The Psychology of Body Language

It is common for as to relate communication with orally presented language. Nevertheless, we should not forget the paralanguage, which refers to all kind of communication that is not verbal. Body language can be defined as a category of paralanguage, which includes body movements and gestures that can be either used with or instead of verbal expressions.

Body language is studied as a part of social psychology, as it is an extremely important tool of communication between social groups. There are differences across the world, but the main principles remain the same and if you were able to express yourself and to gain information using your body language in your country, you will be able to do it anywhere. This ability to understand others from their body movements and gestures is now applied in the field of selling: sales personnel are trained to observe and read the body language of their potential customers in other to really know how to communicate with them. This technique is also used frequently by policemen during the investigation.

It should be stated, that body language is referred to as being a mirror of our unconscious mind. It represents our true thoughts and emotions and cannot be hidden so easily. There are several signals of body language that can be noticed quite easily almost every day: crossing our arms against our chest, loosing an eye contact, touching the ear or scrathing the chin, tilting the head to one side etc.

There are also a great amount of books, videos and learning courses to teach people how to master their skills of nonverbal communication. A person can learn how to persuade, how to attract others and do not reveal the traits of his own personality through the body language.

All in all, body language not only plays an extremely important part in our communication and development (taking as example the understanding between an infant and his mother in the first years), but also is put into practise as its psychological value to understand humans has been proved.