from Goodreads: Drawing upon more than thirty years in the field, as well as cutting-edge research from evolutionary biology, psychology, and medical technologies that demonstrate what happens in the brain, the authors examine each component of body language and give you the basic vocabulary to read attitudes and emotions through behavior.

The author does not disguise the fact that he has "no education in psychology, neuroscience, or psychiatry". He's a musician / insurance salesman who happened to be able to utilize previously understood body language concepts and apply them in such a way that he effectively became a personal salesman- selling himself as an expert on body language.

Whether this is good or bad will depend on your intent when reading the book, and your desired outcomes.

As a quick reference, and viewed as pop psychology, it would be a quick fill-in for my purposes, which would only be in regards to general character interaction or scene staging.

As a general summary of information that you could Google, this is a pretty good curation of pre-existing information. Where it falls apart for me are the sweeping generalizations, blatant sexism, outdated examples, and quoting of "studies", which they do reference, but not in a way that is user-friendly. Additionally, a lot of the studies are outdated and I am highly suspect that even the newer ones are cherry-picked.

Despite the overwhelming problems, there are some good sections, and a few good ways to deal with space invaders and serial hand shakers. They do also make it a point to repeatedly state that no gesture should be taken in isolation, but that one should look at the "cluster" of cues before interpreting what they're looking at.

From a proper scientific standpoint, I would take this book with a huge grain of salt, and would not recommend using it as a "definitive guide" or "authoritative guide

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Created Oct 10, 2019 at 9:38pm • Submit your own review...