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Tuttoscienze n. 841, La Stampa, Year 132, n. 268, 1998, september, 30 - Wednesday

g NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR

Lips, words of silence
even when we don't talk, we let our mood and emotions out

Marco Pacori

Elvis Presley in his "Burning Love" sang "Your kisses lift me higher /Like the sweet song of a choir …".
What power those kisses! But everybody knows this thing: there is nothing more intimate, more captivating and more deep than kissing. Who lives this experience, will continue to think at it as a magic; but scientist have found out, al least in part, the mysterious alchemy of the attractiveness of the human mouth.
First of all, only human beings own, among animal species, lips that are rotated outside; furthermore, we can see even part of the mucosa. Only this tissue has another color compared with the whole skin. This fact has a social reason. For human beings communicating is a primary need, like to breathe or eating. So we can draw the conclusion that shape and extreme expressiveness of our mouth are results of natural selection: lips have a rosy "complexion" and are so mobile to perform a social function.
One of the most important messages conveyed by the mouth is a sexual signal. Women have more swollen lips than men. This would be happened, because, unlike humans do, in other animals copulation is made from back. Female shows willingness to copulate, displaying its buttocks, swollen and whose color is bright. The outside parts of her vagina are visible too.
Women therefore would have developed big and red lips to send to men an erotic message.
In fact, if a woman is aroused her lips become bigger and blushes. Moreover, she frequently licks them. In this way, women simulate physical changes and lubrication of their genital area. The same meaning has the reason why women put their lipstick on and fill their lips with silicone or collagen.
Lips can become swollen, but they can even become narrower and thin. This happens when someone feels angry. Especially, if somebody is really enraged, his lips grow thinner and are wan and drawn back.
We can distinguish all emotions by the shape and grimaces we made, moving or tightening the corner of our mouth.
If we are afraid, outside corner of our mouth are tightened and lips appear tense (without those creases we usually can observe when lips are relaxed).
When we feel happy, our mouth is open and its corner are raised and slightly tense. If someone is disgusted, he pushes lower and upper lip toward up. We can notice a swelling under his lower lip.
We can recognize if somebody is sad, because his lips are blank, like "emptied" and corners of the mouth are bent toward down. If he is going to cry, his lips has a trembling.
Louis Corman, one of the contemporaneous exponents of the physiognomy (the discipline that study links between features and character), on the basis of observations like the ones just illustrated and dealing with the unchangeable traits of the face morphology, states that narrowed lips that are even thin and usually closed are clues of introversion, reserve, wariness, selfishness and avarice. On the contrary, big and open lips would mean generosity, warmth and sensuality.
These interpretations lack of scientific proofs (these scholars don't consider hereditariness), but Corman certainty has caught ordinary sense; quite apart from the fact that links like the ones this scholar asserts, we have a bent to ascribe to someone who has certain features the same characteristics of personalities Corman describes in this studies. Is it only a mangling of our perception or there is really some truth in dept? Paul Ekman, maybe the well-known researcher on emotional facial expression, affirms that if someone feel for a long time (like a sensation of fear o anger), facial cues links to that emotion remains as "engraved" on his face; so we could, rightly, think that somebody we meet for first time is a "faint-hearted", a "timid" or a "short-tempered".
Talking again about the lips, we can say that one of more common acts link to them is licking them. We pass our tongue over our lips every time, we see o hear something we feel attractive or, to better saying, emotionally "tasty" (even a topic of conversation). When this happens our mouth's watering; in other words, we have an increase of our salivary secretion as we were smelling or tasting something appetizing. William H. Masters, the famous sexologist, discovered that we have the same reaction when we are aroused. In other words, they said that one of the cue of sexual arousal is a neurovegetative reflex rise of salivation, and probably it induce someone to lick his lips.
So we could infer this reaction and the consequent to lick our lips would originate from our alimentary behavior; in plain words, we could say we would deal with something we found moving or exciting as it would be something to eat.
However, sometimes, this act has another meaning. If we make it with a quick movement of our tongue usually on the upper lip and from a side to the other of our mouth, it means fear of anxiety. When a news or something else made us anxious, we have a sensation of dryness into our mouth, because one of more common physiological changes provoked by anxiety is a reduction of the salivation. As a consequence, we wet our lips with our tongue.
We often put one or more fingers on our mouth. Keeping a finger on it, especially if our mouth is half-open, means we found what we are listening, seeing or feeling is stimulating. When we feel uneasy or sad however we can lean our inch in that area of the face; this act call to our mind, with a "sketch" of the original action, the feeling of comfort we felt sucking our "big finger" in our early childhood.
If we are leafing through a magazine, we can see some advertising page in witch a women leans her little finger on a side of her mouth. We can see this act in our experience quite rarely; it is more often a pose suggested by admen to models to induce men to perceive those women as helpless as a child. In other words, their little finger, just because is the more minute finger of our hand, evokes, in a symbolic way, the imagine of a child in need of tenderness and to be protected. Childlike postures or behaviours made by women appear very attractive to the eyes of men.
Leaning a finger against the mouth, however, can sometimes also express refusal and wariness: this signal takes this meaning when one keeps his index finger in a crosswise and slanting way on his mouth. Who made this act can even pressing his finger against his lips. It could be like to the road sign of "no entrance". A message like this is given by the signal making pushing under the lower lip with the forefinger. In this case, who performs this act, simulates part of the disgust or contempt facial expression. He or she couldn't be in a position to show these emotion publicly. Otherwise, somebody could feel these attitudes for a long time (for example, until the interlocutor doesn't stop talking or for the duration of an exposition) so keeping the facial expressions link to them would be very hard if it has made only through his facial muscles. We began talking about kiss. Now let us come back to that topic.
With regard to this, many scholars on nonverbal behavior, M. S. Cary, Monica M. Moore, etc. have discovered that during dating or another interaction between stroger and fair sexes, women almost always controll the course of the interaction. .
Adam Kendon, observing couples, noticed that this happen about who "decides" and "directs" the behavior to kiss.
Here some signals Kendon and others observed in that context. .
1. She looks repeatedly at his mouth; when she makes it her eyes are often shining and her lips half-open. .
2. She takes breath - as someone who feels an intense emotion - when it happens, the chest rises and the body leans lightly toward the other; sometimes, her mouth is half-open. .
3. She listens him keeping her mouth half-open, all the time he goes on talking; her gaze is feathered blurs and she is almost motionless. .
4. The man is talking; at a certain moment, he finish to talk and she, instead to take her turn of conversation, remains silent and fixes him in his eyes. .
5. When she is seated, looking at him, she rhythmically swings her upper body forward and backward. .
6. Listening him, she close her eyes slowly and for some istant. .
7. Listening and looking at him, she keeps her mouth half-open and moves slowly her forefinger on the lower lip. Her pupils are often dilatated. .

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