Body language is an
important means of communication to most species. Critical of course when two
creatures meet, but also in general day to day contacts. This is especially
true in social species with constant contacts between conspecifics.
Reading other species body
language is critically important too. Your dog can read you almost like the
proverbial book. It may recognize some words, but it’s your body language and
intonation rather than words that is being understood. Or on occasion
misunderstood and you may have the scars to prove it.
Human reliance on the
spoken word has apparently relegated the reading of each other’s body language
to very much a minor role. At least, many of us would claim that if we’re
asked. But relying on your “gut instinct” or first impression of a person is
gaining some respectability in the literature. We’ve gone along with that by
and large even though we used to be told not to.
An interesting question
arises as to how fast do we learn to read body language? We learn to speak quite
slowly. We learn to read even more slowly. So where does learning to read body
fit in?
Much body language is
subtle and that must slow down the learning process. Learning to lie in body is
rather more difficult than learning to lie in speech. A good actor is someone
whose profession is lying very convincingly. Learning the words is the easy
part. The expression by intonation, cadence and body action come together to
make them convincing.
Mime is a great example of
using body language to tell a story and all stories express emotion of various
types. In a recent paper, Ross et al in
last weeks PLoS ONE used actors and mime to check out the rate of progress in
reading body for a group of 121 children and adults (1).
The actors wore tight
fitting black suits and mimed to express emotions such as anger, sadness, happiness and fear.
No white faces with makeup which might give clues, because reading faces is
something babies do very early (as does your dog). To muddy the water more, the
actors had reflective markers that were used in low light conditions to give a
basic figure structure. Rather like a stick figure if one were to connect the
light dots.
The group of participants of
4 to 18-years olds were asked to choose the emotion of the figure in full light
and then in the point light outline figures. Then the data was pored over,
graphed and pored over some more. At 4 no one was very good at picking up on
the emotion expressed by the body language. By 18 they were better. Full light
figures were easier to read correctly than point light outlines.
The excitement though is in
the rate of learning to read body. The data showed a steep rise to 10-years old
and then a slowly improving rise through 18. Full light scores were better, but the change
from rapid learning to slowly improving occurred at 10 still. The slow
improvement was slightly faster for the point outline figures, but not by much.
So it seems that we can be
slower to learn body than to read and that we don’t become competent until our
teenage years.
