Here is an insight into some of the latest studies on how we can use body language to our advantage in every day life.

Your body expresses emotion better than your face

We all grow up learning how to deal with each other based on facial expressions. And yet, that might not at all be the best way to judge other people’s emotions.

Researchers from Princeton performed a very simple experiment. They asked study participants to judge from photography whether that person is feeling joy, loss, victory or pain. Now some photographs showed facial expressions only, some showed body language and some both.

“In four separate experiments, participants more accurately guessed the pictured emotion based on body language — alone or combined with facial expressions — than on facial context alone.”

Extremely positive and extremely negative emotions are especially hard to distinguish from each other, explains head researcher Todorov.

Now, it gets even more interesting. Body language isn’t just something we have to learn. Most emotional expressions come built into our system. For example, scientists from British Columbiaobserved congenitally blind people at the Paralympics.

So, if body language is both so ancient and ingrained and also so powerful to express our true emotions, how can we use it better in our every day lives to achieve what we want?

Amy Cuddy from Harvard has answers for us:

Body language changes who you are – literally

 Amy Cuddy explains some of the most peculiar happenings of body language. Cuddy focuses a lot on the business world and how body language is helpful for us here and the possibilities seem to have no boundaries.

Now Cuddy’s research reveals a bunch of extremely interesting things. The first is that expressing more powerful poses helps us get better jobs, makes us feel better and makes us overall more successful.

And yet, it goes a lot further than to just change the positing of your legs or arms. Cuddy explains that inside our bodies, actual changes are happening as our body language changes. These changes largely have to do with hormones.

The two hormones in question are:

• ·Testosterone: The “power” hormone, which amongst lots of other things helps us to be a better leader, have more focus and attention.
• ·Cortisol: The “stress” hormone, which amongst lost of other things makes us less re-active to stress, makes us feel overwhelmed and powerless.

Here is what Cuddy’s experiment contained:

They brought people into a room. For two minutes, they would either perform a powerful pose or a powerless pose. Then they would go on into performing a job interview. The results were absolutely stunning:

Neutral recruiters, who didn’t know who performed which pose, consistently picked only those that previously performed the powerful poses as people they would want to hire.

On top of that, the actual hormone levels of people changed dramatically.

According to Cuddy, here findings show that changing our body language doesn’t just change our outcomes. It changes who we are as people. So instead of “faking until you make it”, her advice is:

Fake it until you become it.

This story originally appeared on Buffer

(Image resource:Unsplasch.com)