Princess Diana's Body Language In Iconic Photos, by Body Language Expert Patti Wood

A Body Language Expert Analyzes 13 Iconic Photos of Princess Diana

For the full article with the photos just scroll down to the link. 

It's not just hindsight that's 20/20—so too is body language, at least if you know what to look for. No one can read non-verbal cues quite so adeptly as our body language expert, Patti Wood, MA who helps us review the evolution of the doomed relationship between Prince Charles and his first wife, Diana, Princess of Wales.

A subtle warning sign

Theirs was to have been a storybook romance, or so it seemed. When Prince Charles met Lady Diana Spencer for the first time in 1977, he was the 29-year-old heir apparent to the British throne, and she was the teenaged kid sister of the woman on whom the young prince had set his sights. Although Charles was the "most eligible bachelor in the world," Lady Sarah Spencer was indifferent to the young prince.

It wasn't until two years after that relationship fizzled that Prince Charles finally took an interest in Lady Diana. A brief courtship began, and six months later, the prince proposed. Here in late February 1981, right after announcing their engagement, the two pose informally outside Buckingham Palace, with Diana gently and passively resting her hand palm down on the crook of the Prince's arm while the prince hides one hand inside his jacket. "It's an early and subtle warning sign of Charles' lack of commitment," Wood notes. "He's attempting to make the connection less intimate."

Destined for doom

"During the engagement so many years ago, I could already see something wasn't quite right between Prince Charles and Lady Diana," Wood tells Reader's Digest, pointing out how in this photo taken during the engagement, Diana is gazing away from Charles, her eyes hooded and looking so sad it appears tears are mere seconds away. Wood also notes how Diana's shoulders are stiff and up near her ears while her arms are tense and still. It's as if a "fear" response has been triggered, and she's frozen in place. "She may be fearful of the cameras," Wood points out, "but notice how Prince Charles [who arguably has been getting comfortable with cameras all his life], is also holding his arms stiffly by his side. It's as if these two already know their impending nuptials are a mistake, but they're powerless to do anything about it. Don't miss these 10 facts you probably don't know about Diana, Princess of Wales

And so they lived happily ever after...?

It was to have been the wedding of the century, nay, a wedding for the ages. And, in a sense, it was. Nearly 1 billion television viewers in 74 countries watched the two exchange vows at St. Paul's Cathedral in the presence of 2,650 guests as they wed on July 29, 1981. But that was just the first day of the rest of their lives, and judging by the dynamics at work in this photo of the newlyweds kissing on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, things were about to slide downhill, fast. "See how she's doing all the work?" Wood points out to Reader's Digest. She's clearly passionate about her new husband, but he does not share her ardor. It's as if she's literally "bending over backward" to hold his attention, while he responds with a nearly chaste peck on the lips, his eyes closed, his passion either in-check or non-existent.

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/lifestyle/smart-living/a-body-language-expert-analyzes-13-iconic-photos-of-prince-charles-and-princess-diana/ss-BB18uRFR?li=AAggFp5

The Body Language Expert Patti Wood, MA  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.
     

Does the Voice Show Emotion Accurately?

Your Voice and Emotion

I love this topic. I am known as a body language expert, but my degrees are broader and include all of the nonverbal communication. The skill I use most often in my "reads" of people is detecting emotion and honesty via paralanguage. When I follow murder trials for the media or analyze public figures' speeches or events like apology statements, I place the paralanguage read as an essential part of the analysis.

1.   How much emotion does our voice reveal? Please note any critical studies on this subject matter that contribute to your answer. If it doesn't convey emotion, please explain why. 

Are voices reveal all our emotions. The seven core emotions (there are more, but the basics are ) Anger, Fear, Disgust, Happiness, Sadness, Surprise, and Contempt, and more.  Research shows that people more accurately interpret someone's emotion from just their voice than they were from listening to and observing or just observing them.

(Here is one of the studies https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171010105639.htm)

Human voices convey emotions much more quickly than words. It takes just 1/10 of a second for our brains to begin to recognize emotions from paralanguage (Paralanguage in the science of all the nuances of the voice including breath, tone, tempo, volume level, pauses, etc.) And we pay more attention to the emotions of vocalizations, like laughter or grows, or crying than we do emotions expressed via words. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/01/160118134938.htm   A test for that is to cry or giggle to a baby or a dog and see how they respond. Or note how, when someone you love calls you, sometimes you know that something is wrong in their lives just from the way they greet you on the call.

2.   Can you provide 3-4 examples (if there are any) about times when voice conveys emotion? 

Voice is one of the primary pathways for expressing emotions. You can see how you can say the same word to portray many different emotions just by how you express it vocally. Say the word "Really" with interest, excitement, concern, worry, sympathy, and annoyance.

Now say, "Congratulations" filled with joy for someone. Now say it sarcastically,

Now imagine you are consoling someone for a loss and say, "I am so sorry for your loss." Without any emotion and now say it with emotion.

When I analyze influential people's apology statements to the media, I listen to them, and I am sorry statement to hear how they say it. (If they do) and it tells me so much about whether they feel remorse. )

A fun example is how Joey on Friends says, "How are you doing?" By vocally emphasizing the YOU that makes the listener feel that he is speaking directly to them in a suggestive sexual way. ( And yes he has a facial expression that goes with it)

 

3.   My thought on this is that I wonder how a wearable can detect the more subtle changes in your voice. When you're sad or nervous, your voice may shake—but on a day-to-day basis, how might something like this be useful for people?  4 What is more subtle ways emotion show up in speech? 

 

4.   I think it could help people who struggle with depression and other issues self monitor their emotional state so they can give themselves more self-care.

At this moment,  Under COVID 19  many people are dealing with more stress and anxiety, and depression than under normal circumstances.

This device could help monitor e how they feel before their emotions become more debilitating.  For someone with more severe issues, the device could be life-changing. For example, someone with bipolar disorder could detect if they are going into a depressive or manic state and self soothes by breathing meditating or stepping away from an overstimulating event or stopping dangerous behavior like drinking or gambling, call a friend, or their therapist.

It might help someone that has issues with a temper and dangerous anger issues self-monitor as some people don't hear their voices change. I.e., "I AM NOT YELLING."

It could help someone that is more C corrector on the DISC assessment of behavior differences that are typically not very emotional in their delivery to create more emotional nuisances in their essential communications.

The technology has existed for years in the form of VSA, Voice Stress Analysis to detect deception. Conceivably if you could use the wearable to monitor the stress in your voice to reduce it to be a better liar, this could be dangerous for others, primarily if used by someone on the Dark Triad like a Malignant Narcissists. They already use their skills at reading people to manipulate their delivery to "appear" other than are to feed their need for emotional supply.

5.   Anything else you'd like to add?

You may know this, but I love it. We know that your voice sounds different when you are smiling, a genuine zygomatic smile than when you are "fake" smiling. Your vocal cords and larynx change when you smile.  Research shows that listeners can identify the type of smile someone is displaying based on the sound of their voice alone. (Smile -- And The World Can Hear You, Even If You Hide

7 Quick Ways to Feel More Energetic Without Drugs or Caffeine. How to Use Your Body Language to Feel More Energetic.

7 Quick Ways to Feel More Energetic Without Drugs or Caffeine.

How to Use Your Body Language to Feel More Energetic.

 

 

How you hold your body can actually change how you feel, in less than a  1/40 of second. If you hold and move your body the way you want to feel your bodies chemistry can change in a fraction of a second. Your posture and movement create a message that acts like a doctor’s prescription the message is sent through your neural  synapsis to the brains pharmacy. The brain notes the posture and movements and creates chemicals that match and sends them out into your blood stream so you begin to feel chemically the way your body language is held or moves. If you drag around head down feeling tired your will get the chemicals that make your feel more tired. You think your body language reflects your fatigue and lack of energy but you can change your energy by how you hold and move your body. I have been writing about the biochemistry aspects for over 30 years. (In her Ted Talk Amy Cuddly speaks about Power Poses using research about this phenomenon.

Keep your body language “up.” Up energetic body language is beautifully symbolic–you go up when you’re feeling up. In addition up body language brings your posture up in way that allows more deep full lung capacity breathing with gives you more oxygenated blood, thus more energy. Though the steps may seem wacky, if your are feeling sluggish and just want to lay down and take a nap, these methods can charge you up very quickly.

 

 

Five Quick Ways to Use Your Body Language to Feel More Energetic

1. Take five deep full breaths.  Breath in a count of three, hold for three sounds and let your breath out slowly on the count of three. Make sure your lungs fill up fully.
2. Stand up so and lift your chest up and out.
3. Stand up against a wall and see if you can get your shoulders back against the wall. Pull the shoulders back  so even the tops of the shoulders touch the wall. Now step away from the wall and see if you can stand and walk with the shoulders back.  This posture enlarges the chest allowing the lungs to fill up with air giving your body more oxygen.
4. Bring your hands up and gesture high in the air. The location of your hands also affects other nonverbal behavior. Put your hands at your sides and your energy goes down your voice lowers and can become more monotone, and you tend to move less and show fewer facial expressions. Bring your hands to the level of your waist, and you become calm and centered. Bring your hands up high to the level of your upper chest or above, and your voice goes up; you become animated.

You can have fun for second and pretend you’re a conductor leading and orchestra. Coincidently researches so conductors tend to live longer and they believe one of the reasons is their high gesturing that increases their oxygen. You can pretend like you have just won an Olympic competition and bring both hands up above your head and hold them there for three seconds, lower them then raise them again. You can dance to Pink’s song, “Raise Your Glass”, “YMCA” or Taylor Swifts, “Shake it Off.” All contain up gestures! (I just love the up shake it off body language at the end of Taylor Swifts Shake it Off video! The link to it is hear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfWlot6h_JM

5. With a lot of energy and at a very loud volume read a paragraph of something, even these instructions. Overdo it have fun. Sing the lyrics to the songs in step 4.
6. Make up facial expressions. First bring your eye brows and forehead muscles up and down and up again in a look of surprise. Now smile and open your mouth so you cheeks and the corners of your lips come up.
7. Have you ever notice how children skip and move up when they are happy and filled with energy? They are moving with up body language. See if you can walk across a room with the same upward energy. You don’t have to skip just move so that your energy is up. 

Patti Wood, MA - 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.
     

How Do You Know If You're an Introvert? Being and Introvert in and Extroverted World.

1. At what point in your life did you realize that you were an
Introvert? When I was an undergrad student in Nonverbal Communication at Florida State or Dean of Communication, Dean Clevenger came into our classes to give us the Myers Briggs test. I tested as an extrovert, but when we had our meeting about my results, he told me I was an introvert and why he knew that. Including that I loved going to study in the library every night! He said he wanted me to know I was, in actuality, an introvert. He said he knew I thought it was better to be an extrovert had unknowingly skewed my answers on my Myers Briggs test to be an extrovert. He said he had done the same thing when he first took the test, and he was an introvert. He said, "I know you want to go to grad school, and I want you to know you will thrive because of your intelligence and introversion." Dean Clevenger said, "Be proud of the fact that you gain energy from being alone and don't judge yourself by the Extrovert world standard." He gave me some of the best insights and advice I have ever received that day, and he went on to be a mentor, and later offered me a partnership in a  consulting business he had with another professor. To this day, I hold him to be one o the most exceptional human beings I have ever know. He was a man of strong character and morals and kindness.

2. Did people ever give you a hard time because of your introversion? My mother gave me a hard time my entire childhood and adult life because I was an introvert, and she was an extrovert, and she thought there was something horribly wrong with me. As a child, I was chastised for as she said, "… always having my head in a book." She would constantly berate me for reading and would even rip my book out of my hand and tell me to go out and play with other kids.  Later she wanted me to go down to the clubhouse to the bar and meet a nice divorced man. Even when I was visiting her on my grad school vacations and had textbooks on statistics, I was studying, and she wanted me to go down to the bar and meet a nice man. I never went to the club or bar, that would have been agony for my introverted personality.  This judgment of me was one of the reasons I was so grateful to my Dean for explaining. It was great to be introverted, and there was nothing wrong with me.

 3. What strategies have you evolved to fight back?  In both junior high and high school, the school library staff asked me to work at the school library because I checked out more books than any student that they ever had. So I knew that reading was a good actor, so I kept checking out books, and I would read in my room out of sight of my mother!  I became a keen observer of people and carried a little notebook with me wherever I went to write what I saw about people, mostly in the form of poetry and songs. I also kept a journal. In college the dorm at school that was so noisy because we had sixty girls partying on my floor and the doors of everyone's rooms where open because we had airconditioning, I went to the library. I embraced the quiet and the company of other introverts.  

Later I studied and got degrees to become one of the world's top body language experts.  I embraced being a watcher!

4. Tips for people who are struggling to make peace with their introversion?   Find role models who are introverts.  Keep a diary or journal so you can see how full your internal life is.  Notice how often you are at peace when you are by yourself or with close friends and family and let gratitude for that peace wash over you. Embrace the fact that you can be in the present moment and don't have the leave your house to find energy and engagement. 

Patti Wood, MA - 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.
     

In what circumstances might it be okay to send a breakup text?

In what circumstances might it be okay to send a breakup
Text? n what circumstances might it be okay to send a breakup text?

If your relationship has taken place exclusively in the "virtual world" via texts, phone calls, and or social media," then that is your established form of communication, and it makes sense that's what you would use to end the relationship. If you are concerned or even afraid or your partner's response to a breakout that you think would occur in face to face or a phone call, then, by all means, stay safe and text your desire to end the relationship.  If you have only been dating a brief time and don't feel there is a connection texting your wishes to stop, dating can work. In all other instances, I don't recommend it as it can make ending things far too easy for the texter, and they don't have to deal with the repercussions of their choice. Using a text to stop a serious relationship doesn't give you the full experience of a breakup. Texting goodbye doesn't teach you how to deal with your emotions or how to communicate your feelings nonverbally in an open way, nor does it help you read and deal with the sentiments conveyed nonverbally by the other person. People need to feel what it means to make that choice, so they learn to choose partners more carefully, communicate behaviors that are making them uncomfortable as they occur in relationships, and invest in fixing problems because they know the cost of ending a relationship. 

A sample text you could send someone. 
I am deeply sorry, but I am not feeling what I should be feeling in my heart to continue the relationship. Its nothing you did, its how I think and there is no way to change that. I am grateful for our time together, but I don't wish to continue seeing you or communicating with you. Again, I am sorry.  Bye

 

 

Patti Wood, MA - 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.