I've recently became interested in body language and my in-depth research brought me to the very core of it - the Sociopath World. It seems reasonable that sociopaths are good at reading and faking it, but are they?
Are you good at reading body language? Are you a born-actor?
And also, is there any books or webpages on the matter that you'd recommend?
Such a fun topic. Naturally being a part of a speculative science, the legitimacy of the data gathered is debated, but it's so fun to look into!
The show Lie to Me is a layman's introduction to micro-expression. The story is crap, but they have Paul Ekman as their consultant, a pioneer in the field of it, which makes the science when it's discussed interesting.
If you feel like checking Reddit, some places people talk about it are Nonverbal Communication, Psychology, Social Engineering, and many others.
Darren Brown touches on the topic lightly in some of his videos alongside manipulation ideas. BS or not, it still gets the mind thinking.
Here's an expression chart that shows it's not merely happy/sad/angry/fearful/etc. I usually use it as artistic reference, but it has more uses than just that.
I signed up for free lessons through email from a guy who calls himself Patryk Wezowski, which sent a link each week as opposed to all at once to make sure anyone who signed up for their mailing list understood the prior material and had time to notice examples of it in real life. It didn't help me too much (the first few I checked anyway), but you might find something useful from it: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8.
Beyond that, I recommend studying acting and psychiatry at the same time. The two have a good amount of interplay if you recognize what the two have in common and cross-train the two into each other. For fun I'll occasionally play around with the "Paul Ekman - METT - Micro Expression Training Tool" I downloaded forever ago, but I personally wish I could speed it up.
Happy hunting~
I've always even at a young age been able to subconsciously read body language (to be fair this is true of most normal people). As I got older I studied it more extensively, from self-study to classes on... lets call it: "interrogation and persuasion".
As Turncoat mentioned Paul Ekman is one of the founding fathers on facial recognition infact he mapped out the entire repertoire of facial expressions and even came up with the concept of so called "micro-expressions". I highly recommend his training on micro-expressions and macro expressions if you have the time and money and aren't already adept at reading people. The systems he has created have even been used successfully by autistics to interact more naturally with others.
Beyond that, the concepts of cold reading and other forms of manipulation used by con-artists, "mentalists" and magicians is a great place to look for relevant information on the topic. Even the new concepts created by so called "Pick-up" artists has a whole slew of this information compounded together for the very purpose of getting women to sleep with you. Check out the book called "The Game" by Neil Strauss.
for a free, thorough and fairly accurate overview I suggest reading:
http://westsidetoastmasters.com/resources/book_of_body_language/toc.html
I can read body language quite well. I also look at the person's facial expressions and tone of voice in order to see what emotion they're feeling.
I've spent my entire life learning to mimic others in order to blend in. I do believe I would make a great actor.
There are no books or webpages I can recommend. A lot of what I learned was from real life social interactions and watching actors on TV, so that I knew what emotions to fake and when to fake them.
Ooh, I had forgotten about the link PmS posted once I took a break from the forum, before the forum did the whole changing hands bit.
Sweet.
I like body language, most people are terrible at hiding it, because it takes a few seconds to be able to. So if you catch someone's expression before they can fix it you can see what they are really thinking.
It happened to me once, luckily i convinced the person who saw it that they were seeing things.
