Body language: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

This article is about the form of communication, for other meanings see Body Language.

Body language is a broad term for several forms of communication using body movements or gestures, instead of, or as a complement to, sounds, verbal language, or other forms of communication. In turn, it is one category of paralanguage, which describes all forms of human communication that are not language.

Paralanguage including body language has been extensively studied in social psychology. In everyday speech and popular psychology, the term is most often applied to body language that is thought to be involuntary, but in fact the distinction between voluntary and involuntary body language is often blurred: a smile or a wave may be given either voluntarily or involuntarily, for example.

Voluntary Body Language

This is less commonly discussed because it seems unproblematic, refers to movement, gestures and poses intentionally made by the person: smiling, hands, imitating actions, and generally making movements with full or partial intention of making them and a realisation of what they communicate. It can apply to many types of soundless communication, for example, formalized gestures.

This applies to involuntary movements that may give observers cues about what one is really thinking or feeling. The ability to interpret such movements may itself be unconscious, at least for untrained observers.

It is widely believed that involuntary body language is the most accurate way into a person's subconscious. In principle, if people do not realize what they are doing or why they are doing it, it should be possible for a trained observer to understand more of what they are thinking or feeling than they intend — or even more than they realise themselves. Interrogators, customs examiners, and others who have to seek information that people do not necessarily want to give have always relied on explicit or implicit hypotheses about body language. However, this is a field that is fraught with risk of error, and it has also been plagued with plausible but superficial or just plain erroneous popular psychology: just because someone has their legs crossed toward you, it doesn't mean that they want to have sex with you; it could just mean that they are comfortable with you, but it could also be how they always sit regardless of where you are.

Furthermore, it is not possible to tell reliably whether body language has been emitted voluntarily or involuntarily, so to rely too heavily on it is to run the risk of being bluffed.

Research conducted by psychologist Paul Ekman at the end of the 20th Century resolved an old debate about how facial expressions vary between cultures. He was interested in whether, for instance smiling, was a universal phenomenon, or whether there are cultures in which its expression varies. Ekman found that there were several fundamental sets of involuntary facial muscle movements relating to the experience of a corresponding set of emotions: grief, anger, fear, enjoyment and disgust. He also indicates that, whilst the furrowing of the eyebrows when experiencing grief is difficult to perform voluntarily, such expressions can be learnt through practice. Ekman's ideas are described and photographically illustrated in his book Emotions Revealed[1].

The use of video recording has led to important discoveries in the interpretation of microexpressions, facial movements which last a few milliseconds. In particular, it is claimed that one can detect whether a person is lying by interpreting micro-expressions correctly. Oliver Sacks, in his paper The President's Speech, indicated how people who are unable to understand speech because of brain damage are nevertheless able to assess sincerity accurately. He even suggests that such abilities in interpreting human behaviour may be shared by animals such as domestic dogs.

A recent empirical study of people's ability to detect whether another was lying established that some people can detect dishonesty consistently reliably. This study showed that certain convicts, American secret service agents and a Buddhist monk were better at detecting lying in others than most people, and it is postulated that this ability is learned by becoming observant of particular facial microexpressions.

The relation of body language to animal communication has often been discussed. Human paralanguage may represent a continuation of forms of communication that our non-linguistic ancestors already used, or it may be that it has been changed by co-existing with language. Some species of animals are especially adept at detecting human body language, both voluntary and involuntary: this is the basis of the Clever Hans effect (a source of artefact in comparative psychology), and was also the reason for trying to teach the chimpanzee Washoe American Sign Language rather than speech — and perhaps the reason why the Washoe project was more successful than some previous efforts to teach apes human languages.

Body language is a product of both genetic and environmental influences. Blind children will smile and laugh even though they have never seen a smile. The ethologist Iraneus Eibl-Eibesfeldt claimed that a number of basic elements of body language were universal across cultures and must therefore be fixed action patterns under instinctive control. Some forms of human body language show continuities with communicative gestures of other apes, though often with changes in meaning. More refined gestures, which vary between cultures (for example the gestures to indicate "yes" and "no"), must obviously be learned or modified through learning, usually by unconscious observation of the environment.

• Argyle, M. (1990). Bodily communication (2nd edition). New York: International Universities Press. ISBN 0823605515