Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Italian Gestures and Nonverbal Communication

Thumbs up - Gestures, Emblems & Cultural Variances - Humintell As mentioned in a past blog post entitled “The Complicated World of Gestures”, there are 2 types of gestures: speech illustrators and emblems.

Emblems are gestures that convey specific verbal meaning that can exist without the use of words. Other gestures (that are not emblems) co-occur with words.

Gestures have been a part of Italian culture for some time and many Italians claim that talking with their hands is “in their blood”. Take a look at the interesting video below featured in a recent NY Times article entitled “When Italians Chat, Hands and Fingers Do the Talking”.

The Hardest Lies to Spot?

dreamstimecomp_12763780Janine Driver aka “The Human Lie Detector” recently appeared on the Dr. Drew show in regards to Andrea Sneiderman’s trial.

Sneiderman was charged with her husband’s murder.  He was shot and killed by her boss, but she has plead not guilty to the 16 charges that were filed against her.

Since then the murder and more aggressive charges that were filed have been dropped for lack of evidence.  Janine weighed in with her thought’s regarding this murder case.

Driver told HLN Network that the hardest lies to spot,

“are the ones where there’s partial truth an partial lie.  Unfortunately, we are worse at detecting deception today than we used to be…Because our brain has its very old instinct.  It is a very sensitive danger detection system. Because we don’t want to be seen as paranoid, we override signs of potential deception and we put ourselves in a dangerous situation.”

Driver is a body language trainer who offers seminars and workshops on body language and deception detection via her two companies: Lyin Tamer and the Body Language Institute.  She also has a New York Times bestseller: You Can’t Lie to Me and has appeared on Dr. Drew’s show before commenting on the very famous Jodi Arias murder trial.