Angelina Jolie's Awkward Pose on the Red Carpet

What is this all about?  This has become the body language issue of the week!

It is meant to be sexy. When a beautiful woman shows "more" skin that is usually covered by fabric, guys cannot resit the urge to look, and hope for more and more skin. It does not matter if the woman is in a pioneer dress to the ankles, if we see the skin of the lower leg, it has the same effect.  Guys are very primitive when it comes to sexuality. There is a lesson here for every woman.

The best at this was... believe it or not... Jessica Rabbit...

Off course it is a whole lot easier when you're a cartoon.

But it falls short when it is practiced, contrived, and not at all natural. Hindsight is 20/20, but if she would have consulted me about the pose I would have told her to move around naturally in a circle when the photographers wanted a shot of her in the dress, move into the pose, and immediately out of the pose, and under no circumstances hold the pose.  The photographers would have caught her at her most sexual and it would have seemed natural.  Also notice how she holds her head and her facial expressions, she is going for a certain coy look.  A look that does not fit with the setting, it would work great for the after Oscar party, but not on the red carpet.  

What she does great is the angles with her arm...

◦

Angelina Jolie's Awkward Pose on the Red Carpet

Body Language Expert on Missing Firefighter's Wife

To watch the actual video click on this the link, Body language expert on missing firefighter's wife.

A firefighter's wife revealed very little information about the case of her husband's disappearance, during a news conference on Monday.

Detectives in Maine said they suspect foul play in the disappearance of 31-year-old Jerry Perdomo, who's been missing since Feb. 16. 

◦

Body Language Expert on Missing Firefighter's Wife

Tragic School Shooting: "He had no emotion on his face, he was just shooting"

"He had no emotion on his face, he was just shooting," a Chardon student told WKYC.


Travis Carver, another student present in the cafeteria at the time said the expression on T.J. Lane's face was "straight determination."


How did the shooter get to this point?
How much of this is personality?  Was he a sociopath?


These are the type of questions we (and the media) will be asking ourselves in the coming months and days.


Some of the things we are hearing from students and people who knew him are:


"...quiet loner who may have been bullied..."


"...He pretty much sticks to himself but does have some friends and has never been in trouble over anything that we know about."


"...17-year-old quiet and sweet, although others said he had a temper..."


"He would never really talk about his family" 


"But you can always tell he had a very sad look in his eyes all the time. He usually just kept to himself."


"He never really stood up for himself very much..." 

The mother of a student in Chardon, who asked not to be identified, said her son knew the accused gunman.
"My son's reaction was 'this doesn't surprise me.' T.J. (Lane) was a nice sweet kid who was misunderstood and he probably cracked from being different," she said.

Those of you that have followed the blog for a while can read between the lines of the above statements. Was he teased or bullied?  Who are the "others" who said he had a temper?  Why would he need to stand up for himself?  There is something going on below the surface.  


Other items that are of interest in understanding the shooter:


The shooter listed "primitive hunting" among his interests on his now deleted Facebook page, the newspaper reported.


Court records showed that the suspect's father, Thomas Lane Jr., had been arrested several times for abusing women he had children with.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In rare situations, students who are isolated from their peers, and lose interest in activities they used to like doing, can sometimes become violent. NBC's Chris Jansing reports.◦

Tragic School Shooting: "He had no emotion on his face, he was just shooting"

Tonya Reiman on Imus In the Morning

◦

Tonya Reiman on Imus In the Morning

New Ekman Video: What is Emotion

◦

New Ekman Video: What is Emotion

An Article You Should Check Out: How Waiters Read Your Table

Read More >

◦

An Article You Should Check Out: How Waiters Read Your Table

Facial Recognition Billboard Only Lets Women See the Full Ad

Read More >

◦

Facial Recognition Billboard Only Lets Women See the Full Ad

Valentines Day Didn't Work Out So Well, There Is A Book For That

Primal instinct meets the power of choice in this go-to guide to getting the guy.

The last time you locked eyes with a gorgeous, manly specimen across the room or took a detour past the object of your affection, fluffing your locks on your way to the powder room, you probably didn’t think you were performing an ancient mating dance. Whether the fashion of the day is miniskirts or mammoth hides, the knowing glances, chest puffing, hair tossing, and backside brandishing are all part of a complicated ritual choreographed over epochs and designed for your very survival. Thankfully, evolution has taken care of the hard part, leaving today’s woman with the sometimes daunting task of deciphering the intriguing, often infuriating signals of modern man.

In this smart, funny, and invaluable book, nationally renowned body language expert Tonya Reiman decodes the complicated dating game. While some of us seem to have been born with a razor-sharp “sexual instinct,” the rest of us could use a little practice. Luckily, the formula for dating success is easy to learn. Within these pages, you’ll discover how to display the body language necessary for making solid connections with potential mates, uncover the mysteries of man himself, and find handy new tricks for your attraction arsenal.

Not only that, The Body Language of Dating will teach you how to: Whether you feel like you couldn’t attract a fireman with your head ablaze or just want to give your seasoned connection-rejection ratio a boost, Tonya Reiman will help you shave time, effort, and heartbreak from your mating quest. She didn’t make the rules, but she sure can teach you how to use them.

* Read a guy’s facial expressions, gestures, and posture for clues to his state of mind.

* Tell long-term mates from short-term dates. (Hint: You can often tell just by looking at him!)

* Send silent messages that tug on your hottie’s heartstrings.

* Save yourself from losers like Not-Interested Nate and Stalker Steve and get straight to Mr. Right (or Mr. Right Now).

* Wield the science of scent in any social situation.

Whether you feel like you couldn’t attract a fireman with your head ablaze or just want to give your seasoned connection-rejection ratio a boost, Tonya Reiman will help you shave time, effort, and heartbreak from your mating quest. She didn’t make the rules, but she sure can teach you how to use them.

◦

Valentines Day Didn't Work Out So Well, There Is A Book For That

Mimi Alford: Her Affair with JFK

I've gotten a couple of emails asking about Mimi Alford asking if I saw any signs she was making this up. I'll have to say I do not see ANY signs of deception.

 In fact, seeing the truth here can help us see deception in the future. Take a look at this video I chose at random.



It is a great video because Barbara makes it clear (along with others) that she is wrote the book for the money- What I see is no hesitation in her answers and it does not appear rehearsed.  She does not deny that she did this for money, but gives more dignified reasons why she chose to do this now.

Let's suppose for a minute she was lying about the affair, what would we expect to see if she was being less than truthful or embellishing the events?

• We'd likely see some signs she found the attention pleasurable.
• The description of the events (which you'd have to see in other videos) would not seem so ordinary; or rather, there might be more 'action' and it would either be portrayed either as more violent or romantic depending if the person telling the story would also want to play the part of the victim or the princess.
• There would likely be more pauses between the question(s) being asked and when she begins to answer the question.  In her mind she'd have to give some thought to the answer(s).
• There also would be some 'new' information offered.  When the media starts to focus on a story and a person, there are endless interviews where the person is asked the same questions over and over again. It is tedious.  If someone is willing to make up a story, there can be a need to please, and the embellishments become bigger in subtle and not so subtle ways.

There is also another psychology principal that relates to lying we see here.  Often times we hear lies but are unwilling to confront or question the lie because there are usually consequences to confronting the person being deceptive.  Think of the wife who 'knows' their husband is seeing another woman. Here we have the reverse of that.  We all know at some intuitive level she is being honest, but there are some people that want to say she is being deceptive, so their beloved and heroic JFK can remain untarnished.  

The 'girls' on The View interviewed her with mock contempt in order to be confrontational. I would think they would treat her with more compassion, because what happened to her was not the normal way someone would lose their virginity, and how she was treated as a young woman was wrong. 

◦

Mimi Alford: Her Affair with JFK

Secret Service and Protection: Danger Detection Articles, APA Journal of Emotion

Two articles stand out, and when combined with psychology profiles of potential threats could prove to be life saving.

Not just another face in the crowd: Detecting emotional schematic faces during continuous flash suppression.


To test whether threatening visual information receives prioritized processing, many studies have examined visual search for emotional schematic faces. Still, it has remained unclear whether negative or positive schematic faces are processed more efficiently. We used continuous flash suppression, a variant of binocular rivalry, to render single emotional schematic faces invisible and measured whether negative or positive faces have an advantage in accessing awareness. Across three experiments, positive faces were detected more quickly than negative faces. A fourth experiment indicated that this positive face advantage was unrelated to the valence of the face stimuli but due to the relative orientation of the mouth curvature and the face contour. These findings demonstrate the impact of configural stimulus properties on perceptual suppression during binocular rivalry and point to a perceptual confound present in emotional schematic faces that might account for some ambiguous results obtained with schematic face stimuli in previous studies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).
http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2012-03015-001/


Memory and attention for social threat: Anxious hypercoding-avoidance and submissive gaze aversion.


Rivalry for dominance is a recurrent challenge in human social interaction. During these social dominance interactions, some people rapidly break eye contact, whereas others merely try to avoid such eye-to-eye confrontations. The first is an example of submissive gaze aversion, whereas the second reflects anxious gaze avoidance. We tested these distinct forms of gaze behavior within a social-memory setting and show that anxious individuals vigilantly attend to, superiorly remember, and subsequently avoid social threats (i.e., angry faces). Furthermore, submissive individuals, as indexed by high trait anxiety and low trait anger, exhibit rapid gaze aversion from facial anger. Mechanisms of hypervigilance–avoidance thus seem to underlie natural gaze behavior and enhanced memory for threat in anxiety. Accordingly, we propose the term hypercoding-avoidance, which describes how anxious individuals habitually scan their immediate social environment for threat, remember its location, and subsequently avoid it. Moreover, this is the first experimental evidence showing that submissive gaze aversion is distinct from anxious gaze avoidance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).
http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2012-03017-001/

◦

Secret Service and Protection: Danger Detection Articles, APA Journal of Emotion

Missing Ayla Reynolds: Blood Found and How I Continue to be Perplexed by Mom's Demeanor

Ayla Reynolds Case: Blood Found in Home Belongs to Missing Girl

Every time mother I see the mother of this child I see happiness/joy in her facial expressions, oh and by the way, she couldn't complete the lie detector test...



Then there is this odd statement from the family, that simply does not make sense on so many levels:

"What [police] were unwilling to confirm to the press, but left to our discretion, is that it has already been determined to be Ayla's blood," the statement said. "Even in light of this evidence we are more determined than ever to find out what has happened to Ayla and we still cling to the hope that she is alive and will be returned to us. We urge anyone that has information about Ayla to come forward now and unburden yourself of the truth."◦

Missing Ayla Reynolds: Blood Found and How I Continue to be Perplexed by Mom's Demeanor

New Issue of Journal of Nonverbal Behavior

New Issue of Journal of Nonverbal Behavior.
Volume 36 Number 1 is now available on Springer Link.

An article I found interesting:

Secrets and Lies: Involuntary Leakage in Deceptive Facial Expressions as a Function of Emotional Intensity

Darwin (1872) hypothesized that some facial muscle actions associated with emotion cannot be consciously inhibited, particularly when the to-be concealed emotion is strong. The present study investigated emotional “leakage” in deceptive facial expressions as a function of emotional intensity. Participants viewed low or high intensity disgusting, sad, frightening, and happy images, responding to each with a 5 s videotaped genuine or deceptive expression. Each 1/30 s frame of the 1,711 expressions (256,650 frames in total) was analyzed for the presence and duration of universal expressions. Results strongly supported the inhibition hypothesis. In general, emotional leakage lasted longer in both the upper and lower face during high-intensity masked, relative to low-intensity, masked expressions. High intensity emotion was more difficult to conceal than low intensity emotion during emotional neutralization, leading to a greater likelihood of emotional leakage in the upper face. The greatest and least amount of emotional leakage occurred during fearful and happiness expressions, respectively. Untrained observers were unable to discriminate real and false expressions above the level of chance.◦

New Issue of Journal of Nonverbal Behavior

Missing Mom (Susan Powell) was 'in the trunk' Boys said before their Deaths

The two boys of a Utah man suspected in his wife's disappearance and then of killing himself and his sons in an intentional fire were starting to talk about what happened the night their mother vanished, noting she was "in the trunk" of the car, an attorney said.


Authorities say Josh Powell set his home ablaze Sunday, killing himself and his sons -- 5-year-old Braden and 7-year-old Charles -- shortly after the boys were brought to the home by a social worker for a supervised visit.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

See what I said about the case, http://www.spyingforlying.com/2009/12/utah-woman-susan-powell-missing-since.html◦

Missing Mom (Susan Powell) was 'in the trunk' Boys said before their Deaths

NPR Yesterday: CEO's Voice Can Speak Volumes

Morning Edition co-host Steve Inskeep and NPR's Shankar Vedantam about software that can reportedly detect when a CEO might be trying to hide something during a conference call with investment analysts sent us off on a search for more about the research that Shankar was discussing.

Layered Voice Analysis technology, according to researchers from Duke University and the University of Illinois, seems to be able to pick up on the "vocal dissonance markers" in the tone of a CEO's voice that signal he or she might be shading the truth, trying to not say something or even lying. 

Listen to the interview.


To read the story, Is That CEO Being Honest? Tone Of Voice May Tell A Lot.◦

NPR Yesterday: CEO's Voice Can Speak Volumes

How Musicians (and everybody else through speech) Communicate Emotion

I am often making the comparison of "communication" to music and dancing; especially when we are involved in high stakes interviews and interrogations.  There is an ebb and flow to every conversation and relationship.  As an observer to interviews and interrogations we are taught to notice when emotions and/or energy levels change, because this is significant.

There are those among us, either through either training or because they are a natural truth wizards, that acutely can zero in when the words and emotions do not match up.

To me personally it is revealed much like the fictionalized show Psych, where one of the characters has the extraordinary power of observation and deduction, that he plays off as his psychic ability, the show uses a special effect to highlight an object- to me the words, or gestures, or slips are amplified.

The following video is a metaphor to what we do when finding  lies and deception.  To understand this in the context of music will help you understand it in other areas of your life, and will improve your ability to be a truth detective.

Dan Levitin designed a psychology experiment using a special player piano to analyze and reproduce a performance without expressive elements, and versions in between. When participants ranked their preference of versions it was found they matched the most expressive, in which a musician uses variations in timing, loudness and softness to convey emotion.



Part Two

◦

How Musicians (and everybody else through speech) Communicate Emotion