Patti Wood Body Language Expert Blog

Can Body Language Indicate Personality Traits and Type?

Many of you know that I have been researching the relationship between body language and the DISC personality assessment for many years. After reading about movement analysis being used to determine Putin’s decision making style I have been looking at some of the newest research in personality and nonverbal communication. Here is a great article on some of the research. I have several other articles if you search on my blog for personality or DISC or gestures and speakers.

Note the yellow highlighted information. The following article was posted on http://postnihilism.blogspot.com/2011/07/can-body-language-indicate-personality.html

Can Body Language Indicate Personality Traits?

In my previous discussion paper, “The Tarot as a Source of Ancient Personality Theory”, one of the more interesting findings was that some characteristics of the court cards, which are believed to represent people in your life, had to do with the way people move, such as ‘graceful’, ‘swift’, ‘acute’, ‘slow’ and ‘clumsy’. As a result this researcher was lead to question whether personality may actually be indicated in how a person moves and carries themselves. However, current personality theory does not associate traits with physical movement within any of the Five Factor Model of personality characteristics. Even though people tend to use their first impressions about a person to make quick judgments regarding personality, surprisingly little research is available to further our understanding of how exactly this might work. In this paper we will examine whether any current research on body language could lend itself to personality theory and expand present knowledge in this area.

An interesting tool recently used in assessment of personality and body language is Laban Movement Analysis. Created by Rudolf Laban to describe interpret and document human movement for dancers, actors, athletes and health professionals, LMA is also being incorporated by psychologists into these theories by correlating movements with emotional state and personality variables (Levy & Duke, 2003). LMA also takes a gender based approach, finding subtle differences in the expression of particular emotions between males and females. For example, in males anxiety may be expressed by increased use of shrinking movements while dominance, achievement and exhibitionism is expressed by decreased use of enclosing movements. Females, in contrast, expressed anxiety by a decreased tendency to change back and fourth between efforts and lack of emphasis in effort, as well as decreased sagittal movements. Dominance and exhibition is expressed by a decreased use of spreading movements. This indicates that there may be some subtle gender based difference in emotional expression in body language.

Another study examined whether body language could be linked to desire for control. In a study more than 700 participants were asked to sit and stand in a variety of positions (Rhoads, 2002). In addition, the same subjects completed need for control tests and the results were correlated. Results indicated that people who crossed their arms with the right arm in the dominant position, with the right shoulder elevated, as well as which side they favor when they stand or sit was positively correlated with desire for control. Highly controlling people are associated with characteristics in the low agreeableness trait.

A very informative study covers a much more holistic view of personality assessment based on body language. Politicians giving speeches were transformed into animated stick figures and shown to subjects, who rated the five personality factors of the figure based on gestures (Koppensteiner & Grammer, 2010). Overall subjects were found to be very adept at associating meaning to gestures and movements. Stick figures with more low arm gesture activity interrupted with smaller periods of high activity were regarded as more agreeable than stick figures with overall high activity. High extraversion was associated with high overall activity and only brief low activity periods. Stick figures with greater head movements were considered less conscientious, more neurotic and less open compared to stick figures with head movements with less amplitude. High openness was associated with pronounced changes in movement direction, and round movements were considered linked to less openness. Making smooth transitions in movement from one activity peak to the next was associated with low neuroticism, whereas high neuroticism was linked to sudden changes in gestures and making these changes more often. Although further study is required to confirm if these traits are consistent, it gives us considerable insight integrating particular movement patterns with trait theory.

Overall we can start to see connections between body language and personality. High extraversion seems to be connected to more movement, broader, sweeping movements and increased saggital movement. High neuroticism could be seen in shrinking, enclosing movements, decreased saggital movement, more head movement and more sudden, jerky movement. Openness may be linked with more profound changes in movement direction, and conscientiousness with less head movements. Agreeableness may be linked to low periods of activity with short periodic bursts of high activity, as well as displaying more submissive body language such as crossing arms with the left arm dominant as well as sitting and standing with the left shoulder favored relative to the right.

Going back to the original traits under consideration we could see swiftness as a trait of high extraversion and slowness associated with low extraversion. Graceful gestures could indicate a smoothness of movement linked to low neuroticism. Finally, acute movement could also indicate increased confidence, and hence low neuroticism, or it may indicate high neuroticism if gestures are sharp and change frequently. It is surprising this has not been an area of more intense research, since the research that has been done would seem to indicate that this method of personality assessment is constantly employed by nearly everyone, and deserves to be better understood.

References

Koppensteiner, M. & Grammer, K. 2010. Motion patterns in political speech and their influence on personality. Journal of Research in Personality, 44, 374-379.

Levy, J. A. & Duke, M. P. 2003. The use of Laban Movement Analysis in the study of personality, emotional state and movement style: An exploratory investigation of the veridicality of “body language”. Individual Differences Research, 1, 39-63.

Rhoads, S. A. 2002. Using body language as a measurement of the personality trait of desire for control. Dissertation Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences and Engineering, 63, 2996

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Labels: laban movement analysis, personality theory, Popular Psychology, Rudoph Laban

Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

Body Language Tips for an Expert Witness on the Stand

You are sitting in a hard chair on a raised platform being asked question after question by a hard hitting attorney while a courtroom full of people watch your every move. Welcome to the hot seat! As a physician testifying as a defendant or serving as an expert witness, your experience on the stand can be daunting. Understanding how to use your nonverbal communication to feel confident and credible on the stand will make a difference in the outcome.

Here are the keys to ensuring that your nonverbal communication conveys the same message of impeccable integrity as your words.

It is important to know that how you hold your body can actually change how you feel. You can influence how you look and feel on the stand by consciously controlling your nonverbal cues.

Under stress the limbic brain normally makes us freeze, flee, fight or faint or give up. Your body may react by freezing in place, appear to be fleeing by pulling your body back, or folding your limbs in to look small. Other reactions to stress may be to become tense and angry, going limp and giving up. You can take steps to reduce those stress responses and increase your credibility.

You want to be aware of the dance between you and the opposing counsel, instead of being reactive to the opposing team’s attorney. Use the following tips to be an effective credible witness.

Space

You want to look powerful, like a true expert, but not appear arrogant. Instead of going still and getting small, take up space and get big. When you need a shot of confidence put your arms on the armrest of your chair, or stretch out your feet a bit. Research says that women on the stand tend to perch, on the edge of the seat arching their backs, making them look less powerful. Men tend to slouch, relying more on the backrest, making them appear disrespectful. Purposefully vary your position to be in control, but when you feel stressed, get big.

Openness

Imagine that there are “windows” on the front of your body, the windows of the knees, pelvis, heart, mouth, eyes, and palms of the hands. These body windows can be open or closed. You want to keep your windows open to look honest and unafraid. The most important window for credibly is the palms of the hands. The limbic brain of the viewer senses danger and dishonesty when the palms of someone’s hands are hidden. Keep your hands open and in view on the table or the arms of the chair. Gesture normally, but don’t use sharp, cutting or poking motions that can be read as symbolic weapons.

Stay Up

When you’re confident and honest your gestures move up, your head comes up, your shoulders come up and back, you sit and move in a way that directs your energy upward.

People who are afraid and or are lying have difficulty moving and staying up.

Get Grounded

When people are nervous, they tend to either move a lot or freeze. Here’s a trick: when you’re in the thick of the most difficult questions, and want to achieve the highest levels of cognition, place both feet firmly on the ground slightly apart. This placement

actually makes it easier to utilize both hemispheres of the brain — the rational and the creative-emotional. If you feel yourself freeze, move your feet apart and/or forward to feel strong.

Lean into It

We tend to pull back when we are fearful or offended by a question. Lean forward as you listen to show you are interested and confident. You can lean forward with your head, your upper torso, or your whole body to show you are connecting to what the lawyer is saying and you are not afraid. Lean in when you are being questioned by your team to show respect. But don’t overdo it, you’re not trying to “get in their face.” So don’t lean forward quickly or aggressively, just aim for gentle timely leans.

Speak with Strength

Everyone, but especially women, should be sure that their voices stay strong until the end of each sentences. Going up high in pitch at the end of your sentences makes you sound unsure of yourself. Practice answering questions with a confident voice going down in pitch, steady and strong in volume, to the end of your sentences.

Match Your Movement and Your Words

Make sure your gestures and movements match what you are saying. If you say “That is accurate” and shake your head “no” the jury will believe your body language, not your words. Be careful of being too scripted or automatic. If your emotion and facial expressions and gestures do not match you seem inauthentic.

Keep Your Hands Away From Your Face

Be careful of showing “stress cues.” When we are feeling stressed the nerve endings fire at the tip of the nose, edge of the ears, around the mouth, and eyes. You may have an urge to touch or rub your face. Don’t! It makes you look uncertain or dishonest. If you need to comfort yourself, briefly place a hand on your leg out of view which will help you feel anchored.

Mind Your Mouth

The mouth is the source of truth and lies. Avoid licking your lips or pressing your lips tightly together. Keep hydrated and keep your lips relaxed.

Giving a deposition or testifying in a trial is an experience that is part of being an EM physician. Knowing the nonverbal messages that people use to ascertain whether you are telling the truth will help ensure that you are perceived as being the credible witness that you are.

Ms. Patti Wood, MA, CSP is a body language consultant and professional speaker, and the author of eight books, including “Success Signals Understanding Body Language” and “SNAP Making the Most of First Impressions Body Language and Charisma.” She is interviewed by national media every week, including CNN, FOX NEWS, The Today Show, The History Channel, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and Psychology Today. You can contact her at Patti@PattiWood.net.

Dr. Sagan is an emergency physician and an attorney based in Woodmere, New York. He can be reached at DougSegan@Yahoo.com.

Using Body Language Analysis to Understand the Decision Making Style of World Leaders Like Vladimir Putin

In Putin All the momentum and energy in Putin's gait comes from the left side; it is as if the right side is just along for the ride. Even the right side of his torso seems frozen. When he is holding a pen, his right hand appears to have only an awkward, tenuous grasp on it. Researches suggests this behavior could have come from a stroke during his birth. Body Movement analyst Brenda Connors suggests for example, that Putin's instinct to make himself whole is mirrored in his imperative to keep Russia from breaking up—but any Russian leader would feel a similar sense of duty. The notion that Putin displays reptilian qualities, however, is not as odd as it may sound; even though ontogeny may not exactly recapitulate phylogeny, modern biology does recognize links between embryonic development and the evolutionary sequences. A characteristic of reptiles, Connors says, is that "they patrol their borders, and if an alien enters, lunge reflexively." That is as good a description of Putin's behavior in res

Here is the article from USA Today.

A Pentagon research team is studying the body movements of Russian President Vladimir Putin and other world leaders in order to better predict their actions and guide U.S. policy, Pentagon documents and interviews show.

The "Body Leads" project backed by the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), the think tank reporting to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, uses the principles of movement pattern analysis to predict how leaders will act.

...

ONA has backed the work of Brenda Connors, the director of Body Leads and a research fellow at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., since 1996, records show, and has paid about $300,000 since 2009 to outside experts to work with her. Part of her work includes a 2008 report for ONA on Putin called "Movement, The Brain and Decision-making, the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin."

Connors acknowledged her work on Putin and other leaders, but declined comment and referred all questions to Hagel's office....

Movement pattern analysis means studying an individual's movements to gain clues about how he or she makes decisions or reacts to events....

Last September, Rende, Connors and Colton published a paper in the academic journal Frontiers in Psychology that detailed the uses of movement pattern analysis to determine leaders' decision-making process. Such analysis, they wrote, "offers a unique window into individual differences in decision-making style."

Brenda Conners was interviewed for this very, very interesting article in The Atlantic in 2005. An excerpt:

In First Person (2000), a collection of interviews with and about him, Vladimir Putin mentions being beaten by stronger children in his rough-and-tumble neighborhood in Leningrad. It's not clear whether he was generally the instigator of the combat or responding to taunts and insults he felt should not go unchallenged. In any case, he resolved to fortify himself. "As soon as it became clear that my pugnacious nature was not going to keep me king of the courtyard or school grounds," he said, "I decided to go into boxing." After getting his nose broken, he took up sambo, a Soviet combination of judo and wrestling, and finally settled on judo. He devoted himself to rigorous workouts and became a black belt and a city-wide champion. He fought like a "snow leopard," his coach once said, "determined to win at any cost."

The wonder is that he even made it into childhood. Two older brothers had died of illnesses, one in infancy and the other at age five. When Vladimir was born, on October 7, 1952, his mother was forty-one, and her prenatal health had no doubt been poor. A decade earlier, during the Nazi siege of Leningrad, there were mass deaths from starvation; "Mama herself was half dead," Putin recalls in First Person. His father, recuperating in a hospital from severe leg wounds caused by German shrapnel, gave her his food. After the war "Papa" went to work as a laborer at a train-car factory. He was given a room in a fifth-floor communal walk-up at 12 Baskov Lane, where Putin grew up, about a twenty-minute stroll from Nevsky Prospekt, the city's main thoroughfare. There were "hordes of rats" in the front entryway, which the young Putin chased with sticks. Once, he cornered one—only to have it rush at him. Frightened, Putin slammed the door shut "in its nose."

I recently came across an intriguing hypothesis about Putin's survival skills. Brenda L. Connors, a senior fellow in the strategic-research department of the Naval War College, in Newport, Rhode Island, is both a former State Department protocol and political-affairs officer and a onetime soloist with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company. Her field of study is a distinctive one: she is a certified "movement analyst." Because of her experience greeting Mikhail Gorbachev and other global figures and her study of modern dance, Connors became intrigued by how body movement—everything from a particular way of walking to hand gestures and facial expressions—constitutes a language for conveying not only emotion but also leadership styles and behavioral patterns. From close analysis of physical traits, captured on tape and examined with the help of experts in medicine, psychology, anthropology, and other fields, she has developed character profiles of a number of world leaders. Her work may sound esoteric, but it is endorsed by, among others, Andrew Marshall, the legendary director of "net assessment" in the Pentagon, and Leon Aron, a leading Russia specialist at the American Enterprise Institute, in Washington, and the author of an acclaimed biography of Yeltsin.

Watching a tape she had made of Putin, compiled mostly from Russian television footage. The tape rolled to a shot of Putin at his first inauguration, in the spring of 2000, at the Andrei Hall of the Great Kremlin Palace. "Here's the picture," she said, as we watched Putin enter the hall and stride down a long red carpet. I saw what she meant only when she slowed the tape—and when she did, I was taken aback. Putin's left arm and leg were moving in an easy, natural rhythm. But his right arm, bent at the elbow, moved in a stiff way, as if jerked by the shoulder, and the right leg dragged, without absorbing his full weight. When she replayed the segment at normal speed, it was easy to pick up on the impediment, and then I had no trouble spotting it in other segments. All the momentum and energy in Putin's gait comes from the left side; it is as if the right side is just along for the ride. Even the right side of his torso seems frozen. When he is holding a pen, his right hand appears to have only an awkward, tenuous grasp on it.

Connors has shown footage of Putin's walk to a range of experts, including A. Thomas Pezzella, a cardiac-thoracic surgeon based in St. Louis; two orthopedic surgeons and a physical therapist at the naval hospital in Newport; and Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, the founder of the School for Body-Mind Centering, in Amherst, Massachusetts, who is certified as something called a neurodevelopmental therapist. They offer a variety of conjectures: Putin could have had a stroke, perhaps suffered in utero; he may be afflicted with, as Pezzella speculates, an Erb's palsy, caused by a forceps tugging on his right shoulder at birth; he could have had polio as a child (polio was epidemic in Europe and western Russia after World War II). The stroke theory is consistent with what appears to be the loss of neural sensation in the fingers of his right hand. (Videotape of Putin at judo matches shows him using his fist, rather than a splayed hand, to push himself up off the mat.) Based on what she has seen and on her consultation with other experts, Connors doubts that Putin ever crawled as an infant; he seems to lack what is called contra-lateral movement and instead tends to move in a head-to-tail pattern, like a fish or a reptile.

Connors believes that Putin's infirmities "created a strong will that he survive and an impetus to balance and strengthen the body." She continues, "When we are unable to do something, really hard work becomes the way." His prowess at judo astonishes her: "He is like that ice skater who had a club foot and became an Olympic skater." Although her research sounds clinical, Connors empathizes with her subject. "It is really poignant to watch him on tape," she says of Putin. "This is a deep, old, profound loss that he has learned to cope with, magnificently." When I heard this, it was impossible for me not to think of another frail child possessed of a fierce will who turned to rigorous physical exercise and pugilism and grew up to be a head of state: Theodore Roosevelt.

Some of Connors's analytical ventures seem unconvincing. She suggests, for example, that Putin's instinct to make himself whole is mirrored in his imperative to keep Russia from breaking up—but any Russian leader would feel a similar sense of duty. The notion that Putin displays reptilian qualities, however, is not as odd as it may sound; even though ontogeny may not exactly recapitulate phylogeny, modern biology does recognize links between embryonic development and the evolutionary sequences. A characteristic of reptiles, Connors says, is that "they patrol their borders, and if an alien enters, lunge reflexively." That is as good a description of Putin's behavior in response to militants in the northern Caucasus as any political analyst has offered.

As the Chechen conflict illustrates, Putin is a ferocious, even pitiless fighter. One need not put stock in Connors's research to see that life does seem to have taught Putin that "the weak are beaten."

What is Body Movement Analysis Used to Read World Leaders Decision Making Styles?

Here is the whole article. http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00658/full

Reading how people move and gesture can tell you how they will make decisions in the future. Specifically, coders read people in interviews and in videos to see if they are high in Assertion or high in Perspective. Here is an excerpt from the article. Unfortunately, the academic writing is even more obtuse than the normal journal article. There are not specific body language movement gestures or movements mentioned just generalities.

In the MPA framework, PGMs are used to generate two Overall Factors—Assertion and Perspective—that together represent a signature decision-making style. The core idea is that individuals have a need to balance their actions/motivations devoted to exerting tangible energy in the environment in relation to pressure, time and attention focus to get results (Assertion), vs shaping the body (with respect to the cardinal planes of three-dimensional space—horizontal, vertical, and sagittal) to position oneself to receive from the environment information to create the result (Perspective). Differences in how individuals achieve their own balance between the complementary processes of Assertion and Perspective are proposed to capture different decision-making styles. For example, individuals high on Assertion may employ a mindset of “nothing happens unless I make it happen.” They rely upon decision-making motivations that include intensively focusing to probe and classify information, applying pressure to support determination, and pacing time to implement a decision at just the right moment. In contrast, individuals high on Perspective are more strategic and get results by positioning themselves. They are receptive to a broad scope of ideas and information alternatives—they shape their bodily position to reflect on the decision's relative value or priority and use movements to strategically anticipate the stages of decision implementation to achieve an overall outcome

Body Language Tips for the EM Physician About to Testify

Welcome to the Hot Seat

Body Language Tips for the EM Physician About to Testify

By Patti Wood MA, CSP and Douglas Segan MD, JD, FACEP