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Postures that speak
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身体语言的魅力
在西方国家，人们有几种非常常用的身体语言，它们的来历颇耐人寻味。
Shrugging shoulders
耸肩
Charles Darwin explained the shoulder shrug by the “principle of unconscious antithesis”. An indignant person, ready to fight for home or honour, holds his head upright, squares his shoulders, and clenches his fists. A person who feels incapable or uncertain adopts an opposite posture. He hunches his shoulders, tilts his head, and shows his hands palm upward. The message is one of the helplessness: “I don't know what to say” or “I couldn't help it.” The shoulder shrug has also been defined as a form of defensive hunching or symbolic retreat from an unmanageable situation. Raising the shoulders has the apparent effect of lowering the head. The careless, half-humorous shrug thus hears a visual affinity to the nod or bow of submissiveness and also to a turtle's retraction of its head into its shell. Whether or not our neurological wiring is mimicking our reptilian past here, the meaning of the shrug among humans is the same as that among turtles: “This is too much for me to handle.”
查尔斯·达尔文用“无意识对立原则”来解释耸肩这个动作。当一个人义愤填膺，准备为家族或荣誉而战时，他会昂首张肩、紧握双拳。而当一个人感到无能为力或未置可否时，他会采取相反的姿势：耸起肩、歪着头、手掌朝天。这个动作的意思是“我无言以对”或“我无能为力”。耸肩也是一种防御性的姿态，象征着从无法控制的局面中摆脱出来。耸起肩后一个明显的效果就是低下头。因此，漫不经心、略带幽默的耸肩看起来和点头表示顺从有些想象，也好像乌龟把头缩进壳里的动作。无论我们的神经传导是否在模仿我们的爬行动物始祖，耸肩的意义对人类和对乌龟是一样的：“这让我无能为力”。
Crossing heart
在胸口划十字
There is an old folk tradition in which a person making a promise would “seal” it by crossing his heart-that is, by drawing an“+” over his breast. This tradition was a secularization of an even older gestural tradition: the religious tradition of crossing oneself that still exists in the Roman and Orthodox Catholic churches. Crossing the heart, like crossing the fingers, provides protection against bad luck by invoking the power of the holy object. At the same time, it invokes the saviour on the cross as a witness that the speaker's pledge is in earnest. Breaking such a pledge would put the speaker's soul in jeopardy; hence the solemn caution: “Cross my heart and hope to die” (if my pledge proves false.)
In its religious form (actually, forms), crossing has been around almost since the beginning of Christianity. A thumb and index finger forehead cross was customary in the second century as a private devotional. The devotion had become liturgical by the fourth century, and the breast (that is, the heart) was also crossed. Full-body crossing came in around the fifth century and was adopted widely by monks in the 10th. Following prescriptions laid down by Pope Innocent III in the 13th century, Eastern-rite Catholics today cross themselves with the thumb and first two fingers (symbolizing the trinity) and they touch the right shoulder first. Roman-rite followers touch the left shoulders first and use all five digits — representing, perhaps, Christ's five wounds.
人们许诺时在胸口划十字来“确立”诺言，这是一项古老的民间传统。这个传统是一种更古老的手势动作世俗化发展的结果：即罗马和东正教的教廷里仍保留着的在胸口划十字发誓的宗教传统。同中指和食指交叉一样，在胸口划十字也是通过祈求天佑神助使人免遭厄运。同时，也是为了祈祷十字架上的救世主能看到说话人的誓言是虔诚的。违背了这个誓言，发誓人的灵魂便会历尽艰险，因此有这么一个严肃的告诫：“我发誓，我宁愿不得好死(如果我说的是假话)。”
几乎在基督教的初期，这种划十字的宗教形式就存在了(事实上，有多种形式)。公元2世纪，用拇指和食指在额头上划十字是一种常见的个人祈祷仪式。这种祈祷仪式在4世纪变成了礼拜仪式，人们在胸口(即在心上)划十字。5世纪左右，出现了全身幅度的划十字。10世纪时，这种方式被僧侣们广泛接纳。根据13世纪教皇英诺森三世制定的条例，现在采用东派教会礼拜仪式的天主教徒们用拇指、食指和中指划十字(象征三位一体)，而且先接触右肩。采用罗马式礼拜式的教徒则先触左肩，而且把五个手指全用上——可能表示耶稣被钉的五处伤口。
Nodding yes, shaking no
点头赞同，摇头否定
Although not universal, a vertical head nod for approval and a lateral headshake for negation is a common pattern across many cultures. Most biologists agree with Charles Darwin that the two movements mimic infantile nursing patterns. The negation pattern, of course, lasts into the toddler years, when the child says no to an offered spoon.
A sociobiological explanation suggests that the affirmative vertical nod may be connected to “ritualized submission,” in which we “submit to the ideas of the speaker,” and that the negative lateral shake may derive from the shaking-off movement of birds and mammals. We refuse an uncongenial idea in the same manner that a wet long dog rejects the water. These ingenious, if unprovable, suggestions do not in any case discredit the nursing hypothesis.
That the yes-no gesture contrast is probably infantile and not culturally implanted later on is supported by the fact that children who are born deaf and blind fall naturally into the pattern without modelling.
在许多文化中，人们上下点头表示同意，左右摇头表示否定，尽管不是所有文化都遵循这个模式。多数生物学家赞同查尔斯·达尔文的观点，认为这两个动作是模仿婴儿吃奶的样子。当然，这种表达否定的方式会延续到孩子的学步期，到这时你再送给孩子一把勺子，他才会说不要。
从社会生物学的角度的一种解释说，用点头表示肯定或许与“礼仪上的谦恭”有关，即我们要表示“赞同讲话者的观点”；表示否定的摇头可能从鸟类和哺乳动物抖毛的动作演化而来，我们拒绝不相投的观点的方式和一只湿漉漉的狗抖落身上的水是一样的。尽管无法证实，这些富有创见的推测并没有否定先前的小孩吃奶的假设。
这种肯定否定相对照的动作可能是本能的，而不是从后天文化中移植的，这一点有事实为证：生来又聋又瞎的婴儿勿需模仿，自然而然就会做这个动作。
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