- The look in their eyes
- Is it threatening, friendly, cautious, uneasy, comfortable...?
- How they arrange their facial features.
- Do they curl the edges of their lips up into a smile? What does that smile look like? Does their face stay neutral while their eyes are wide with curiosity? Or is it fear? Do they bite their lip? How do their eyebrows contribute to their overall expression?
- Body Language
- Fiddling with fingers/twiddling thumbs, constantly smoothing down hair, darting their eyes all the time, using hands expressively as they speak, picking at nails, flexing hands unassumingly...
- Tone of Voice
- Well this would be the obvious one that nearly everyone notices. Nervous, Comfortable, Angry, Annoyed, Frustrated...but I dissect it into subcategories, and after I do that, I look behind the voice and see what's lying underneath. Don't ask how I do it. I don't know. It just happens.
- Choice of Apparel
- This is the slipperiest of all of that I've listed. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it's related, sometimes it isn't. But I've noticed that choice of clothing can really reflect someone's mood and how they decided what they were going to wear that day--and once I've got the mood, I can use that to calculate more about what a person is really thinking.
- If a person was feeling a little bit down, they might wear duller, monotonous tones. If they were feeling slightly happy and had a spring in their step, they might wear something--there's no other word to describe it, but please know I mean this figuratively--something "bouncy." But again, this is not good to rely on. Take me, for example. I usually wear dull, unimpressive pieces, but that does not mean I'm feeling gloomy--on the contrary, I usually feel quite upbeat.
aug 16 2012 ∞
sep 15 2012 +