Bodies in Emotion
QUEENAN, JOE
Bodies in Emotion ‘What does she mean by that?’ The mystery is solved. BY JOE QUEENAN The Power of Body Language by Tonya Reiman Pocket, 352 pp., $25 Every once in a while an author comes...
...I say this because of an event that occurred one recent, glacial winter night when I found myself in the parking lot outside Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey...
...Not one study, mind you, not two studies, but numerous studies...
...I read it because I thought if I mastered paralanguage, and paid more attention to input from my right parietal operculum, it might help me fi gure out when John Edwards was lying, when Mitt Romney was telling the truth, and when Fred Thompson was awake...
...The parking lot was relatively empty, with just a handful of cars clustered in one area...
...How Reiman got Hillary to participate in this book is beyond me...
...So I wisely got back into my car, drove off and deposited it all the way over on the other side of the parking lot...
...Arriving at the Izod Center, which stands a few hundred yards away from the stadium both the Giants and Jets call home, I learned that the multilevel parking lot adjacent to the arena was full...
...The other 93 percent is expressed in a kind of skeletal, epidermal, neurological, abdominal, and physiognomic code that most people cannot understand because they are paralinguistic illiterates who have not read her book...
...The Giants were not expected to win...
...I can sense the atmosphere...
...I did not start reading The Power of Body Language specifi cally to handle situations like this...
...The game was to be played 700 miles away at Soldier Field...
...Yet by far the most intriguing subject is broached by the anonymous social leper who queries: “I have a problem...
...Is it true that men who put their thumbs in their belt loops are more prone to be perverts...
...Please don’t say it’s my imagination...
...Reiman also contends that an upper lip raised in a sneer may be a sign of contempt, and maintains that upbeat people are better liked than mopers...
...And what the “secret signal decoder” that my mirror neurons were arming me with were saying, was this: “These clowns look like mean drunks...
...Armed with the latest cutting-edge data from such publications as The Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, Dermatological Surgery, and The Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, Reiman makes a convincing case that when women cross their legs, it is often to draw attention to their bodies, and that jiggling your car keys or playing with your water bottle cap may send a message to another person that you are not interested in having a sexual relationship with them...
...In general, people take an immediate dislike to me before I have even spoken...
...she asks, rhetorically...
...Moreover, I was wearing a Philadelphia Eagles cap...
...And so it did...
...A few yards away sat two pickup trucks, surrounded by nine men and three women...
...In short, I was parking my car a few yards away from a dozen drunks who were tailgating for a game that would not even be played in the stadium outside which they were partying, and would be returning to the same spot in a virtually empty lot three hours later, by which time the hypothermic Giants fans would have consumed even more alcohol, and worked themselves up into an even more bellicose mood...
...BY JOE QUEENAN The Power of Body Language by Tonya Reiman Pocket, 352 pp., $25 Every once in a while an author comes along who can not only change our lives, but save our lives...
...It was an awful lot of work to see two crummy teams play a crummy basketball game...
...Reiman, a brilliant, charismatic body-language expert who appears regularly on The O’Reilly Factor, has advanced a revolutionary theory that only 7 percent of communication between human beings is verbal, perhaps even less in northern New Jersey...
...A cop told me to cross the bridge that spanned the highway, park in the lot next to Giants Stadium, and take a special bus back to the Izod Center...
...Marcel Proust is one, Kahlil Gibran another...
...This is probably even more true if you are doing it while in bed with them...
...Emerging from my vehicle, I realized that I was not alone...
...Those who do not feel like wading through an intensely technical, occasionally abstruse volume fi lled with discussions of such exotic constructs as the “Pinocchio Effect” should turn to the back of the book, where Reiman answers a number of “frequently asked” questions that have perplexed mankind since we fi rst emerged from the caves...
...No, is the answer—though regrettably she does not address the corollary: “Is it true that men who put their thumbs in your belt loops are more prone to be perverts...
...They were wearing New York Giants regalia, drinking heavily, and making a fair bit of noise...
...I often think maybe I give off bad vibrations, and they detect it...
...A few months ago—naive, trusting sort that I was—I would have parked my car right beside the belching, marauding Giants fans assuming that people are basically good and that my vehicle was less likely to be stolen if it was parked near other cars...
...But armed with the skills I’d acquired by reading Reiman’s electrifying volume I realized that there was something about those fans that wasn’t quite right...
...Joe Queenan is the author, most recently, of Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile’s Pilgrimage to the Mother Country...
...I’d been given tickets to a basketball game between the Philadelphia 76ers and the New Jersey Nets, and for reasons that still worry me, had accepted them...
...As she puts it, in her deceptively authoritative way: “Numerous studies have found that people who smile are believed to be more warm, honest, polite, kind, sociable, happy, fl irtatious, successful and attractive...
...I knew this because the mirror neurons in my right parietal operculum—yes, those very same neurons identifi ed by Giacomo Rizzolatti and Vittorio Gallese in their breakthrough work at the University of Parma in 1996—were enabling me to crack the mysterious code conveyed by the body language of the boozed-up Giants fans...
...Take off the Eagles cap, and get the hell out of here...
...To their august ranks can now be added the prescient, wise Tonya Reiman...
...They were tailgaters, getting tanked up a full 18 hours before the Giants played the Chicago Bears the next day...
...Having mastered the murky “paralanguage” that enables human beings to read secret messages transmitted by other people, I knew that the section of the brain called the amygdala, which detects fear in other humans, had been activated in the tailgaters’ skulls as soon as I emerged from my car, and that they could literally smell vulnerability and victimhood-in-waiting...
Vol. 13 • February 2008 • No. 22
