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Stephen Porges, psychiatry professor and Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University, where he directs the Trauma Research Center within the Kinsey Institute, speaks about the importance of safety in relationships. Porges' Polyvagal Theory describes how our autonomic nervous system mediates safety, trust, and intimacy through a subsystem he calls the social engagement system. Our brain is constantly detecting through our senses whether we are in a situation that is safe, dangerous, or life threatening. People's autonomic nervous system are designed to perceive threat: a protective, defensive survival mechanism, but a response that can also get us into trouble if we sense that our safety is at risk, causing us to misread the situation. However, humans also have a mammalian mechanism that mediates those gut-level ANS responses. This social engagement system enables us to interpret linguistic, facial, tonal, intonation, and gestural cues, and the intentionality of others. When our body and mind experience safety, our social engagement system enables us to collaborate, listen, empathize, and connect, as well as be creative, innovative, and bold in our thinking and ideas. This has positive benefits for our relationships as well as our lives in general. The takeaways: 1. Safety is paramount in crucial conversations and conflict-resolution. 2. Learning to deploy cues that display love, trust, and engagement in the midst of conflict can help disarm defensive, threat response mechanisms in other people, help restore safety in our social interactions, and reaffirm bonds.

Article talks about apologies and how CEOs whose facial expression matched their apologies had better invester recovery. Also, the vague language CEOs use in their apologies removed blame from themselves and made it seem like the mistake "just happened" rather than being their fault.

This article answers the question of why sarcasm is hard to detect in texting and email conversations. It depends on things like context of the person like the relationship you have with the person you are using sarcasm with. Also, with texting, you can't convey your emotions with facial expressions like you do in face-to-face conversation. Emojis help a little bit with that, but it isn't the same as a face-to-face interaction.

This article discusses the impact that social media has on youth. Because most modern teens are learning to do the majority of their communication while looking at a screen, not another person, they are missing out on the extremely critical social skills required for social situations. When you replace face-to-face interactions with screen-to-screen interactions, children do not learn the social cues such as body language, facial expression, and vocal reactions. The article discusses indirect communications, how to lower the risks of your child having bad social skills, how cyberbullying and the imposter syndrome affect teenagers, how stalking other people accounts can lower their self-esteem, and what parents can do to help. Experts worry that because social media and text messages have become so integral to teenage life, they are promoting anxiety and lowering self-esteem.

Nonverbal Messages: Cracking the Code Excerpt taken from Introduction (pp. ix - xiv) November 2, 2016 "What motivated me to spend fifty years investigating facial expressions, gestures, emotion and lies? Why these topics, which had been abandoned as fruitless by the academic establishment?...

A study done with monolingual babies and bilingual babies under a year old showed that in the earlier months, both sets of babies had discrimination abilities to separate languages, but by eight months only the bilinguals had this ability. The study was done by only showing visual clips of people speaking different languages. This means that the babies could differentiate languages by looking at facial movements and the rhythm and shape of the person's mouth.

R.I.P. to the understatement. Welcome to death by Internet hyperbole, the latest example of the overly dramatic, forcibly emotive, truncated, simplistic and frequently absurd ways chosen to express emotion in the Internet age (or sometimes feign it). The trend toward hyperbole appears to echo a broader belief among experts that young women are its first adopters. One explanation for the use of hyperbole (OMG!) With the increase in digital, vs. face to face communication, we must come up with increasingly creative ways to express tone and emphasis when facial cues are not an option. There's a performative element to our social media interactions, too: We are expressing things with an audience in mind. Tyler Schnoebelen, a linguist and founder of Idibon, a company that uses computer data to analyze language, notes "Performance generally requires the performer to be interesting. So do likes, comments and reshares. Exaggeration is one way to do that."

Article talks re: the changing nature of a period. Its original function, to indicate the end of a thought, has become obsolete in texting, because of the ability to "send". Now the period can be used to indicate seriousness or a sense of finality. But caution is needed, said linguist Gretchen McCulloch, noting that problems can start to arise when you combine a period with a positive sentiment, such as "Sure" or "Sounds good." "Now you've got positive words and serious punctuation and the clash between them is what creates that sense of passive-aggression," said McCulloch. Binghamton University psychology professor Celia Klin says a period can inadvertently set a tone, because while text messaging may function like speech, it lacks many of the expressive features of face-to-face verbal communication, like "facial expressions, tone of voice, our ability to elongate words, to say some things louder, to pause." Our language has evolved, and "what we have done with our incredible linguistic genius is found ways to insert that kind of emotional, interpersonal information into texting using what we have," said Klin. "And what we have is things like periods, emoticons, other kinds of punctuation. So people have repurposed the period to mean something else."

Some metaphors are common in spoken language but are inappropriate in sign, body-part metaphors are possible in sign metaphors but odd/uncommon in spoken metaphor. In spoken language, tone and body position determine when a metaphor is that and not literal. Sign metaphors also have similar markers such as change in facial expression but are more limited in expressing change in tone and body position (as the body is already the main mode of communication). There is a sign for "metaphor" or a way to slightly change the signs for common words in metaphor so that the "listener" knows that the "speaker" means something metaphorically as opposed to literally.

A spoken language is more than just words and sounds. Speakers use changes in pitch and rhythm, known as prosody, to provide emphasis, show emotion, and otherwise add meaning to what they say. But a language does not need to be spoken to have prosody: sign languages, such as American Sign Language (ASL), use movements, pauses and facial expressions to achieve the same goals. In a study appearing in the September 2015 issue of Language, three linguists look at intonation (a key part of prosody) in ASL and find that native ASL signers learn intonation in much the same way that users of spoken languages do. Children learning ASL acquired prosodic features in three stages of "appearance, reorganization, and mastery": accurately replicating their use in simpler contexts, attempting unsuccessfully at first to use them in more challenging contexts, then using them accurately in all contexts as they fully learn the rules of prosody. Previous research has shown that native learners of spoken languages acquire intonation following a similar pattern.

A Johns Hopkins study found that damage to a key structure in the brain may explain why some stroke patients can't perceive sarcasm. Researchers looked at 24 people who had experienced a stroke in the right hemispheres of their brains. Those with damage to the right sagittal stratum tended to have trouble recognizing sarcasm, the researchers found. This bundle of neural fibers connects a number of brain regions, including those that process auditory and visual information. Sarcasm can be hard to interpret; it's a complex way to communicate. First, the person has to 1. understand the literal meaning of what someone says 2. detect the components of sarcasm: a wider range of pitch, greater emphatic stress, briefer pauses, lengthened syllables and intensified loudness relative to sincere speech "There're a number of cues people use, and it's both facial cues and tone of voice," noted Dr. Argye Hillis, a professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Emotional contagion is the phenomenon of "catching" other people's emotions and moods. According to Elaine Hatfield, a psychology professor at the University of Hawaii, humans are hard-wired "to automatically mimic and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person and, consequently, to converge emotionally." Primitive emotional contagion is a basic building block of human interaction. It helps us coordinate and synchronize with others, empathize with them, and read their minds-all critical survival skills. When we mimic, the body gets feedback about the expressions we've taken on; we then feel what the other person is feeling. Gary Slutkin, a physician, epidemiologist, and founder and CEO of the nonprofit Cure Violence, says that emotional contagion, specifically anger and violence, springs from four mechanisms involving the brain: 1. Engagement of the cortical pathways for copying, a behavior related to mimicry. The most contagious behaviors are the most emotionally engaging, as well as the ones carried out by the people who are most relevant to you. 2. Activation of the brain's dopamine system, which works in anticipation of a reward. "Activation of that system puts you down a pathway toward what is important socially and for survival," he says. If you anticipate being rewarded for responding to someone with anger or violence, you are more likely to get on that behavioral track. 3. The brain's pain centers activate from veering off or being shut out from getting a reward. "A sense of I can't stand it lights up in the context of disapproval." 4. Serious injuries or abuse cause the limbic system and amygdala in the lower brain to become hyperreactive. "This causes you to be less in control, which accelerates violent behavior," Slutkin says. It also makes you more likely to get angry and be quick to react. "Then there's hostile attribution, another part of what happens with the limbic sy

Written language is an imperfect method for the messy, complex business of communication, where facial expressions, gestures and vocal tones transmit oceans of meaning and subtext - for those, at least, who can read them. Words themselves offer none of that: In a famous study, Albert Mehrabian, a psychology professor at U.C.L.A., found that humans tend to perceive only a fragment of a speaker's meaning through spoken words. Instead, he observed, most meaning is gleaned from body language and tone of voice. In a text-only environment, how can we ever be certain other people understand what we mean when we post online? Enter tone indicators. Tone indicators are paralinguistic signifiers used at the ends of statements to help readers fill in the blanks. Put simply, they are written shorthand for the poster's intent and emotion. One might use "/srs," short for "serious," to express sincere affection for a pop culture crush.

Ubiquitous video technology and social media have given deaf people a new way to communicate. They're using it to transform American Sign Language. For more than a century, the telephone has helped shape how people communicate. But it had a less profound impact on American Sign Language, which relies on both hand movements and facial expressions to convey meaning. Until, that is, phones started to come with video screens. Over the past decade or so, smartphones and social media have allowed ASL users to connect with one another as never before. Face-to-face interaction, once a prerequisite for most sign language conversations, is no longer required. Video has also given users the opportunity to teach more people the language - there are thriving ASL communities on YouTube and TikTok - and the ability to quickly invent and spread new signs, to reflect either the demands of the technology or new ways of thinking.

Despite claims that emoji are a universal lingua franca, emojis are neither "universal", nor a true "language". Instead, they are "at most a linguistic tool that is being used to complement our language". In other words, emojis do not and cannot by themselves constitute a meaningful code of communication between two parties. Rather, they are used as a way of enhancing texts and social media messages like a kind of additional punctuation. They help express nuance, tone and emotion in the written word. Emojis offer a chance for the average email writer, SMSer or social media poster to imply an emotional context to their messages, to express empathy. With emojis, they can do this as simply and naturally as using a facial expression or gesture when talking to somebody face-to-face. Yet relying too heavily on emojis to bridge that gap can cause problems of its own. We may all have access to more or less the same emojis through our smartphone keyboards, but what we mean when we use those emojis actually varies greatly, depending on culture, language, and generation.

That's because lol and lmao have evolved, and are now predominantly used as tone indicators, explains John Kelly, the Associate Director of Content and Education at Dictionary.com. As we increasingly spend our lives online and communicate largely through digital messages, the paralinguistic functions we use IRL to convey emotion, tone and nuance - i.e. body language, gesturing, facial expressions - gets lost in our texts, emails, Slack messages and tweets. So we have to rely on different things to do that, like emojis and text acronyms. So what are we trying to communicate when we sign off our text messages with a lol? It's not because we're literally laughing out loud; rather, we're using this lowly little acronym to try and soften the tone of our messages.

This article discusses how both verbal and body language can indicate deceit in conversation. Although there is no established method of lie detection, many psychologists are working towards creating a more accurate system to do so using a combination of technology that analyzes facial expression, speech patterns, and more.

Hawaii Sign Language (HSL) was once believed to be similar to American Sign Language (ASL), used in the majority of deaf communities in the U.S. However, the work of Woodward and his team revealed they're not similar at all. In 2013, the language was recognized as its own distinct language. "Everything is different," Woodward says. "The vocabulary has less than 10% correlation to ASL, which is typical of languages that don't have a relationship to each other and were developed independently." HSL also uses much more body movement and facial expression than ASL.