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""Although a great deal of research has shown that more physically imposing individuals are more likely to acquire power, this work is the first to show that powerful people feel taller than they are," says Michelle M. Duguid, PhD ... In a series of three experiments, the researchers found a definite correlation between feeling powerful and feeling tall, and even suggest that future research may want to examine whether employers should consider placing short high-ranking workers in higher offices to raise their psychological sense of power. "Height is often used as a metaphor for power," Duguid says ... "These findings may be a starting point for exploring the reciprocal relationship between the psychological and physical experiences of power," Duguid says." Full study (free PDF): http://j.mp/yxfnPV

The effective use of body language plays a key role in communication. Here are ten tips for powerful body language I've learned during the past two decades of coaching teams around the world:

This article discusses how powerful words are. It talks about how and when words can be more powerful than actions. It also explores why words can be more powerful.

This article highlights the importance of social media and how it has the potential to change interactions, dialogue and exchange of new ideas. It specifically goes into detail about how social media is giving voice to thousands of people worldwide who struggle with political oppression. Social media is gaining more popularity and governments are recognizing the its power and responding to the power threat by blocking or banning the use of platforms such as Facebook. Social media is a powerful force that is expanding information across international borders.

Words are extremely powerful tools that can hurt or transform us because really, they are energy, each with a vibration (high or low). I learned why being around negative people or putting yourself down makes you feel dreary... because it lowers your energy.

Many people around the world have difficulty saying NO! But this powerful word can improve your confidence, your relationships, and your mind. This article discusses the reasons why people are afraid to use the word and what the benefits of saying it more are.

Children learn language and literacy skills best during powerful, high-quality conversations with the important adults in their lives. Learn what the ingredients of a powerful conversation are, and get specific tips for what you can do during these conversations to build the important skills your child needs to learn.

To this day, Paraguay remains the only country in the Americas where a majority of the population speaks one indigenous language: Guaraní. It is enshrined in the Constitution, officially giving it equal footing with the language of European conquest, Spanish. And in the streets, it is a source of national pride.

"These guys have worked out how to measure power differences between individuals using the patterns of words they speak or write. In other words, they say the style of language during a conversation reveals the pecking order of the people talking. ... The key to this is an idea called linguistic co-ordination, in which speakers naturally copy the style of their interlocutors. ... 'If you are communicating with someone who uses a lot of articles - or prepositions, orpersonal pronouns - then you will tend to increase your usage of these types of words as well, even if you don't consciously realize it,' say Kleinberg and co." Also, as the article mentions, Kleinberg (previously) developed the algorithm on which Google's PageRank (the algorithm used to rank pages in its search engine) is based. Link to the study (available in PDF): http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3670

"Tweenage girls who spend endless hours watching videos and multitasking with digital devices tend to be less successful with social and emotional development ... The girls' answers showed that multitasking and spending many hours watching videos and using online communication were statistically associated with a series of negative experiences: feeling less social success, not feeling normal, having more friends whom parents perceive as bad influences and sleeping less. ... The survey findings are bad news, given that the 8 to 12 age range is critical for the social and emotional development of girls, and because children are becoming active media consumers at an ever-younger age. ... Higher levels of face-to-face communication were associated with greater social success, greater feelings of normalcy, more sleep and fewer friends whom parents judged to be bad influences. Children learn the difficult task of interpreting emotions by watching the faces of other people, Pea said. ... For the negative effects of online gorging, "There seems to be a pretty powerful cure, a pretty powerful inoculant, and that is face-to-face communication," Nass said."

A new Northwestern University study shows the power of language in infants' ability to understand the intentions of others. The results, based on two experiments, show that introducing a novel word for the impending novel event had a powerful effect on the infants' tendency to imitate the behavior. Infants were more likely to imitate behavior, however unconventional, if it had been named, than if it remained unnamed, the study shows. Sandra Waxman, co-author of the study, states, "This is the first demonstration of how infants' keen observational skills, when augmented by human language, heighten their acuity for 'reading' the underlying intentions of their 'tutors' (adults) and foster infants' imitation of adults' actions."

For bilinguals, because both languages are active in the brain, the act of keeping the two languages separate sharpens the executive control system. Strengthening this area may have long-term benefits: namely, performing better on a variety of cognitive tasks and possibly delaying the onset of dementia later in life.

John Pennebacker, a University of Texas-Austin psychologist, found that language could successfully predict speed dating successes, as well as the relative longevity of such matches.. When the language style of two people matched, when they used pronouns, prepositions, articles and so forth in similar ways at similar rates, they were much more likely to end up on a date. "The more similar [they were] across all of these function words, the higher the probability that [they] would go on a date in a speed dating context," Pennebaker says. "And this is even cooler: We can even look at ... a young dating couple... [and] the more similar [they] are ... using this language style matching metric, the more likely [they] will still be dating three months from now." This is not because similar people are attracted to each other, Pennebaker says; people can be very different. It's that when we are around people that we have a genuine interest in, our language subtly shifts. "When two people are paying close attention, they use language in the same way," he says. "And it's one of these things that humans do automatically." Pennebacker also says that by analyzing language, you can easily tell who among two people has power in a relationship, and their relative social status. "It's amazingly simple," Pennebaker says, "Listen to the relative use of the word "I." What you find is completely different from what most people would think. The person with the higher status uses the word "I" less.

This powerful video explains the what honor it is to have words. How we use our words in our lives should mean something and should be used for good.

This is a great video I thought I would share. It represents the power of words and how amazing language can turn the hearts of men.

"There is a reason why neither Globish nor Basic caught on in a mainstream way, and that reason is the basis of the English language's growing global power."

Prof. Jeff Zachs: "When they're reading the story, they're building simulations in their head of events that are described by the story... language itself is a powerful form of virtual reality, that there's an important sense in which when we tell each other stories that we can control the perceptional processes that are happening in each other's brains."

See also the graphs at the bottom of the page. "Perhaps the biggest collection of words ever assembled has just gone online: 500 billion of them, from 5 million books published over the past four centuries... The words make up a searchable database that researchers at Harvard say is a new and powerful tool to study cultural change... You can, for instance, type in a word or a short phrase, and the database produces a graph - a curve that traces how often an author used those words every year since 1800."