A Psychological Resource

On this post, I felt that I should boil things down to the core of business, animation and yes body language. I have shown you that business and animation can have body language in common. I would like to highlight a very simple aspect of body language that truly underlies business and animation. That is of course psychology. It true, psychology is behind animation and I may even dare say at the very center of animation itself.

For example when an animator captures anger, sadness, joy, contempt, is he not using psychology?

The same can be said for a lot of businesses. All of these commercials and ads we see are developed from a marketer’s psychological profile of their targeted market. Not to mention the psychological effects of colors used in commercials and ads as well.

Body language is no different. In fact body language is essentially a form of psychology itself. We can make very “educated guesses” of how a person would react and move the way they are moving based on what we know of emotions.

So, with this in mind I am going to be offering a link to a potential resource for those who want to know more about this powerful science. Just below is a link to the APA or American Psychological Association.

http://www.apa.org/index.aspx

One of the best things about the APA’s website is their research. If one were to type “business” into the search function at the top of the website, you can find around 3,370 different articles that have something to do with business. The same can be said about body language.

I will note that while analyzing some of the websites research not all of the research shown will have to do with the subject typed in at the search function. That means that if you want to get what you are looking for from this website you may need to sift through the descriptions of the articles given right under the title of the article.

What I do like however is that when searching through articles it shows from which source and what year the article was created.

Another feature I enjoyed was that if you searched a particular emotion like anger in the search box, then it would give you not only articles on anger, but also the actual definition of anger itself.

So if you ever want to keep up on new psychological findings, or just want to find out something specifically dealing with psychology for business and potentially animation, I would definitely recommend this website.

What to do and what not to do in a presentation.

    

For this post we will be examining someone who has a bit of practice in terms of public speaking. Seth Godin is an author, who primarily writes about marketing. In this particular video from Ted.com, he is speaking about making your ideas stand out in a somewhat crowded market. It is quite interesting and I do recommend watching just for the good information that you can get from his speech. However this blog focuses largely on one thing, non-verbal communication.

That being the case let us start to analyze some of his actions and see what makes him a good speaker and some things that he could work on. Lets start by pausing at second 00:33 give or take a few frames. Here we see 2 good things and one not so good thing. Lets start with the not so good.

See how his arms are clenched up to his sides and hands directly in front of his abdomen? This tells us that he is being a bit defensive. At this stage he is probably thinking thoughts like “the audience is bored” or “I might be talking too long on this section”. While this is most likely not really the case, it may be thoughts along these lines that have led him to subconsciously “defend” himself.

Lets look at the 2 things that he is doing right. He is smiling. Smiling leads to other people smiling. When someone is smiling back at you it can lead to feelings of comfort, which can then lead to better presenting. The second gesture he is on his way to getting right is the palm up gesture. You can tell he is at least a little experienced by his almost natural tendency to keep his palms pointing up.

As shown in an earlier post, palm up gestures tend to make the listeners feel less “threatened” and therefore allows the listeners to trust him a little.

“The palm facing up is used as a submissive, nonthreatening gesture, reminiscent of the pleading gesture of a street beggar and, from an evolutionary perspective, shows the person holds no weapons.”  - Allen Pease, writer of The Definitive Guide to Body Language

Now if we move all the way to minute 14:07, we see a very good gesture. This gesture is completely open. Palms are relatively facing up and the arms are all the way out. This tells us that what he is saying at least in his mind is true, which can lead to the listeners feeling trust towards Seth.

So to summarize a bit, try to avoid bundling your arms in front of yourself during a presentation. Open those arms and hands up; tilt those palms a bit upward. This can lead to confidence when speaking as well as instill trust in the listeners.

To the animators – If you want a character to look confident in what he is speaking about, open his arms and hands up, and try to move them almost on beat with words of importance.

Reference: [Video] – Seth Godin on Standing Out, from Ted.com

[Quote] – Allan Pease from the book, The Definitive Book of Body Language