It’s 10 a.m and Mark Bowden is sitting comfortably in his chair in front of his desk. His back is upright and he is leaning slightly toward his computer as he sips a cup of coffee. Bowden puts the cup down, smiles and extends his arms in an open hand sweep as if tracing the outline of the room, showing what has now become his home office due to the pandemic.

Bowden is a world-renowned expert on body language and he has been researching non-verbal communication and doing public speaking appearances for more than 10 years. 

“Body language it’s part of our way of non-verbally communicating how we might be thinking, feeling, and intending right now. It’s mainly unconscious to us,” he says. “We’re not really aware of much of the body language that we produce, and we’re often not consciously aware of a lot of the body language that other people produce, but we tend to react to it.”

Non-verbal cues are extremely important when it comes to creating connections. Bowden says it is an unconscious form of conveying emotion. A simple smile can tell us a person is happy and a frown could mean they are sad or worried. Communications expert and consultant Ely Aquino says he considers body posture, facial expressions and the rhythm of breathing to determine the predisposition of a person when conversing with another and the possibility of creating a connection. 

“Rapport and attunement are two extremely important terms in interpersonal communication,” Aquino says. “Understanding rapport as that frequency in which I enter with you at the moment of conversing, which involves certain movements and a certain body position that mirrors yours.”

As human beings, we are built to observe body language signals and understand their meaning. Faith Wood, communications and conflict consultant, calls the science behind understanding non-verbal communication, observation-based communication.

“Observation-based communication is really just about learning what’s a natural style of communication for this person? Do they use their hands? Do they nod their head? Do they raise an eyebrow? Do they furrow when they're thinking? So that we understand when there is a change,” she says.  

The functioning of the human brain is very complex. Neuroscience in recent years has come a long way in understanding it and we now know much better how the brain processes verbal and non-verbal communication. Recent advances in neuroscience have allowed us to understand the importance of body language in human communication.

While researching the impact of non-verbal cues on human communication, I came across a study about “mirror neurons” done by a group of Italian  neurophysiologists at the University of Parma in 1995 and Mark Bowden’s TED Talk  “The Importance of being inauthentic.”

The study revealed humans have something called ‘mirror neurons’ and because of these, we are able to show empathy. These are also the neurons that allow us to experience that rapport Aquino mentioned. 

The way these neurons work is that when a person does certain facial expressions that our brain knows how to interpret, the mirror neurons are activated and make us feel the same emotion.

When talking about the science behind non-verbal communication, Bowden talked about what scientists called the reptilian or primitive brain. This part of our brain is in charge of making  snap judgments about everyone around us and based on their behavior, making the decision of either approaching or retreating.

At the beginning of 2020, no one imagined the radical changes the COVID-19 pandemic would have on our lives. The pandemic not only made us experience a significant transformation of our daily habits, it also caused a disruption in how we communicate, our gestures and body expressions. It made it more difficult to read and interpret cues that are important for social interaction and relationship building.

A large part of human communication takes place at a subconscious level, making non-verbal communication the most basic and fundamental part of communication. Albert Mehrabian, a psychologist who studies human behaviour, says body language represents 55 per cent of the information extracted from communication, tone of voice 38 per cent and words only seven per cent. The foundation of this rule is that all human emotions are bodily processes. 

All behaviour is communication and all communication affects behaviour. But behaviour is affected by the context in which it takes place. The context of the pandemic has had one of the biggest environmental changes on human behaviour ever seen. We have had to move abruptly from face-to-face interactions to adapt quickly to a digital environment and then back to face-to-face interactions.

Bowden and Aquino say they started noticing a shift in people’s non-verbal behaviour that has lasted from the time the first wave of COVID-19 hit until now. Where before we had bright eyes, big smiles, and were eager to greet each other with a hug, a kiss or even a simple handshake, during the pandemic we were thrust into a period where all we saw were eyes above a mask, eyes that avoided eye contact. We had – and still have – masks that prevented us from showing emotions, that covered a smile or a nose wrinkling in disgust. People were holding out their arms not to hug but to ask for more space.  Everyone was afraid. 

Fear is a basic emotion, essential for survival. It is the most natural reaction to something that  threatens us. Without fear, it is likely that neither our ancestors nor the other animal species would have survived.

Meaghen Shaver, St. Lawrence College professor and Board Certified Behaviour Analyst, says that while fear can sometimes prevent people from taking a step forward and doing things they may have otherwise done, when it comes to COVID-19, fear turned out to be somewhat of a healthy response.

“Early on when you had little information about how bad something is going to be and you hear that people are hospitalized and dying, fear was healthy then,” she says. “It kept us home and it kept us safe.”

Historically, there have been several pandemics, the bubonic plague, the 1918 flu, AIDS, and hepatitis to name a few. But before 2020, it was very rare to see a disease occupy so much global media attention. The 1918 flu, also known as the Spanish flu, killed between 50 to 100 million people. The World Health Organization (WHO) says it infected at least one-third of the world’s population at that time. The COVID-19 pandemic has infected more than 760 million people and killed more than six million people around the world.

The WHO declared the COVID-19 disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus as a public health emergency of global concern on Jan. 30, 2020. By  March 11 of that year, the WHO classified it as a pandemic. 

COVID-19 raised not only health, scientific and social alarms, but also environmental and political ones. As COVID-19 spread, work ground to a stop, there were losses in air and maritime transport, tourism and the general economy of most countries of the world. Much of the attention the pandemic attracted was due to the amount of misinformation that it brought with it because of the lack of information and the rapid spread of the virus. This caused distrust in the media and left people vulnerable to believing in false reporting and various conspiracies that were going around at the time. 

“I believe that there is an awful lot of pressure right now in society, around the world internationally, that we were already kind of headed into this direction of feeling a sense of distrust.” says Wood.

For months during the first wave, radio stations and television programs had uninterrupted coverage of the latest number of deaths and new infections. This constant bombardment of information caused greater anxiety, with immediate effects on the mental health of many people, and on their behaviour.

“For two and a half years we have had exposure to fear-based communication, and we created an unhealthy attachment to it,” she says. “So we’ve lost the ability to lower our own stress level, which is in fact, what’s impacting our non-verbal communication.”

The problems that were appearing before the pandemic have not diminished and many people who already had a previous pathology saw their mental illness worsen. A study by the World Health Organization highlighted that during the first year of the pandemic, the global prevalence of anxiety and depression increased by 25 per cent.

“We’ve gotten good at hiding behind a screen, hiding behind the mask, hiding behind a shield or plexiglass. And it allows a sense and  a level of anonymity,” says Wood. “And because it has been going on for so long, people forget that they’re in a live setting having a conversation with a live person and they’ve somewhat forgotten how to mask.”

For Wood, it’s all about being more careful and conscious about not triggering people. “We’re lacking resources and we’re constantly being told what to do, and there’s this hypersensitivity or resistance to people talking in a way that makes us feel like an object instead of like a human being,” she says.

Aquino says adolescents are the one group most affected by mental health issues due to the pandemic. Masking helped hide any issues adolescents had with body image and self-esteem.  “I have noticed that this issue of wearing a mask has allowed them to create certain emotional defensive barriers, as they are in the process of strengthening their personality,” says Aquino. “The mask has become a defense mechanism and many have found it difficult to let go.”

Teachers and professors have also been affected by the use of masks. Humber College professor Genna Buck thinks masks are still necessary and are a form of including those at high risk of infection.

“It allows people to participate and be able to communicate with those who otherwise could not be here because of their risk,” Buck  says. “And we never know who that person is going to be, who is disadvantaged in such a way that masking not being a community practice could hurt them.”

As a professor, Buck says she tries to compensate for the lack of facial expressions due to masks by prioritizing eye contact, bringing more enthusiasm to the class, and paying special attention to her tone of voice.

“It is true that sometimes I might have a little bit more trouble reading students’ facial expressions,” says Buck. “But your eyes are very expressive and I prioritize eye contact. I also ask people regularly to talk to me.”

The need for interpersonal communication and connection with other people is something innate, so when the virus began to restrict our direct contact with people, forced us to wear masks wherever we went, and reduced the places we could visit, we looked for other ways to connect from the safety of our homes.

“It is evident that this pandemic affected connections, but it is also very evident that we were creative and resourceful enough to come up with ways to maintain that contact,”  says Aquino. “I think the proof is in the way we invent other forms to say I am here, I still love you and you’re still important to me.”

Experts like Bowden and Aquino had to expand their presentations and courses to include training on how to interpret body language during online interactions and how to retain people’s attention in this new environment.

“During the pandemic and those two years of lockdown, I had the biggest training activity I had ever had and it was all virtual. What were the issues that we addressed precisely? How to keep teams connected and engaged with organizational processes through virtual channels,” says Aquino. “And beyond that, how to make people truly present without invading their space, which was already being invaded because we were working from home.”

Ricaurte Vasquez, administrator of the Panama Canal Authority, says he noticed his body language during online interactions was significantly different from in-person ones.

“The fact is that it demands a higher level of concentration,” Vasquez says. “And yes, in some of those meetings I was guilty of showing my absolute boredom with the discussion that was taking place. They even made a meme out of it.”

For Aquino, virtuality represented a challenge at the level of communication and as a result  there was a significant deterioration in the use of our body language. This is because during an online call, people don’t always turn on their cameras and on the occasions that they do, we can only see a part of their body. This leaves us less ways to interpret non-verbal cues.

Professor Shaver experienced these difficulties too with her students. “I couldn’t tell who looked confused or who was engaged, who was listening or who was falling asleep,” she says. “For me, the experience was a very lonely one. It felt very one-sided and it definitely was very difficult to engage people.”

Bowden says one of the first things we look at in another person is where their center of gravity is, the position of our feet and what are the hands doing. 

“Our brains are different from other social mammals because we have this and so, when we look at another human being, we want to know where the hands are and what are they doing?,” says Bowden. “Where’s that center of gravity? Which way is it pointed? So where’s that whole body going? And is the center of gravity lowered into an aggressive stance?”

For these experts some of the questions raised by the pandemic include how will body language work on a video call where you can’t see the full body of the speaker and you can’t hear changes in voice tone well?

Bowden says that during human interactions, the less information our brain gets, the less optimistic it is towards a person. He says during video calls most of the time we can not see the center of gravity of the other person, we are not able to see where the tension in the body is, as a result, we cannot see what is happening with the rest of the person and we cannot interpret what they are feeling.

“I can make less judgements about you and the less information our brains get, the less optimistic they will be,” says Bowden. “So depending on the risk of the situation, I’m more likely to default to negatives rather than positives.”

For this same reason, Aquino stresses the importance of having good verbal communication to accompany body language during online interactions as this helps to better understand the possible expressions of those who decide to turn on their cameras.

After three waves of COVID-19 had pass and health officials deemed safe to go back to in-person interactions, a report from the American Psychological Association showed that about 50 per cent of Americans were anxious about returning to in-person interactions “post-COVID.” Part of this feeling of anxiety had to do with the combination between long periods of lockdown, social distancing and lack of physical touch.

“We are loving beings in the biological sense of the word and curiously enough, the form of expression of love is contact,” says Aquino. “Contact is something that has been very prevalent as a social code of expression of appreciation, and it was always the hug, the handshake, of course, with its cultural variants.”

Being the face of a company as large as the Panama Canal Authority, which has more than 40,000 employees, Vasquez says physical contact is what has helped him regain that closeness with his collaborators. 

“I hug them,” he says. “For me it’s important to approach my collaborators and affirm that they are doing a great job despite the circumstances.”

However, Shaver says that even though a hug or a handshake is a good icebreaker,  in these times of reintegration to in-person interactions, it is especially important to respect people’s space and ask before making physical contact with someone. 

“To me it’s just so intriguing and I love just meeting people where they’re at,” says Shaver. “It’s a really important part of compassion and empathy.”