Tag: non-verbal communication

The Benefits of Sarcasm

[Sarcasm] appears to stimulate complex thinking and to attenuate the otherwise negative effects of anger

— Miron-Spektor et al., 2011. Others’ anger makes people work harder not smarter: The effect of observing anger and sarcasm on creative and analytic thinking. in J. Applied Psychology via Smithsonian Magazine.

If there’s anyone for whom sarcasm is a primary language, it’s probably adolescents. It can be used to bully or put down, but, according to Richard Chin (2011), is more often used among friends; a bit like positive aspects of teasing.

Chin has a good article that looks over recent research into how sarcasm works on Smithsonian.com.

Apparently, sarcasm exercises the brain more than regular comments:

… observing anger communicated through sarcasm enhances complex thinking and solving of creative problems”

—Miron-Spektor et al., 2011.

Right hand “man”

Lunch on Wednesdays follows our main block of Student Run Business time. It’s after they’ve delivered pizza, prep-ed for a week of bread, completed finance and its reports, prepared and processed order forms, and sorted out the plants.

Over the last couple weeks I’ve started having my students discuss the business over lunch (including finance reports presentations) and it’s turning into a regular board meeting.

Today they started assigning seating.

We usually sit around two long tables set end to end, with the main supervisor on one end and myself at the other. Today the main supervisor started laying out plates and positions. Pizza supervisor to his right, bread to his right, finances one down from bread and sales across from finances. Everyone else could find their own spot.

I was a little surprised at this unprompted expression of hierarchy. Pizza is our most involved part of the business and the core of the the enterprise so its supervisor, P., has a very important post. She was placed on the right hand of the main supervisor!

I asked the main supervisor why he did it. He said, “I don’t know.” I even had to explain the meaning of the term, ‘right hand “man”‘.

It ended up with the supervisors at one table and everyone else (and myself) at the other.

Except for the plants supervisor. Plants have been going slowly, lately, including some seedling failures. The plant supervisor sat all the way down the table, next to me.

…

I can feel it in my bones that there are some interesting lessons in all this. From organizational structure to non-verbal communication.

But since we’re dealing with positions around a table, and we’ve been talking about the importance of place in geography, the best context to discuss this right now might just be one of the importance of geography and place in the interactions among people.

Non-verbal communication: Micheal Grinder

To communicate an important or difficult message, it is important that your non-verbal communications, gestures, body language, align with the words you speak. Micheal Grinder who teaches courses on presentation skills and classroom management has a few good YouTube videos like the one above.

His blog is also a good resource.

Two faced

Facial symmetry: left=original picture; middle=left-left composite; right=right-right composite

A slight tilt of the face to the left or the right changes the emotional message you send. There’s a whole field of study on what’s called laterality that looks at how the asymmetry of your posture says things you might not realize.

Mike Nicholls has done some interesting work. In one study, he took two pictures of just the left side of peoples’ faces and reflected one half to make a composite image that basically had just two left sides or two right sides. The image above (which was not done by Nichols) shows an original photo, a left-left composite and a right-right composite. He found that:

… head turns of just 15 degrees can bring about significant changes in the perceived emotionality.

Nicholls discusses the implications with regards to the fact that portraits tend to feature the left side of the face. However, it is also interesting to think about what this means for non-verbal communication. Another paper, using 3D imaging of facial movements showed that:

Emotions are expressed more clearly on the left side of the face than the right … There was a trend, however, for left-sided movement to be more pronounced for negative than positive emotions.