Can Others Read Secret Messages in Your Body Language?
Does your walking style, posture, and gestures, give you away?
Posted March 11, 2026 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Research in nonverbal communication has suggested that various body cues can reveal a lot about an individual. From your walking gait to gestures to posture, reading movement cues can tell a lot about a person. Here are some of the secret messages that body language can reveal.
Emotions in Body Movement
We look to nonverbal cues to decode a person’s emotions. The best way to detect another’s emotional state is to rely on their facial expressions. There is a great deal of research suggesting that our faces are a rich source of information about our felt emotions (or the emotions we are enacting to hide our true feelings). Think of the broad smile of a happy person, or the gritting and bared teeth of someone angry. However, what if you can’t clearly see another’s face? Can you, for example, read another’s emotions from a distance?
Research suggests that when angry, body movements tend to be stiffer, jerkier, and faster. When a person is sad, body movements tend to be slow, loose, and contracted—not at all expressive. Happiness , however, is characterized by expansive and loose body movements. For example, joy is associated with arm raising; grief is through downward-directed body movement. When fearful, people tend to engage in self-focused movements, such as hand-wringing or touching other parts of the body.
Can you identify a friend or family member, even at a great distance, by noticing their walk? Research suggests that we can tell a lot from gait. Not only do people have distinctive walking styles that are a personal “signature,” but emotions can be detected through a person's walk. Personality may also be expressed in the way that a person moves and walks. In one of our studies (Riggio and team, 1990), we found that the personality trait of extraversion could be detected from watching a person’s body language.
Our posture, the way we position our bodies, can tell a lot about a person’s feelings and intentions. For example, we can communicate interest in another person by orienting our bodies toward them—an open and welcoming posture. Or we can signal disinterest by turning away and closing off our body language. Pride or enhanced self-worth can also be conveyed via posture, with the chest thrust out, standing erect, head held high, while the posture of embarrassment or shame has the head downward and body slumping.
A review of research on how our body movements can be used to communicate is in a recent book chapter (Crawley and Riggio, 2025).
Riggio, R. E., Lippa, R., & Salinas, C. (1990). The display of personality in expressive movement. Journal of Research in Personality , 24 (1), 16-31.
Crawley, A., & Riggio, R. E. (2025). Emotions Expressed in Body Movements, Postures, Gait, and Dance. In D. Chadee & A. Kostic, (Eds.). Body Language Communication (pp. 235-258). Springer Nature Switzerland.
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Ronald E. Riggio, Ph.D. , is the Henry R. Kravis Professor of Leadership and Organizational Psychology at Claremont McKenna College.
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