How can you tell when someone’s stressed? What does a person’s body language say about them?
You can observe someone’s behavior and mannerisms to develop a profile of their behavior. Additionally, you can read someone’s behavior and speech to detect stress—and potentially, signs of deception.
Keep reading to learn how to read people’s body language and detect went they’re stressed.
Physical Indicators: Detecting Stress
Despite popular belief, it’s impossible to tell when someone’s lying just by behavior, even if you know how to read people’s body language. However, Chase Hughes explains, people tend to feel very stressed when they’re lying—so monitoring someone’s behavior for signs of stress can help you determine whether they may be lying.
Before we get into the signs, Hughes warns that the most important part of monitoring these signs is to notice change in someone’s behavior. Someone might display a stress-associated behavior, but if they display that behavior the entire time you’re interacting with them, you can’t accurately label the behavior as a sign of stress. However, if their behavior changes at some point in the interaction, you can deduce that their stress level has increased as a result of something that just happened in the conversation.
We’ll look at three physical signs of stress that Hughes discusses: increased blink rate, closing or extending the fingers, and facial touching.
Physical Indicator #1: Increased Blink Rate
According to Hughes, paying attention to how quickly someone blinks can tell you about how much stress they may be feeling. Generally, people blink around nine times per minute. However, people blink more frequently when they’re stressed. When you first start talking to someone, take note of how frequently they blink—fast, slow, or somewhere in between. If at any point in the conversation, you see their blink rate speed up, that’s likely a sign of stress. Conversely, if their blink rate noticeably slows, that’s a sign that they’re feeling relaxed.
Physical Indicator #2: Closing or Extending the Fingers
Hughes explains that watching people’s fingers can also give a strong indication of whether or not they’re feeling stressed. When people feel stressed, they often curl their fingers inward as if they’re going to make a fist. This movement is usually very slight; a person probably won’t clench their whole fist when a topic makes them uncomfortable, but you may be able to notice a minor inward twitch. On the other hand, extending the fingers is a sign of comfort and relaxation.
Physical Indicator #3: Facial Touching
According to Hughes, people often touch their faces or cover their mouths when they’re feeling stressed. This is an instinctive response we frequently see in children—for example, if they’ve just said something mean to another child and then they realize their parents overheard it. This behavior is a sign of stress in adults as well.
Speech Indicators: Detecting Stress and Deception
Again, physical indicators of stress may indicate deception, or they may simply signal stress or have other causes. Signs of stress in someone’s speech, however, are much stronger indicators of deception.
Hughes describes many signs to look for in someone’s speech, but we’ll focus on these four: hesitation, changing speed and pitch, reversing a question, and attaching caveats to statements.
Speech Indicator #1: Hesitation
According to Hughes, if you ask someone a question and they take a long pause before responding, they may be stalling for time to think of a lie. This also applies when someone repeats your whole question back to you. For example, if you asked your employee “Why were you so late turning in this project?” and they say “Why was I so late turning in this project? Well…” before answering, they might be thinking up a lie.
Speech Indicator #2: Changing Speed and Pitch
Hughes says that people’s voices tend to get higher and their speech faster when they’re lying, so pay attention to whether someone’s speech patterns change as they speak.
Speech Indicator #3: Reversing a Question
Hughes explains that another way people often hide deception is to reverse a question that’s asked of them. For example, if you suspect your spouse is cheating on you, you might ask them, “Have you ever thought about being with someone else?” If they defensively respond, “Have you ever thought about being with someone else?” they may be withholding something important from you.
Speech Indicator #4: Caveats for Excluding Details
People may include caveats in their statements that allow them to omit certain details without explicitly lying. Examples of these caveats include, “If I remember correctly,” “As far as I know,” “If memory serves,” and similar statements. The context of these statements is important. If you ask someone if they’ve ever committed a murder, they shouldn’t need to search their memory for that information. If they preface their response with “As far as I can remember,” you may want to avoid spending time alone with that person!
