Comments by "Christina" (@MargaritaMagdalena) on "Moment judge recognised school friend in dock - BBC News" video.

You don't know what he was thinking when he smiled.
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This body language pseudoscience fad needs to stop.
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@crayzee1372 Forming judgements about things you can't know is kinda silly though.
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@crayzee1372 "Threatening" is not just in "body language" either. There was an experiment where people were shown footage of a group of protesters. If the subjects were told that they are pro-choice, the Republicans thought they looked aggressive, while Democrats thought they were peaceful. When the subjects were told that these were pro-gun demonstrators, the Republicans thought that they looked peaceful, and Democrats thought they looked aggressive. (Source: "How Emotions Are Made" by Lisa Feldman Barrett). In real life, you assess people's emotions by much more than just their "body language", even though you don't notice it. If you use just "body language", you'll often be wrong, and even if you're right, it'll just be a correct guess.
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@crayzee1372 Also, this is video. It's not "the world around you".
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@crayzee1372 You are really into this body language BS aren't you 🥴
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@crayzee1372 That doesn't mean that people communicate everything that's inside them. Only oversocialized 21st-centurists think that people constantly communicate with them. You cannot make judgments about people's inner state.
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@crayzee1372 Also, just because people communicate non-verbally, doesn't mean it's enough to correctly assess their feeling. If you take a picture of a stereotypical "angry" face, and photoshop it onto a picture of a body holding a dirty diaper, people will describe the facial expression as "disgust" rather than "anger". In another experiment, subjects were shown a picture of an actress and three quarters described her face as "sad". But when a little story was added, "she's trying to decide whether she should tell her husband about the rumor that's she's gay before he hears it from someone else", and almost as many subjects now described it as "fearful". So, even though the faces were communicating an emotion, they weren't communicating the exact emotion. You need other information to figure that out. And finally, someone can feel an intense emotion and not show any signs on the outside, even without deliberately hiding it. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
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@crayzee1372 I'm really annoyed by people who get their ideas from the latest fads and think it makes them deep and wise. It's my pet peeve.
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@crayzee1372 It depends on the situation. People can run at you for different reasons. And not everyone who wants to attack you will also look it.
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@crayzee1372 Maybe you're right in your original comment and I was unduly aggressive. But this "body language" fad is still p-ssing me off. I can barely read a comment section without someone analyzing the "body language" of someone in the video. Often they're demonstrably wrong which means they're saying untrue things just to have something to say, and it's also dangerous. If everyone starts imagining emotions in other people's faces we'll get serious problems in life.
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@crayzee1372 The judge is smiling all the time. How can she feel anything positive about this situation? This is a fine example of how much variation there is in emotional expression. Variation is the norm.
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@crayzee1372 About most communication being nonverbal, the "official" figure is 93%, and it's a myth that resulted from a misinterpretation of dr. Albert Mehrabian, professor of psychology at UCLA. His experiments in the 1960s showed that when people talk about their feelings, and their body language doesn't match what they're saying, their words tend to have little meaning, and the listeners rather draw conclusions from body language (38% from voice and 55% from facial expression, hence 93%). Mehrabian: "Please note that this and other equations regarding relative importance of verbal and nonverbal messages were derived from experiments dealing with communications of feelings and attitudes (i.e., like-dislike). Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable."
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@History_Matters I've lived without body language "science" for 32 years, and humanity has lived without it for thousands of years. Just because everyone is suddenly gung ho on "body language" doesn't mean I'll be peer pressured into it myself.
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