The Role of Powerful Postures in Everyday Interaction

Reading people is more than just gesture and expression. It also involves posture. This blog tends to focus primarily on gestures and expressions, and we have delved only occasionally into the importance of posture in expressing or detecting various affective states. However, in a comprehensive review of research on nonverbal postures, Dr. Amy Cuddy and…

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Lie Detection in the Media

Learning how to read people extends beyond one on one conversation into the realm of politics and media studies. A recent study published in Science has sought to analyze the ways in which such false stories get promoted and circulated throughout social media. While many news commentators have pointed to the role of automated bots…

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Framing a Reciprocal Interview

What is the impact of offering an interviewee a bottle of water? This seemingly innocuous question actually delves into major questions both with regard to communication but interviewing techniques more specifically. By looking at this basic question in a recent study, Humintell’s Drs. David Matsumoto and Hyisung Hwang were attempting to look at the notion…

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Olympic-Level Emotions

Can the Olympics teach us anything about reading people? Most of these blogs have been devoted to reading people’s emotions when they are being actively concealed, such as during efforts to detect deception. However, the Winter Olympics give us an opportunity to read people exhibiting unfiltered, raw emotions. With emotions as high as they are…

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