Does your body language give you away?
Are you an inveterate eye-roller? Without realising it, do you look upwards when someone you disagree with or don’t like says something that annoys you? How about your tendency to tap your fingers? Do you drum your fingers impatiently when someone is talking too long or saying things you feel are uninformed or just plain wrong? The ability to control your body language would seem to be a key ingredient to social success. Although you may be aware of what you should do, you may be less able to identify those nonverbal behaviours you need to avoid. In a recent study on automatic movements of the eyes and hands, University of Kansas psychologist Lauren Schmitt and colleagues provided intriguing ideas about how to exert control over these inadvertent messages your body language is sending.
Let’s consider in more depth the signals you send off when you don’t control your body language. Let’s begin with that eye roll. It’s hard to imagine a more powerful message than the upward-glancing eyes of a critical member of one’s audience. You’re in the middle of speaking out at a community meeting where an upcoming ballot question is being debated. As you glance around at your listeners, you can’t help but notice the man in the plaid shirt who exchanges an eyeroll with the woman to his right. You don’t know this plaid-shirt clad individual, but it’s clear you’ve said something that has raised his hackles. It would have been fine with you if he’d gone to the mike and stated his opinion in a matter-of-fact manner. We don’t all have to agree all of the time. But when people don’t agree with you, they should at least have the decency to state it outright instead of taking the passive-aggressive route of the eye roll.
It may be fair to say that a true mark of civility is the ability to refrain from using body language to attack or criticise the people with whom we don’t agree. To keep the discourse from taking the unfortunate turn of being impolite or inconsiderate, we all need to be able to listen with an open face, if not open mind. It’s perhaps when you disagree with the people around you that you most need to monitor the little mini-expressions that reveal just how closed your mind is.
The eye roll can also get you in trouble when you
It may be fair to say that a true mark of civility is the ability to refrain from using body language to attack or criticise the people with whom we don’t agree use it in response to a request someone makes for your help. Your boss seems to be piling up one thing after another, and you don’t know where you’re going to find time to tackle even the first assignment you’ve been given. When your boss comes in with yet one more request, you feel your eyes rolling up toward the ceiling before you’ve even had a chance to think about it. This is not a good way to polish up your job ratings.
Finger tapping is another behaviour that you may wish you could excise from your body language vocabulary. The minutes tick by at the weekly staff meeting, and all you can think about it what you’d rather be doing at this very moment other than sitting around listening to everyone else yammer on about their concerns. You’ve already executed the eye roll several times, but now it’s your hand that you can’t seem to control. It just starts tapping all on its own, so it seems.
Schmitt and her collaborators stress the importance of exerting voluntary control over these otherwise involuntary responses, regarding such adaptive ability as “necessary for flexibly adapting behavior to changing environmental demands”. You can probably roll your eyes and tap your fingers as often as you’d like in the privacy of your own home or at the other end of a phone call, because there is no demand to filter your negative facial or bodily reaction. When the environment demands civil, or at least not impolite, responses, then you’ll need to put those controls into action.
Knowing that you’re a chronic eye-roller, though, can help you in exerting the kind of “top-down” or volitional control that the Schmitt et al. team describe. You could even try the “stop” strategy on yourself where you pretend that someone is going to call you out on your eye roll while you’re in the middle of making it. Getting control of your body language may take some effort, but it’s very well worth the work. Susan Krauss Whitbourne is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
—Psychology Today