Lingualogue Blog

A new study from Israel claims that the best way to detect if someone is lying or not is to check their handwriting. Forget the old polygraph, or the infamously ineffective sodium pentathol shot, now all you need is to look at their handwriting. The basic idea is that by the time we are adults our handwriting is fixed– hardwired if you will into an automatic action. When people lie, however, the extra cognitive effort that goes into pulling out an enormous whopper of a porky means the writer tends to unintentionally hesitate and press harder on each pen stroke. This is imperceptible to the naked eye but is detectable to specially programmed computers.

As cool as this sounds I have a couple of issues with the science: The sample was pretty small (only 34 people) to begin with, and the volunteers were only asked to write either true or untrue stories to check the system. I would be interested to see if for the “liars”   there is a difference between people who are ostensibly writing fiction (and whose brains would therefore be forced to stop and think), and people who are lying (and could have planned their lie well in advance). My point is, many people who are gifted liars, plan their lies in advance and almost believe the lies they say themselves. Therefore I would be a little skeptical as to how much extra time their brains would need to process the lie.

I would certainly be interested in seeing more research on this though.

One more thing– how many people actually use handwriting these days anyway?  Maybe they can devise a liars typing test

The full article is at Mmegi

An interesting study published in Psychological Science recently builds on the old sentiment that simply seeing someone smile makes you want to smile too. Strangely enough, it has been proven that seeing somebody smile (or even frown) automatically activates the  muscles in our face that produce that same expression–whether you want them to or not.

Two psychologists from the university of Amsterdam and the university of Utrecht, did separate experiments to test if words associated with these expressions would produce a similar response. The study showed, oddly enough, that a group of test students who read happy emotion verbs (e.g. “to smile”, “to laugh”) had a significant increase in the activity of their zygomatic major (the muscle responsible for smiling) and those that were given sad emotion verbs (e.g. “to cry”) had a similar increase in the activity of their corrugator supercilii (the muscle responsible for frowning). The results showed that reading happy action verbs  always tweaked the smile muscle and not the frown, and vice versa. It is interesting to note though that when students were given emotion adjectives (e.g. “funny”, or “angry”) they exhibited much lower automatic responses to the corresponding muscle. It seems that it is the words associated with the expression itself that produces the response.

A slightly more sinister result was gained in the second experiment. This time students were asked to watch cartoons with the emotion verbs subliminally shown at the beginning of each one. Half of the students who watched the cartoons were prevented from smiling by holding a pen between their lips, while the other half were not. The results interestingly showed that the volunteers found on the whole that cartoons with subliminal smiling-related words were much funnier than those with the frown-related words. Except that is for the students who had their muscles movement stopped by the pen: They did not find the same relationship between the subliminal emotion verb and how funny the cartoons were.

These strange results seem to imply that verbs can not only affect our emotions but directly affect the muscles that express these emotions, which in turn affect our emotions. It seems then that language is not just a bunch of  symbols with meanings but also holds a direct physical and psychological tie to our emotions.

It is no wonder that language is such a beautiful thing.

An interesting, yet strange article in the Telegraph yesterday claiming that scientists in Spain and Britain have found that the body language of dolphins follows similar patterns to that of  human verbal communication. To me the link seems a tad tenuous, but I guess that could be due to the reporting. Their theory is very simply that the most commonly used words in human languages tend to be the shortest–like “the” and “but”. This is called the law of brevity and applies to all human languages.  The story claims that although dolphins have a reasonably complicated language of clicks and whistles, their most common vocabulary is expressed with body language when swimming in a group,  such as tail slaps, leaps, and twirls (and we thought they did that to amuse us).

If I am reading it right, the ‘proof’ comes from the fact that the 30 or so patterns of behaviour exhibited by the dolphins had a much higher probability to be exhibited in small clusters, or individually, rather than in groups or complex clusters. This, obviously (according to the scientists) must have a correlation with the most common human  language usage and be on a par with the simplest of our conjunctions and indefinite articles.

I for one cannot see from the article alone why the body language of dolphins cannot be linked to the body language of other animals. All animals  have body language of some description and most of it is in short bursts in response to a stimulus, and not in complex arrangements. After all, it is a pretty instinctive response (I am yet to see “learn body language now” appear in our schools, and yet we all do it) and is often hard to control.  After all, do we not smile when we are happy or scowl when angry? Do we not blush when embarrassed? Do we not raise our hands when we want to get served at the bar?

I am not saying that dolphins are not smart, I certainly know they are. I also know they communicate via a language that seems on a par with humans for its complexity. I am just unsure of why dolphins perceived body language of slapping, jumping, and diving would be linked to humans most common words and not our own wealth of universally understood body language.

After all, how much of a pain in the ass would it be to have to slap your leg every time you wanted to say the word “the”, or jump in the air every time the word “but” cropped up. I am sure you would be pretty tired with a damn sore leg within no time.

But sometimes – even with our own ‘sophisticated ‘ human languages -  actions speak louder than words, and I am sure a smile is just as common as the word “the” in most people’s vocabulary.

But then again, I  guess if a dolphin’s most used phrase is “how about getting down and dirty in the next rock crevice?” then it would be worth the odd slap of the tail, and a spot of dorsal pain.

The Telegraph article