You Had Me At Hello: The Science Behind First Impressions

May 05, 2014 3:39 AM ET

Michelle Trudeau

Humans make split-second judgments about others based on the way they talk.
Katherine Streeter for NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Katherine Streeter for NPR

Remember that famous line in the movie Jerry Maguire where Renee Zellweger says to Tom Cruise, "You had me at 'hello' "? Well it turns out there is some scientific evidence to back this up. People use voices to instantly judge people, researchers say.

"From the first word you hear a person speak, you start to form this impression of the person's personality, says Phil McAleer, a psychologist at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, who led the study.

In his experiment, McAleer recorded 64 people, men and women, from Glasgow, reading a paragraph that included the word "hello." He then extracted all the hellos and got 320 participants to listen to the different voices and rate them on 10 different personality traits, such as trustworthiness, aggressiveness, confidence, dominance and warmth.

What he found was that the participants largely agreed on which voice matched which personality trait. One male voice was overwhelmingly voted the least trustworthy, "the sort of guy you'd want to avoid," McAleer says. The pitch of the untrustworthy voice was much lower than the male deemed most trustworthy. McAleer says this is probably because a higher pitched male voice is closer to the natural pitch of a female, making the men sound less aggressive and friendlier than the lower male voices.

What makes females sound more trustworthy is whether their voices rise or fall at the end of the word, says McAleer. "Probably the trustworthy female, when she drops her voice at the end, is showing a degree of certainty and so can be trusted."

McAleer says it doesn't really matter whether the ratings of personality accurately reflect a speaker's true personality. What matters, he contends, is that there was so much agreement on the traits.

"What we find is that they all seem to perceive that one voice is the most trustworthy and another voice is the least trustworthy," he says. And the same is true of all the other personality traits that were tested.

In less than a second, the time it takes to say "hello," we make a snap judgment about someone's personality, says Jody Kreiman, a UCLA researcher who studies how we perceive voice. On hearing just a brief utterance, we decide whether to approach the person or to avoid them. Such rapid appraisals, she says, have a long evolutionary history. It's a brain process found in all mammals.

"Things that are important for behavior and for survival tend to happen pretty fast," Kreiman says.
"You don't have a huge amount of time. It has to be a simple system of communication."

And it doesn't get much simpler than a simple "hello," rapidly communicating friend or foe — a phenomenon that Phil McAleer has now dubbed "the Jerry Maguire effect." Underscoring the old adage that you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Actual link to the article:

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/05/05/308349318/you-had-me-at-hello-the-science-behind-first-impressions?utm_source=npr_email_a_friend&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140505&utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_term=


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.

Movie, INSIDE OUT Reminds Us How to Train Your Brain to Manage Your Emotions

Recently, I wrote about the new Pixar Movie "Inside Out"  The film educates children on how their emotions effect them and how they can honor emotions in others.  And the article below my post shares how to train your brain to manage your emotions. First I wanted to share that there is one particular effective scene in the movie in which the character Sadness listens to the character Fear and helps him deal with his pain by mirroring his body language and reflecting his emotions.  Yes, a cartoon charterer used "Mirroring" and Reflective Listening."  A powerful message in the movie is that the emotion of sadness can be a important part of life and can actually move you to reflect on your life and make changes. I didn't begin to learn that until I was in college and my father passed away. How incredible for a small child to know that sadness does not make them bad, unlikable and less than.
Here is more advice about how manage your emotions.

Pixar's 'Inside Out' Reminds Us to Manage Emotions by Training Our Brain By Richard J. Davidson, Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry.

Posted: 07/24/2015 10:28 am EDT Updated: 07/24/2015 11:59 am EDT

If you could look at your own personality, which emotion leads others in managing your mind's control room? Joy? Fear? Disgust? Anger? Sadness?

Through the lens of the new Pixar movie "Inside Out", Joy calls the shots in the mind of the 11-year-old protagonist named Riley. In fact, this positive emotion -- personified by actress Amy Poehler -- finds it hard to step aside when other emotions are in many ways more appropriate for the situations Riley finds herself in, including moving to a new city and navigating school and friends.

The role emotions play in our lives has driven my research for 30 years and motivates the search for an answer to why some people seem more resilient than others to life's slings and arrows. What is it about the resilient group that helps them better overcome adversity?

To begin to answer this question, we've taken a look at how these emotions work in the brain in a laboratory setting with tools such as fMRI scanners. Over time, we've not only documented that people indeed have emotional styles and predispositions, but there are also techniques that show great promise in helping adults and children to alter their emotions to improve well-being and decrease suffering.

Thanks to neuroplasticity, perhaps the most influential idea in the past several decades in neuroscience, we know that the brain's structure and function can change throughout life, even as adults. It means you can train your brain to better manage which emotions surface when and for how long. So how do you move emotions like anger and sadness to the backseat to make room for more joy and to increase well-being?

Joy

There is growing neuroscientific understanding of joy and happiness, and one of the important things we've learned has to do with what might best be called "savoring" --- the capacity to savor a positive experience and to allow it to permeate your activities and give a positive glow to everyday interactions. We've learned that while people with depression show normal activation in the circuitry of the brain associated with joy, it's transient and does not persist.

People with the capacity to persist in activating these brain regions critical for positive emotion and who can sustain this activation more over time report higher levels of well-being and exhibit lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

One way to cultivate joy and to activate this region of the brain involves reflecting on what I've called "innate basic goodness"-- the human propensity to desire happiness and be free from suffering. All humans share this same basic quality, and we bring this to the fore in all of our interactions. It enables us to respond to those around us in ways that maximize their and, in turn, our own well-being.

Fear, Disgust and Anger

The neuroscientific bases for fear, disgust and anger share some similarities and have two key things in common: the amygdala and its role in recovery. The amygdala is a structure in the brain that gets your "fight-or-flight" mechanism going. It signals to the rest of the body when something's salient or wrong, whether it's a car that veers a little too close to the sidewalk (fear) or the mere thought of broccoli pizza (disgust) in the eyes of a preteen.

It's normal and healthy to show a context-appropriate response -- an emotion that is adaptive in a particular situation -- but you don't want these emotions to linger beyond the point when they're actually useful. We know that mindfulness meditation can be helpful in regulating these emotions. Such training results in less anticipatory worry toward pain and a faster recovery following negative or uncertain events.

Anger, however, poses even greater dangers if left in charge. Research has suggestedthat anger is biologically toxic and can have harmful effects on the cardiovascular system, increasing a person's risk for a heart attack. In many cases, anger arises when our goals are thwarted. The challenge is to harness the energy that may be associated with anger and figure out ways to work around the obstacle rather than banging your head against it.

Sadness

Unlike anger, contextually-appropriate sadness is not toxic to the body; however, in circumstances where sadness holds the reins unnecessarily, people can develop depression. To manage sadness, there's an approach that may sound strange at first -- generosity. We are often saddened by tragic circumstances, by all the hardships that people have to endure, and being able to help others to relieve suffering contributes to others' well-being and our own. It also helps us to take the perspective of others and directly see that we are not the only ones who are suffering. Generosity is a very direct antidote -- neuroscientifically-speaking -- to sadness, and it activates circuits in the brain associated with joy.

As we navigate through our day and encounter people who look like they are having a difficult time (such experiences have become all too common during my frequent travels), we can do a simple mental exercise by looking at each person and reflecting on how, just like us, they share the same basic wish to be free of suffering. During those moments, we can say a simple phrase to ourselves such as, "May you be free of suffering and the causes of suffering."

In addition to mental exercise, recent findings indicate that physical activity may help prevent depression. Moreover, aerobic exercise is one of the best ways to increase brain plasticity, and if accompanied by positive psychological input that can be generated through the types of mental exercises noted above, the combination can be particularly effective.

 As a body language expert I knew I was going to be intrigued with the way each emotion was animated. I thought about all the research I have studied over the years about emotion and facial expressions done by Dr. Paul Ekman. 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.

Famous People Who Admit to Nervousness and Stage Fright

Famous People Who Admit to Nervousness and Stage Fright

Show me a person who says, “I never feel nervous when I go to present,” and “I’ll show you an “automatic presenter.”

Some of the world’s most famous presenters freely admit to nervousness and stage fright—

Benedict Cumberbatch - He is so adorable, and his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes a marvel. And I loved him in The Imitation Game. He does, like Hugh Grant, often play bumbling and or odd characters so he can channel his nervousness into the part.

Adele - That booming voice, and she still gets scared.

Bob Dylan - That incredible creative man has stage fright. I get he has a bad voice, but he is a poet/lyricist of great magnificence.

Jason Alexander - He acts nervous all the time, how can he tell? By the way did you see him in the TV version of Bye Bye Birdie? Lots of fun.

Maya Angelou - She writes magnificently and has that amazing voice, but she also has stage fright.

Hugh Grant - There is a great interview on YouTube where he talks about it. Look up Graham Norton Show Hugh Grant Stage Fright. He talks about he even gets it working on animated films!

Annie Lenox - She says she gets over it by enjoying the moment. 

Brian Wilson - (The Beach Boys) Receives shoulder and neck rubs and prays before his concerts.

Sir Lawrence Olivier - Yes, one of the greatest actors of all time had stage fright.

Barbara Streisand - (singer and actress) I have seen her perform live. She had not done a live performance in years. She is wonderful, and you can see that she is a bit shy but she uses humor to overcome her fear.

Nicole Kidman (actress) - I was surprised. In her roles she always comes across as a bit plastic. I don’t see the vulnerability other people seem to see.

Michael Douglas - (actor) Yes, surprising.

Alfred Hitchcock - (director) I took a film class on him and read several biographies. As a child his mother was ill, and made him come home from school every day and stand at the end of her bed and report on his day. That would strike fear into anyone’s heart.

Winston Churchill - He dealt with it by drinking!

John Cougar Mellancamp (musician, actor)

William Shatner - He just keeps taking risks, and darn I admire that. If you can find the TV show where he and his wife remodel their home, you will be charmed with his boundless enthusiasm. I think that helps him as well. 

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.

#TheEmptyChair Amplifies Conversation About Sexual Assault, Bill Cosby and Sexual Assault

#TheEmptyChair Amplifies Conversation About Sexual Assault

July 30, 2015 5:07 AM ET

NPR Staff

The cover story of this week's New York magazine is getting a lot of attention.

It features 35 women seated in chairs and one empty chair. The women are all dressed in black, looking straight ahead with both hands resting on their knees. It is a stark image, and all the more compelling because each of them is openly and by name accusing Bill Cosby of horrendous acts. Some say they were drugged and raped; others recount stories of narrowly escaping sexual assault.
But what has really hit a nerve is the empty chair in the photo. The chair has sparked a powerful conversation online, including a viral hashtag #TheEmptyChair.

NPR's Renee Montagne spoke to Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men: And The Rise of Women, about the significance of the hashtag and how it's shedding light on a movement of people speaking publicly and frankly about experiences with sexual assault.

---

Interview Highlights

On the symbolism of the empty chair
It serves so many purposes. First, it's a rebuke, like a classic rebuke. You know, here ... history, America, the patriarchy, whatever you want to call it, has made it difficult for women to speak their truth. So there's a chair that represents silence, something that didn't happen. It's also the opposite of that, which is an invitation, you know: "Come sit in this chair." ... Social media, the hashtag "EmptyChair" basically is saying, "All of you, it's time to speak up now. Walk up to this chair, sit down like the rest of us. There's a sisterhood here, waiting to greet you and share your stories."
On the visual effect of the cover
This is technically a story about Bill Cosby, but when you look at the cover, visually it transmits something different. There are women of all ages, ranging from 40 to 80; there are women of all races on this cover. There are women of all visual styles; they're all wearing black, but they're not wearing the same dress. ... So what this is saying is assault can happen to anyone. Here's a historical archive, not just of Bill Cosby's actions, but of women who have been assaulted generally.
On what struck her about the hashtag
I guess what struck me is the phenomenon that you can trace people's stories back to them. You know, Twitter is completely public. This is not a private forum for women to gather together. This is not one woman sort of clearing her throat and bravely coming forward. This is people under their own names, under their Twitter handles, saying this happened to me or a version of this happened to me or even just cheering the women on.
On whether #TheEmptyChair moment will last
I think this moment is going to last. ... [It] is unresolved and very interesting and, right now, intention. I'm not talking about the Bill Cosby story anymore. ... The way this story has come out, apart from the Cosby story, is sexual assault on campus. And right now I think you have this moment where woman feel simultaneously very vulnerable. ... There's been so much news about sexual assault on campus. That's a story that really has invigorated the feminist movement in the last couple of years. On the other hand, women also feel empowered. ... The best example of this is Emma Sulkowitz, a recent graduate of Columbia University. ... She wants people to pay attention to her abuse. ... She's also owning her abuse, turning it into art, really identifying herself with it and using it to make a statement.
On how #TheEmptyChair connects to issues of sexual assault on campus
The cover and the empty chair tie this whole story together. Because the cover is historical — you see that the women are a bit older. And then the empty chair ties into social media — that taps into the sexual assault on campus movement. So you've got ... a kind of feminist history put together from beginning to right now.

Link to the actual article:
http://www.npr.org/2015/07/30/427458729/-theemptychair-amplifies-conversation-about-sexual-assault

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.

Dress Code If You Are Going To Court

Dress Code If You Are Going to Court

Just so you know, no bedroom slippers if you are going to court, whether you are the defendant, a witness or  if you are going to be a juror.

The dress code may be different “up north” but down here in the south we like ‘em” to dress up, bless our hearts, I am sure glad about that.

Georgia Courts Enforce Dress Codes

Suzanne Monyak, Daily Report

July 6

Gerald Weber John Disney/Daily Report

If you are planning on entering a Georgia courthouse this summer, leave the tank tops and shorts at home.

Different courthouses have different rules, though the Bibb County Courthouse in Macon seems to have one of the toughest policies—and the most detailed.

According to the dress code posted on its website, many things are prohibited, including: tank tops, halter tops, sleeveless T-shirts, muscle shirts, shorts, ripped jeans, low-riding pants, camouflage clothing, sweatpants and track suits, more piercings than one earring per ear, hats (except for religious purposes), bedroom shoes or slippers, and clothing that is either too baggy or too tight, as well as clothing with obscene or gang-related images or symbols. The policy also mandates that skirts may be no shorter than two inches above the knee, all women and post-pubescent girls must wear bras, all pants must be supported by a belt or suspenders, and all shirts and blouses must be tucked in. Undergarments, the abdomen and cleavage may not be visible.

"This is a place of business and in a place of business, proper dress should be worn. The court should have more respect than to dress inappropriately in their [the judges'] presence," said Major Harry Colbert of the Bibb County Sheriff's Office, who is in charge of the courthouse dress code policy.

According to Colbert, about one person a day is turned away from the courthouse for a dress code violation, most commonly young men wearing shorts or sagging pants, he said. However, due to recent media coverage of the courthouse's dress code policy, he said that number has been reduced to about two to three dress code violators a week.

Colbert said that if an individual is only attending to business in the clerk's office of the Bibb County Courthouse—located on the first floor away from the courtrooms—the deputy at the courthouse may employ more leniency to the rules at his or her discretion. Additionally, if a dress code violator has been subpoenaed to court and does not have time to go home and change clothing, the deputy will make an exception and allow the individual into the courthouse.

A similarly thorough dress code policy was ordered by the district court judges for all courthouses in the Southern District of Georgia, which includes the courthouses in Augusta, Brunswick, Dublin, Savannah, Waycross and Statesboro. This policy, signed by Chief Judge Lisa Godbey Wood in January 2014, bans from the courthouses bare feet, shorts, tank tops and sleeveless shirts, belly-baring tops, offensive clothing and tattoos, and clothes and body parts that are dirty.

The judicial order goes further to provide an additional dress code for those entering a courtroom. Males must wear trousers, a collared shirt, shoes and socks. Females must wear slacks, dresses or skirts no shorter than two inches above the knee, and shirt sleeves must be at three-quarter length and have a "business-like appearance." Jeans are prohibited in the courtrooms.

In Fulton County Superior Court and DeKalb County Superior Court, there is no specifically enforced dress code policy, but rather a set of guidelines for the public to use as suggestions. It is at each individual judge's discretion to enforce a dress code in his or her own courtroom.

According to Gerry Weber, senior staff counsel at the Southern Center for Human Rights and an adjunct law professor specializing in constitutional litigation and First Amendment law, certain dress codes could be a violation of the public's right of access to courts, depending on how that dress code is enforced. For example, he said, if the dress code is vague and the court fails to provide the public with sufficient notice of the rules, the public could be unjustly blocked from observing a public hearing.

Weber noted that just posting the dress code on the courthouse website would not be considered sufficient notice.

"It's not sufficient for people who don't have Internet access or don't know to go on the website," he said.

He added that if an individual arrives at court to observe a hearing and is asked to go home and change, in his view, the hearing should not be conducted in his or her absence.

Hollie Manheimer, executive director of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation, expressed her concerns for the possibly subjective nature of a dress code, which at the Bibb County Courthouse is enforced by deputies.

"While courts may impose reasonable restrictions on dress, any dress code or policy should not be used to deter citizen access to any courthouse. Also, when applied, any dress code or policy must be applied evenly, and cannot be used to bar someone a sheriff, marshal or other court official simply does not like," Manheimer wrote in a comment. "While not usually problematic on their face, the application of policies such as these is very difficult and as a result sometime unfairly deny citizens access to courtrooms."

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.