Body Language Reveals More than Poker Face, Say Researchers

According to the latest research, poker players should pay more attention to their opponents' body language, rather than facial expressions. “When people rated a whole image, it was clear to them - they saw winners and losers,” said Hillel Aviezer, an assistant professor of psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “When you see the faces alone, it is really confusing.” As a postdoctoral student at Princeton University and a co-author of a paper on the subject that was presented to the Journal of Science recently, in his research Aviezer focused on how accurately the average person is able to gauge mood from facial expressions and body language in others. With this aim in mind, he drafted 45 undergrad students were in for the tests, during which one group were shown photographs of tennis players' full body, another of faces only, and a third group were shown only body shots, with all images chosen to project a series of emotions such as anger, triumph, frustration and joy. Identifying the emotions, students turned out to be more accurate when studying the full body and body-only images, whereas those undergrads who saw only the facial images were only right 50 percent of the time. Naturally, this may be quite valuable for poker players and put to an interesting test at live poker tourneys.