NLPhilia Blog

We’ve intuited for ages that faces reflect personalities, and that we can “tell just by looking at them” what a person is really like. Some new research is bearing out our intuition, at least in the domain of aggression:

Volunteers viewed photographs of faces of men for whom aggressive behavior was previously assessed in the lab. The volunteers rated how aggressive they thought each person was on a scale of one to seven after viewing each face for either 2000 milliseconds or 39 milliseconds.

The photographs were very revealing: Volunteers’ estimates of aggression correlated highly with the actual aggressive behavior of the faces viewed, even if they saw the picture for only 39 milliseconds.

Facial Features May Predict Volatility is on Psych Central.

A recent article on the Lingformant blog points to some compelling new research on how we parse gestures:

Your ability to make sense of Groucho’s words and Harpo’s pantomimes in an old Marx Brothers movie takes place in the same regions of your brain, says new research funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), one of the National Institutes of Health.

You can read the synopsis at Words, Gestures Are Translated by Same Brain Regions.

OK, so it isn’t NLP-related, but I know there are those of us who run trainings and who manage practice groups and such, and there are times when it’s useful to have professional-looking name tags for the folks in the room. So I’d like to draw your attention to FreeNameTags.net. They have more than 60 ready-to-use printable name tags that you can download and print for free. (They take Avery 5395 or compatible adhesive labels, or plain paper.)

The Employee name tags might be great for associate trainers or other helpers you’ve got, and the Hello tags for your participants. Unless you’ve got an interesting sense of humor, of course.

Incidentally, the folks who run that site have lots of other free printable stuff for your business, too.

(Thanks, Lifehacker!)

Sorry… there’s just no better title for this post. I’m talking about the punctuation mark that looks like : .

In the spirit of a couple of recent posts on punctuation (the use of the comma and the apostrophe), I’d like to refer you to DumbLittleMan’s Guide to Colon Use.

The high points are the following nine, though there are a few more:

1. To introduce a list
2. To introduce direct speech
3. When showing an example
4. To offer a conclusion
5. To explain something more fully
6. To Introduce a subtitle
7. As a substitution for a conjunction
8. To link independent clauses
9. To Introduce a question

(Hey, I used one to introduce a list!)

Get the full story at The DumbLittleMan Guide to Colon Use.

Cognitive Daily recently posted some research that may give us an easier way to improve our ability to tell when other people are lying to us:

But what if there was a shortcut in sniffing out a lie, relying on our own instinctual behavior? Would it be possible to improve the lie-detecting abilities of ordinary people without all that training? A team led by Mariëlle Stel had a hunch that our tendency to mimic the physical and facial expressions of the people we are speaking to might help us to tell when they are lying.

It isn’t what you are probably thinking. I think you’ll be surprised. Check it out:

Is There an Easier Way to Detect Lies Than What You See on TV?

Eyes for Lies points to a sweet video by Dr. David Matsumoto, “Characteristics of Basic Emotions”. In it, Dr. Matsumoto explains the differences between the seven “basic” or “universal” emotions and the rest.

Amanda Ripley, author of the truly excellent book, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why, is, it appears, also interested in the education of children. In a very recent blog post titled “What Makes a Teacher Great?“, she refers us to some conclusions on the subject:

Finally, we can identify extraordinary teachers—with data, not hearsay—and investigate what they are doing differently. We can even make more of them. The question is, Will we?

Her blog entry points to an extensive and well-written article in The Atlantic, also written by Ms. Ripley.

(See also: Teach for America)

Do you know any teachers like this?

I read an article today on Stepcase Lifehack and found myself impressed. The author, a teacher, developed a model of how to help children be happy:

…every Mother’s Day I would ask my students to give me advice on being a mother. They were to think about things their mother or guardian did for or with them that made them feel happy or loved. The classroom would go silent as the students wrote intensely for longer than they had ever written before. Often smiles would appear on their faces as they reflected on the happy experiences they were remembering. After reading their responses I would add to my list all the ideas they mentioned. Surprisingly, many of the responses were the same. Year after year, in every country I taught, and in every type of demographic, the students were saying the same things and had the same message…

It brought to mind the woman I love. One of the things I find so compelling about her is her focus on her kids’ happiness. They’re lucky to have her.

The Top 10 Things Children Really Want Their Parents To Do With Them

In the same vein as my previous post on the use of commas, I once again offer you a way to make your writing appear more intelligent: How To Use An Apostrophe, from The Oatmeal (courtesy this post from LifeHacker). It’s a nice, simple, visual guide.

Personally, I think it’s still too complicated. According to Michael D. C. Drout, professor of Linguistics at Wheaton College and author of several of my favorite Modern Scholar Series lectures from Recorded Books, the apostrophe’s job is to indicate that one or more letters are missing. When you understand that English used to have a dative case which was marked with the suffix “-es”, and that languages tend to “lose” the last unstressed vowel in a word over time, you understand why we tag possessives with “‘s” now.

For your amusement, check out Apostrophe Abuse.

I recently got ahold of Jonathan Altfeld’s “Automatic ‘Yes'” CD set, the subject of which is the powerful skill called “state chaining”. (I won’t define or describe it here. Hit the link for a full description of the course, and buy your copy before the special sale ends.) I was fortunate enough to have been exposed to the basics of Jonathan’s approach in the Master Practitioner training he co-trained with Doug O’Brien a little while back, and it was something I wanted to play with and get better at doing. Before the end of the training, I realized I’d been doing it in certain contexts all along, in shorter chains, and I hadn’t realized it.

Listening to the CDs reminded me that I’d never really spelled out how I think about how I do it, so I resolved to put it here. I’ll start with one particular aspect: how to shift someone from a high-energy unresourceful state, such as anger, to something a little more flexible.

Many years ago, I was an Emergency Medical Technician working for a private ambulance company, and I was stationed at a state psychiatric hospital. I happened to walk in on a training they were having for their nurses and technicians: Bruce Chapman’s Handle With Care Behavior Management System. I was immediately captivated by Master Bruce’s teaching style and his philosophy. I arranged to take the training for myself. What I’m about to share here is roughly based on something I learned in that class and in much subsequent reading of Chinese philosophical work such as the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu and The Art of War by Sun Tzu.

Tai Chi Tu (click image for SVG source)

Here we have the Tai Chi Tu, commonly known as the “Yin/Yang symbol”. This is the Taoist in-a-nutshell representation of the way the universe works. You’ve seen it many times, no doubt, but I imagine nobody’s really explained it. I’ll give it a shot.

First, you’ll notice that it’s a circle. No beginning, no end. Now, pick a spot, either at the top or the bottom, where either the black or the white is almost non-existent. Moving clockwise, you’ll see that the color you chose increases while its opposite color decreases… and that as soon as it gets to the point where it can’t hold any more, you’ll see that the opposite color starts to kick in, PLUS, there’s a little “seed” of the opposite color contained in the fullest part of the swell.

Now, I can’t find the citation at the moment, but there’s an old saying that hard winds don’t blow all morning and heavy rains don’t last all day. Physics tells us that energy constantly changes form. Biology tells us that we change or we go extinct. It isn’t just that change always happens; it’s that it must happen. So when I’m in front of an angry person, I know I don’t have to do anything at all to get them to stop being angry. All I have to do is get rapport, pay close attention to when their angry state changes to another state, catch the transition point, and steer it to where I want it to go. The best part is, if I can figure out what the “seed” of the next state is, knowing that it’s already there, I can speak to it… drawing attention, and therefore the other person’s energy, toward it… making sure that it really is what’s next.

Anger, and most other high-energy emotional states, cannot last long. It’s physically impossible to maintain it. It costs too much. Anyone who claims they’ve been angry about something for years and years… they aren’t angry. They may be bitter, but they aren’t angry. Anger is a flash, not a smoulder. (This is one of the ways the psych nurses know when someone is faking a condition, and why we keep people for observation for up to 72 hours.)

Jonathan suggests in the Automatic “Yes” CDs that, to move someone out of a high-energy unresourceful state, we should turn it up rather than try to turn it down. I agree. Several times I’ve been called to the psychiatric unit where I work because a patient is scaring the staff and the other patients despite the fact that he isn’t actually doing anything. He’s got a clenched jaw, closed fists, and knitted brow, and he’s pacing, and he’s been doing it all day. When I respond, all I do is engage the guy in some sort of conversation and then do something that I think will annoy him. Not anger him; just irritate him. It adds energy to his stuck state, and then he has to choose which side of the fence he’s going to crawl off on. Is he going to start throwing things and kicking walls and cursing, or is he going to start talking? As soon as he gets to the decision point, I lead him to the state I want him to have. Usually I just tell him what it is: “It’s gotta be frustrating,” I say, or “I’d be scared too if I were in your place.” Sometimes I offer a path to follow instead: “You just have to wonder what’s going on, but the more questions you ask the more answers you get.”

(Of course, I’m ready if he decides to go the other way, too. It’s never actually happened, but if it does, at least he’ll have resolved his stuck state and can work from there.)

I can take these more energetic states and ride/drive them to something a little more useful for the other person and a lot safer for those around them. Which is, essentially, what state chaining is about.

I strongly recommend Jonathan’s “Automatic ‘Yes'” CD set to you and to anyone else who wants to take their social skills to the next level. And I want to thank him publicly for helping me to think more clearly about one of the things I’ve been doing without realizing it.

The US Federal Trade Commission requires that I add: While Jonathan did ask me for a product review, it should also be noted that I bought my copy of this audio program directly from his Web site, and that my recommendation is not a form of payment for the product.