One of the most serious mistakes a novice in body language can make is to interpret a solitary gesture in isolation of other gestures or other circumstances. For example, scratch¬ing the head can mean a number of things -dandruff, fleas, sweating, uncertainty, forget¬fulness or lying, depending on the other gestures that occur at the same time, so we must always look at gesture clusters for a correct reading.
Like any other language, body language consists of words, sentences and punctuation. Each gesture is like a single word and a word may have several different meanings. It is only when you put the word into a sentence with other words that you can fully under¬stand its meaning. Gestures come in ‘sen¬tences’ and invariably tell the truth about a person’s feelings or attitudes. The ‘perceptive’ person is one who can read the non-verbal sentences and accurately match them against the person’s verbal sentences.
Figure 5 shows a common critical evalua¬tion gesture cluster. The main one is the hand¬-to-face gesture, with the index finger pointing up the cheek while another finger covers the mouth and the thumb supports the chin. Further evidence that this listener is critical of the speaker is seen by the fact that the legs are tightly crossed and the arm crosses the body (defensive) while the head and chin are down (hostility). This non-verbal ‘sentence’ says something like, ‘I don’t like what you are saying and I disagree with you.’
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