That awkward moment when you're at a dinner party, and someone asks you what you do for a living, and you answer ... "I'm a psychotherapist.”
It's a conversation killer. "Aha, a Mindreader. A Wizard of truth!” The look that you may be peering into their soul and reading their thoughts. If only it were that easy!
In a recent psychology study (Bond, 2008), a group of 23 Secret Service agents were given a test - How to spot a lie?
They scored the top marks (73%) in the category of determining attitude out of 20 000 participants.
In the category of determining if you did something or not, they scored 63%
When tested on reading your emotions, they scored a meagre 48%. That is below the score compared to if they flipped a coin.
So how did the psychotherapists do?
A Truth Wizard can spot any lie in under 8 seconds.
"They're extraordinarily attuned to detecting the nuances of facial expressions, body language and ways of talking and thinking. Some of them can observe a videotape for a few seconds and amazingly they can describe eight details about the person on the tape.
Truth wizards have a natural knack for spotting micro-expressions. They also home in on inconsistencies in emotion, body language, and the spoken word."
In a study by Machado and Beutler (1999), psychotherapists' were pretty spot on in accurately determining and labelling specific emotions. The more self-aware and empathetic the therapist, the more accurate the determination was.
Consider this: A psychotherapist called Ekman trained that group of Secret Service agents
...or so the rumour goes.
References.
Bond, C. (2008). A Few Can Catch a Liar, Sometimes: Comments on Ekman and O'Sullivan (1991), As Well As Ekman, O'Sullivan, and Frank (1999). Applied Cognitive Psychology. 22. 1298 - 1300. 10.1002/acp.1475.
Machado, P., & Beutler, L. (1999). Emotion recognition in Psychology: Impact of therapist level of experience and emotional awareness. Journal of Clinical Psychology. 55: 39–57, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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