[humanser] FW: Body Language - Myth or Real?

[Ginny Duff]

Merry - Is this the article you were mentioning a few days ago??   Are there any other articles?   I think that this issue is such a core issue for us.  

The other day, I had my annual re-appointment meeting with the head psychiatrist at one of the hospitals that I work in.   He told me that one of his supervisors when he was a student was totally blind.   He told me a bit about him and that he felt that he didn't miss anything b/c of his vision - or maybe very little.   I was actually greatly relieved that this topic was comfortable for him to talk about and that he has had previous experience with someone with vision loss and that the experience was positive.   I must say I do live with a constant haunting fear (mostly very much in the background) that someone , someday , will question my capacity to assess patients / situations.    Nobody ever has.   Any articles on ability to asses would be greatly appreciated - and discussion of course.   JD, you have supervised blind students so this must be a live topic for you and them.  

Ginny



Dr. V. Duff 
Clinical Director, West End ACT Team, 
St. Joseph's Heatlh Centre , Toronto
Staff Psychiatrist, Complex Mental Illness, CAMH 
Lecturer, University of Toronto
Tel:   416.530.6000, ext 3101
FAX:   416.530.6363

Sent from my iPad

> On Mar 20, 2016, at 10:33 AM, Merry Schoch via humanser <humanser at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> 
> Hello All,
> 
> This article was originally posted to the list from JD and I personally want
> to thank him for this.  Although this article does not specifically address
> our professions that have insulted us by professing we need to see our
> clients' body language to be able to do our jobs proficiently, it does have
> information that is useful!  
> 
> I will be sending this to our web master, Dennis Sumlin, to post on the
> division's website for future use.  Thanks again JD for this valuable
> article and the service you provide to our division!
> 
> Article below:
> 
> New York Times Science Desk Section 2014 03 25
> 
> FINDINGS.  Their Pants Aren't on Fire.  By JOHN TIERNEY.  Like the rest of
> us, airport security screeners like to think they can read body language.
> The Transportation Security Administration has spent some $1 billion
> training thousands of 'behavior detection officers' to look for facial
> expressions and other nonverbal clues that would identify terrorists.
> But critics say there's no evidence that these efforts have stopped a single
> terrorist or accomplished much beyond inconveniencing tens of thousands of
> passengers a year.  The T.S.A.  seems to have fallen for a classic form of
> self-deception: the belief that you can read liars' minds by watching their
> bodies..
> Most people think liars give themselves away by averting their eyes or
> making nervous gestures, and many law-enforcement officers have been trained
> to look for specific tics, like gazing upward in a certain manner.  But in
> scientific experiments, people do a lousy job of spotting liars.
> Law-enforcement officers and other presumed experts are not consistently
> better at it than ordinary people even though they're more confident in
> their abilities.
> 'There's an illusion of insight that comes from looking at a person's body,'
> says Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of
> Chicago.  'Body language speaks to us, but only in whispers.
> The T.S.A.  program was reviewed last year by the federal government's
> Government Accountability Office, which recommended cutting funds for it
> because there was no proof of its effectiveness.  That recommendation was
> based on the meager results of the program as well as a survey of the
> scientific literature by the psychologists Charles F.  Bond Jr.  and Bella
> M.  DePaulo, who analyzed more than 200 studies.
> In those studies, people correctly identified liars only 47 percent of the
> time, less than chance.  Their accuracy rate was higher, 61 percent, when it
> came to spotting truth tellers, but that still left their overall average,
> 54 percent, only slightly better than chance.  Their accuracy was even lower
> in experiments when they couldn't hear what was being said, and had to make
> a judgment based solely on watching the person's body language.
> 'The common-sense notion that liars betray themselves through body language
> appears to be little more than a cultural fiction,'
> says Maria Hartwig, a psychologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice
> in New York City.  Researchers have found that the best clues to deceit are
> verbal -- liars tend to be less forthcoming and tell less compelling stories
> -- but even these differences are usually too subtle to be discerned
> reliably.
> 
> 
> JD Townsend LCSW
> Helping the light dependent to see.
> Daytona Beach, Earth, Sol System
> 
> 
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