes for determining masculinity and anger may be intertwined.

"These results make a lot of sense," says University of Pittsburgh behavioral anthropologist and facial expression researcher Karen Schmidt, PhD. "Faces have always had gender, so if we're always activating gender and affect at the same time then the processing is likely highly coordinated."

The paper raises new and interesting questions about gender, says UCSB postdoctoral student Aaron Sell, PhD, who studies the evolution of gender. "Specifically," he says, "why do male and female faces differ, and what is the nature of emotion detection?"

The data appear to suggest that the anger expression has evolved to make a face seem more masculine, says Sell. Even female faces may communicate anger more effectively the more masculine they appear, says Becker. Future studies will have to tackle questions about the intentions expressed by the angry face and why looking more male would be an evolutionary advantage in communicating these intentions.

"I see this article as opening the book on a new research topic more than having the final say on the issue," says Sell.
Beth Azar is a writer in Portland, Ore.


Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at http://PattiWood.net. Also check out the body language quiz on her YouTube Channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.