Imagine you're trying to teach a colleague how to recognize stress in a stranger across the table. You could hand them a body-language book — they'd flip through 300 pages of "what crossed arms mean" and walk away knowing nothing useful. Or you could hand them a single page with every behavior mapped onto a grid — top of the page is the head, bottom is the feet, left side is the calm behaviors, right side is the deceptive ones, color-coded by stress severity. They'd glance at the chart, see three of those behaviors clustered on the right side, add up the points, and know whether to keep selling or walk out of the deal.
That's the BTE. Hughes spent years rearranging notecards on his living room floor trying to compress everything he learned in a million-dollar interrogation training career onto a single placemat — because his mom said, "I wish I could just borrow your eyes to watch The Bachelor."1 What he ended up with was the Behavioral Table of Elements: a periodic-table-style chart where every single behavior gets a cell, and the cells get added together like chemical elements to form judgments about what's actually happening in someone's head.
It's not a body-language reference. It's a scoring system.
The BTE is designed to consume one input: behavioral observations made during a question-and-answer period. The chart is calibrated for interactive contexts — interrogations, sales conversations, jury selection, depositions, job interviews, first dates — anywhere one person is asking and another is answering. It does not work as a passive observation framework. It is a structured tally tool for active dialogue.
The biological substrate the BTE exploits: human nonverbal behaviors leak before, during, and after verbal responses, and those three timeframes carry different meanings. A behavior that appears before the answer reveals stress about the question itself. During the answer suggests stress about what's being said. After the answer indicates monitoring — the speaker checking whether they got away with something. The BTE encodes this temporal structure directly into its cell metadata, alongside the behavior's location on the body, its likely cause, and its severity rating on a 1-to-4 stress scale (the Deception Rating Scale, or DRS).1
The chart sits permanently on the operator's phone or wall — Hughes designed it specifically to be a glanceable reference, not a memorized taxonomy. The operator runs through a Q&A and tallies behaviors as they appear. At the end of the question-answer period, the points get added up. More than 11 points = highly likely deception.1
Open any cell on the BTE and you find thirteen pieces of information about that single behavior:
That's the cell key. Every behavior on the chart has all thirteen properties filled in.
The BTE is not arbitrarily organized — its spatial layout encodes meaning:
The layout means an operator never has to memorize where any single behavior lives — body region puts it in a row, stress severity puts it in a column. The eye is up-and-left. The fist is mid-and-right. Hushing is upper-mid. Once you've seen the chart twice, navigating it is automatic.
This is where most body-language books fail and the BTE departs from them. The chart isn't a lookup tool — it's an arithmetic engine.
During any question-and-answer period, the operator notes which behaviors appear and their DRS values. At the end of the period, points are summed. The threshold is fixed:
More than 11 points on the DRS during a single question-and-answer period = highly likely deception.
The cluster-amplifier rule (red letters → 4.0) is the BTE's signature mechanic. A behavior that on its own scores a mild 1.0 — say, a brief lip-lick — can suddenly count as a 4.0 if it appears alongside a confirmed 4.0 behavior in the same period. This is how the BTE captures the well-known principle that behaviors cluster. A lone tell means little. A tell next to another tell can mean everything.
Hughes works this through with a Clinton example. The phrase "I did not have sexual relations with that woman..." contains:
A more dramatic example: a sexual-assault suspect responds to a where-were-you question with a Resume Statement ("I've volunteered coaching that softball team for over seven years. I have a Master's in Psychology...") That single statement contains a non-answer + two psychological distancings + a resume statement. Combined DRS: 16. Highly likely deception by the BTE's threshold, before any body language is even considered.1
Pre-encounter (1 minute). Pull up the BTE on your phone. Identify what kind of conversation you're entering and which body region you'll have visual access to. (Sitting across a desk: face + hands + upper torso + voice. Walking and talking: feet + dominant hand + voice. The chart works with whatever you can see.)
Establish baseline (first 60–90 seconds). Watch the target's resting behaviors before any pointed question is asked. Their default blink rate, their default breathing location, their default facial movement, their default vocal pitch — these are the anchors. The BTE measures deviations from baseline, not absolute values. A normally fast-blinker is not stressed.
Ask. Watch. Tally. As each question is asked and answered, note any behavior that appears outside baseline. Symbol, body region, severity. For each, place it temporally — Before / During / After the verbal answer. Did the throat-clear come before they spoke? That's stress about the question. After? That's monitoring.
Sum at end of period. A "period" is one full question-answer-pause cycle. At the end of it, sum the DRS values, applying the cluster-amplifier rule (red-letter behaviors → 4.0 if any 4.0 appeared in the same period). If you cross 11 points, deception is highly likely. If you don't, the period was clean — move on.
Repeat per question. The threshold resets per period. A clean question can follow a deceptive one. The BTE measures each Q&A unit independently.1
Contaminated baseline. The operator entered the conversation already in motion, never observed the target's resting behavior, and has nothing to deviate against. Without baseline, the chart's values are uncalibrated. Recovery: ask several low-stakes questions to establish baseline before any pointed inquiry.
Missing temperature data. Blue-letter behaviors are temperature-dependent. A target sweating in a hot room is producing thermoregulatory sweat, not stress sweat. Operating the chart without environmental context produces false positives. Recovery: note ambient conditions; depress blue-letter values in cold rooms, ignore them entirely in temperature-extreme contexts.
Single-period scoring on multi-period stress. Some targets carry stress across multiple Q&A cycles — a continuous high-anxiety state from the moment they entered the room. The BTE measures per-period change, not absolute level. A target with constant 8 DRS who never crosses 11 may still be hiding something. Recovery: also track baseline drift across the conversation as a separate signal.
Cultural false-positives. Eye-contact norms, gesture density, and emotional display vary substantially across cultures. The BTE includes a Cultural Prevalence flag per cell, but the operator has to read it. Operating the chart without cultural calibration yields systematic false positives in cross-cultural interrogations. Recovery: pre-brief cultural baseline before any high-stakes assessment.
Cluster-amplifier overcounting. The red-letter rule can produce score inflation if the operator misidentifies the 4.0-anchor behavior. One mistaken 4.0 can pull every red-letter behavior in the period up to 4.0, ballooning the total score artificially. Recovery: red-letter elevations should require high-confidence 4.0 anchors, not borderline calls.1
The BTE is presented in Six-Minute X-Ray as the foundational reference chart underlying the entire 6MX behavioral profiling system. Hughes claims its development drew on "15,000 hours of interviews, interrogation analysis, and research"1 across his 20-year US Navy career and post-retirement Applied Behavior Research practice. The chart is freely downloadable from chasehughes.com/behavior-profiling and has reportedly been hung at the FBI Academy and used in police departments. No peer-reviewed evaluation of the chart's predictive validity exists. Individual indicator claims draw on named-but-not-formally-cited researchers (Ekman, Hess, Pennebaker, Bowden, Pease, Navarro).
Single-source proprietary tool with no peer-review. The BTE is Hughes' own synthesis. The 11-point threshold, the cluster-amplifier rule, the DRS 1-4 calibration, and the temporal Before/During/After coding are all Hughes's empirical claims based on his practitioner experience. None have published validation studies. The BTE is internally consistent and operationally sensible — but a sales professional applying it has no published baseline for false-positive rates.
The threshold-as-arithmetic vs. cluster-as-judgment problem. The 11-point threshold treats deception detection as a numeric calculation. Yet most experienced interrogators describe their reads as gestalt judgments rather than tallies. The BTE may be functionally a training scaffold — a way to build up to gestalt judgment via explicit accounting — rather than a working operational tool. Hughes himself notes that experienced operators can stop tallying once the underlying pattern recognition is automatic.
Cultural Prevalence as a cell flag, not a calibration system. Acknowledging culture in a per-cell metadata field is not the same as calibrating the whole chart for cross-cultural use. A behavior that is mild in one culture and severe in another can't be encoded as a single DRS value with a "cultural prevalence" footnote. The flag is honest acknowledgment of the limit, not a solution to it.
The BTE's most direct comparison in this vault is the deception-detection apparatus from Lieberman's Mindreader (2022). Both authors are popular practitioners writing for general audiences. Both present claim-detection systems based on observable behavioral markers. Where Hughes builds a quantitative tally tool with explicit scoring — twelve points and you've crossed a threshold — Lieberman builds a qualitative apparatus organized around linguistic patterns (Pennebaker's pronouns, Weintraub's qualifiers and retractors, Cleckley's psychopathy markers).
The convergence: both refuse the body-language-attribution-error trap. Both insist that no single behavior means anything in isolation. Both build cluster-based reads.
Where they diverge: Hughes operationalizes via numeric scoring; Lieberman operationalizes via specific linguistic-pattern recognition tied to scholarly anchors. Hughes' tool is faster to deploy in the field — you can run a BTE tally during a conversation. Lieberman's tool requires more analytical attention but has stronger citation support. Where Hughes trains you to count, Lieberman trains you to parse. The split reveals: deception detection at the practitioner level is two distinct skills — speed-tallying observable indicators and slow-parsing semantic patterns. The skilled operator runs both simultaneously, but the books teach them separately because the cognitive modes are different.
What neither states directly but both imply: the most important behavior is the baseline shift. Hughes encodes this as the per-period DRS calculation; Lieberman encodes it as language-pattern deviation from a person's normal speech. Both are saying: what changed? — not what is present?
The BTE's 11-point threshold runs into a structural problem that clinical psychology has spent decades wrestling with: the base-rate problem in diagnostic instruments. When the underlying condition (deception in this case) is rare in the tested population, even an instrument with high sensitivity and high specificity will produce more false positives than true positives. This is the same mathematical issue that makes psychiatric screening tools — depression inventories, anxiety scales, autism spectrum measures — so methodologically fraught. A screening tool that catches 95% of true depressives in a population where 1% are depressed will misidentify a substantial fraction of non-depressives as positive.
The structural parallel: the BTE is functionally a screening tool for deception, calibrated against Hughes' practitioner population (interrogation suspects — a high-base-rate population for actual deception). Applied to first-date populations, sales conversations, or job interviews — where actual deception rates are dramatically lower — the same threshold will likely produce systematic over-detection. This is invisible to the operator because the BTE provides a "score" that feels objective.
The structural connection unlocks what neither domain produces alone: the BTE is most valid when applied in populations where the operator has prior reason to suspect deception — interrogation, fraud investigation, security screening — and progressively less valid as it's applied in populations where deception is rare. The "for entertainment purposes only" disclaimer at the front of the book is, viewed through this lens, more substantive than it appears: applying BTE arithmetic to general social interactions probably produces more wrong reads than right ones, simply because of base-rate math. See Deception Detection for the broader vault apparatus on this question — and note that the same base-rate problem applies across that whole literature, not just to Hughes.
The HaHa Lung concept of Yuku Mireba — "the power of seeing" — describes a practitioner's tell-spotting capacity organized around three deception levels (chicken-shit, bull-shit, elephant-shit) with associated body-language signatures. Like the BTE, Yuku Mireba refuses single-tell attribution and works through layered observation. Unlike the BTE, Yuku Mireba doesn't quantify — it categorizes deceptions by order of magnitude of the lie being told.
The structural parallel: both frameworks treat tell-spotting as taxonomic rather than mechanical. Both insist that the meaning of any single behavioral indicator depends entirely on context — what other behaviors accompany it, what was just said, what stage of the conversation you're in.
The deeper alignment: both frameworks are practitioner-derived, both bypass academic peer-review, both have been transmitted through training relationships rather than published validation. The Eastern lineage holds that this kind of perceptual capacity is built through sustained practice with a master operator, not through reading. Hughes implicitly agrees — he ends Six-Minute X-Ray with a 25-week training plan and a blunt acknowledgment that "only 2% of people who read this book will go through with the training."1 The book is not the skill. The skill is built through repeated observation against feedback, the same way Yuku Mireba was traditionally transmitted.
The split: where Yuku Mireba is held within an integrated framework that includes ethical constraints on its use (specific to operator ranks and lineage authorizations), the BTE is held within an explicitly utilitarian frame ("for entertainment purposes only" disclaimer notwithstanding). The Eastern tradition would view this gap as the structurally important problem: a perceptual capacity this sharp, distributed without lineage-mediated ethical scaffolding, will be turned against the populations its operators interact with daily. See Yuku Mireba for the lineage-embedded counterpart.
The BTE sits at an interesting intersection with behavioral economics work on heuristic decision-making. Gerd Gigerenzer's research on fast-and-frugal heuristics shows that simple, transparent decision rules often outperform complex algorithmic models in real-world conditions — particularly when the underlying process is non-stationary or the data is noisy. The BTE is functionally an algorithmic scoring system — sum the DRS values, threshold at 11. Gigerenzer's work would predict that this kind of algorithmic approach can underperform a skilled operator using fast-and-frugal cues unless the algorithm is matched to the actual statistical structure of the deception-display problem.
The structural connection: Hughes' system probably works best as a training scaffold that builds toward gestalt heuristic judgment, then gets dropped. The BTE may be most useful for the apprentice (who needs explicit accounting to track behaviors they can't yet see fluently) and least useful for the master (whose pattern recognition has compressed the chart into immediate perception). This matches Hughes' own description of skill development across the four phases of his training plan — Visual / Audio / Response / Mental — where the Mental phase is explicitly the dissolution of explicit tallying into automatic recognition.
The Sharpest Implication. The BTE quietly inverts most people's mental model of what deception detection actually is. Most people think it's: "I see a particular behavior; that behavior means a particular thing." The BTE says: "Behaviors don't mean anything individually. The meaning is in the cluster, the timing, the magnitude relative to baseline, and the cumulative score across a question-answer cycle." If you took the BTE seriously, you would have to abandon most of what you think you know about reading people — every "crossed arms means defensiveness" or "looking up means lying" maxim becomes wrong, not because it's false but because it's unanchored. Hughes is offering a structured replacement for the entire body-language-as-decoder-ring tradition, and the structured replacement requires you to do more perceptual work, not less. That's why most people who buy the book never use it.
Generative Questions.
The 13-Property Cell Key above comes from Six-Minute X-Ray. The Behavior Ops Manual's own presentation of the same chart lists 14 properties, not 13 — it opens the key with Reference Number (the number printed in a cell's upper-left corner) as property one, then runs Symbol, Name, Confirming Gestures, Amplifying Gestures, Micro Physiological Amplifiers, Variable Factors, Cultural Prevalence, Sexual Propensity, Gesture Type, Conflicting Behaviors, Body Region, Deception Rating, and Deception Timeframe as properties two through fourteen.2
Reference Number is deliberately decoupled from meaning — it identifies a cell's position on the chart, nothing else. Hughes is explicit that as the BTE "evolves on a monthly basis," cells get added or removed, but reference numbers stay fixed to their position so a printed chart from one month still cross-references correctly against training material from another. It's an indexing convenience, not a diagnostic input — which is probably why the earlier Six-Minute X-Ray ingest didn't carry it forward as a counted property. Functionally it's closer to a page number than a behavioral datum.
The BOM's own framing for the whole key opens with a borrowed principle worth carrying alongside the properties themselves: "the first principle of interrogation is the suspension of judgment," credited to CIA and other interrogation-school training.2 The book positions the entire cell-key apparatus — all fourteen properties — as machinery in service of that discipline: hold the observation, resist the conclusion, let the data points accumulate before interpreting.
🚩 Two claims from the same passage need a confidence tag. The BOM claims that after "a three-week period of periodic use, most clients in the test group experienced significant results and were able to recall over 95% of the cell data" — no methodology, sample size, or test-group description is given anywhere nearby.2 [LOW CONFIDENCE]. A separate, softer claim in the same passage — that "instinctive" real-world fluency with the table "usually takes about nine to eleven weeks of exposure" — carries the same absence of methodology and gets the same tag. [LOW CONFIDENCE]. Both read as promotional claims for Hughes' own training-package sales, consistent with the standing 🚩 MOTIVATED REASONING concern that runs through this author's commercial material generally.
The Clinton (DRS 12) and sexual-assault Resume Statement (DRS 16) examples above are both purely verbal. The BOM runs a third worked example that's the more instructive one precisely because it isn't — it's a full multi-channel group, verbal and nonverbal scored together exactly the way a real interrogation produces them.2
The scenario: a senior interrogator asks a child-molestation suspect, "Mr. Phillips, what happened when you were with Kyle Williams in your car last week?" Before Phillips says a word, the analyst has already logged digital flexion and knee clasping — a confirming pair, since Foot Withdrawal-style stress gestures cluster with Knee Clasping in the BTE's confirming-gestures field. Then he answers: "I am a well-respected member of this community. My entire neighborhood knows who I am, and I'm an usher at our Presbyterian church. He and I did not do anything while he was in my car." As he says "he was in my car," his right shoulder rises, he shakes his head "no," and he exposes his palm.
Tallied out:
Total: 17.5 — well past the 11-point threshold, and the analyst hasn't even reached for facial expression, blink rate, or vocal pitch yet. The book's own gloss makes the point explicit: this is only a partial tally of what a real analyst would catch in the room, and the final sentence of Phillips's statement also contains psychological distancing (worth another 4.0) that the worked example sets aside for later coverage.
The example is worth holding next to the two purely-verbal ones precisely for the DNL tag on palm exposure — a 1.0-rated, "deception not likely" gesture that still gets folded into a 17.5 deceptive total. The BTE's cluster arithmetic doesn't require every component gesture to individually point toward deception; two 4.0s and a stray 1.0 signaling trust can sit inside the same accumulating group without contradiction, because the score is additive, not a vote.
Both enrichment sections above cite the Mr. Phillips worked example and the 13/14-property cell key to the 2023 Behavior Ops Manual. That's not wrong, but it's incomplete — it's a republish, not an origin. The BTE itself, the "Mr. Phillips" child-molestation worked example (résumé statement + non-contraction + single-sided shrug + head-shake "no" + palm exposure), and the DRS arithmetic all first appear in The Ellipsis Manual (2017), six years earlier.3 The 2017 version of the Phillips example runs the identical gesture sequence — digital flexion and knee clasping observed before he speaks, the same four-sentence résumé-and-denial statement, the same shoulder raise/head-shake/palm-exposure cluster on "he was in my car" — and lands on the same Total score: 17.5, glossed with the line "With a score of 12 being extremely deceptive, 17.5 is almost a sure bet."3
That "12" is worth sitting with. It isn't the BOM's 11-point threshold, and the vault's existing DRS-threshold Tension (11-pt BOM vs. 12-pt EM) is exactly this discrepancy, traced to its actual first appearance: Hughes stated 12 as the deception threshold in 2017 and 11 in 2023, then reused the same worked example both times without reconciling the two numbers against each other. The BTE chapter opens with the same "first principle of interrogation is the suspension of judgment... in CIA and other interrogation schools" framing this page already quotes from the BOM2 — that line, too, is 2017-original, not 2023-original.3 Treat the BOM as Hughes's second presentation of a chart he built years earlier, not as the chart's source.
The Ellipsis Manual prints the BTE's individual cell entries in full prose — one heading per behavior, each with its symbol, variant notation, and interpretive gloss. This is the granularity neither the BOM excerpt nor the 13/14-property key above captures: the actual name-by-name, symbol-by-symbol contents of the chart. Reference table below, condensed from the book's per-cell prose.4
| # | Behavior | Symbol / Variants | Core Read |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Arm Cross | Ac (4 variable factors: palm closeness, thumb direction, tightness, humerus-to-torso distance) | Assurance/warmth-seeking or threat response — not simple "defensiveness" |
| 1 | Head Tilt | Ht | Open/vulnerable; curiosity, flirtation, feigned innocence; conflicts with Jc (challenge) and Tp (boredom) |
| 2 | Chin Thrust | Ct1 (deliberate/cultural directional signal), Ct2 (involuntary collar-adjust microgesture) | Challenge/anger (1U/2M: variant 1 universal, variant 2 mostly male) |
| 3 | Eyebrow Flash | Ef1 (flash), Ef2 (constantly raised) | Friendliness/trust (1); anger/fear/emphasis (2) — Ef1 triggers an unconscious mirrored return |
| 4 | Head Downcast | ~U prefix (both sexes, more common in women in courtship); confirmed by Gpr | Shame, guilt, submissiveness; contraindicated in abuse survivors |
| 5 | Lip Compression | Lc | Suppressing opinion/withholding; escalates to 3.0 in hypothetical-crime-justification interrogation contexts |
| 6 | Teeth Sucking | Ts1 (antisocial/challenge), Ts2 (hygienic) | Aggression/contempt (1) vs. innocuous (2) |
| 7 | Turtling | — | Fear-based; shoulders up, head down; common in abused children |
| 8 | Object in Mouth | "lip" (notebook shorthand) | Reassurance-seeking, not typically deceptive |
| 9 | Jaw Clenching | Jc | Withheld aggression, latent hostility |
| 10 | Nostril-Wing Dilation | Wd | Increased oxygen need under stress/arousal |
| 11 | Confirmation Glance | — | Post-statement check toward the most socially powerful person present |
| 12 | Yawn | Ye (red-coded cluster amplifier) | Anxiety/deception more often than boredom; false pre-question yawns flagged in guilty subjects |
| 13 | Happiness (facial) | — | Genuine: full-face, eye-corner wrinkling; fake: lower-face only, asymmetric |
| 14 | Flushing | — | Adrenaline-driven vasodilation: embarrassment, guilt, fear, arousal, or substances |
| 15 | Head Back | Hb1 (data recall), Hb2 (neck exposure/challenge) | Retrieval effort vs. fearless posturing |
| 16 | Lip Retraction | (see Oi) | Reassurance-seeking, equal across sexes |
| 17 | Ocular Orbital Tension | Ot1 (classical), Ot2 (disgust) | Squint-adjacent muscular tension from curiosity/focus/emotion |
| 18 | Eyebrow Narrowing | Bn1 (anger), Bn2 (contemplation) | Context-dependent — same muscles, opposite meanings |
| 19 | Ventilation | (single category, no variant split) | Thermoregulation under stress; more common in deceptive/high-stress subjects |
| 20 | Adam's Apple Raise | Aa1 (with swallow), Aa2 (without swallow, emotional-reactive) | Disagreement/stress; RAS-linked |
| 21 | Guiding | Gg1 (hands), Gg2 (head), Gg3 (self-removal from path) | Direction-indicating, low diagnostic weight alone |
| 22 | Baton Gestures | Bg | Speech-rhythm hand motion; asynchronous timing signals a felt/said rift |
| 23 | Vertical Head Shake ("no" while meaning yes) | — | Truth leaking through an unconscious "no" during an affirming statement |
| 24 | Head Support | Hs1 (chin on hand), Hs2 (head tilted to hand near ear) | Boredom/fatigue (1) vs. trust/curiosity/defiance, carries 1Ht meaning (2) |
| 25 | Surprise (facial) | — | Brow-raise + sclera exposure + jaw drop, hard to fully suppress |
| 26 | Eye Blink Rate | Br (variable, e.g. "Bl3") | Slows with captivation/interest, spikes with stress; rapid blinking can read as contempt |
| 27 | Pupil Dilation | Pd / –Pd (constriction) | Pleasure/attraction (dilation) vs. disgust/aversion (constriction) |
| 28 | Eye Squint | Sq | Stress/disagreement/incredulity/concentration — disambiguate via accompanying head tilt/brow position |
| 29 | Shoulder Shrugging | — | ~4 possible readings depending on context; single-sided variant leans deceptive |
| 30 | Sadness (facial) | — | Gravity-effect facial relaxation; conflicts with Jc (precedes anger) |
| 31 | Disgust (facial) | — | Rarely feigned; highly reliable when observed; conflicts with Wd (air-need) |
| 32 | Fear (facial) | — | Widened eyes/sclera exposure, horizontal lip stretch; conflicts with Bb1 (pride) and Ia (excitement) |
| 33 | Contempt (facial) | Co | Only asymmetric genuine facial expression; moral/social superiority |
| 34 | Anger (facial) | — | Lowered brows + compressed lips; conflicts with Pe (innocent protest) |
| 35 | Protecting Gestures | Pr | Limb-crossing to cover a vital area; closed gesture, anxiety/insecurity |
| 36 | Swallowing | (red-coded) | Inconclusive alone; RAS/adrenaline-linked excess saliva |
| 37 | Elbow Closure | — | Seated-only; drawing vital parts inward; discomfort/insecurity; temperature-affected |
| 38 | Single-Shoulder Shrug | Ss | Doubt/disbelief, verbal-context specific |
| 39 | Digital Extension | — | Low stress/openness; can also appear with genital-protection fear (73Gpr) |
| 40 | Palm Exposure | Pe | Trustworthy/honest signaling; deceptive version shows less bodily/facial involvement |
| 41 | Chin Stroke | — | Contemplation; combined with Co (contempt) reads as deviant/ownership thought |
| 42 | Pupil Constriction | Pc | Relative-measurement aversion response |
| 43 | Elbows Out | Eo1 (<shoulder width), Eo2 (single elbow), Eo3 (>shoulder width) | Opening gesture — sudden confidence/security |
| 44 | Posture | Ps1 (vertical), Ps2 (convex) | Baseline-only behavior, not mood-linked |
| 45 | "No" (head shake while affirming truth) | — | Same core mechanism as #23; leakage of disagreement during a truth-claim |
| 46 | Locked Fingers | Lf1 (loose/restful), Lf2 (capillary withdrawal/tension) | Self-restraint; Lf2 escalates toward 2.0 |
| 47 | Steepling | St1 (head height), St2 (chest), St3 (waist/lower) | Internal confidence; height correlates inversely with receptivity |
| 48 | Behind Head | — | False confidence, contempt/insecurity, deliberate dominance display |
| 49 | Arms on Hips | Ah1 (thumbs back), Ah2 (thumbs forward) | In-charge signaling (1) vs. curiosity/interest (2); gendered display variance |
| 50 | Self-Hug | Shg | Closed/soothing; thumbs-up + body contact instead reads as confidence |
| 51 | Arms Behind Back | Bb1 (hands clasped, confidence/superiority), Bb2 (wrist-grip, self-restraint under anger) | Grip height on Bb2 scales with anger level |
| 52 | Constantly Raised Shoulders | — | Vital-organ protection reflex; social fear/self-consciousness |
| 53 | Single-Arm Wrap | — | Self-conscious; mostly women, diminishes as social comfort builds |
| 54 | Freeze | — | Cognitive-load halt during deception management; fear expression can override via RAS |
| 55 | Facial Touching | — | Most media-notorious "tell"; weighted no higher than any other cell in practice |
| 56 | Throat Clasping | — | Fear-and-consequence variant of facial touching |
| 57 | Arms in Air | Ia | Comfort/elation/excitement; high-comfort storytelling marker |
| 58 | Figure-Four Leg Cross | (conflicts with 90Kc) | Comfort/trust; culturally restricted (sole exposure taboo in parts of Asia/Arab world) |
| 59 | Pelvic Tilt | forward/backward (no fixed symbol) | Forward = confidence; backward = lack of confidence |
| 60 | Facing | Ff1 (away), Ff2 (toward) | Pelvis follows the true object of attention, independent of upper-body orientation |
| 61 | Hands in Pockets | Po1 (thumbs in), Po2 (thumbs out), Po3 (fingertips only) | Deference/uncertainty (1); confidence/availability (2); readiness or reservation (3) |
| 62 | Chest Touching | — | Nervous response to distressing information |
| 63 | Double-Leg Cross | — | Withholding/probable concealment, distinct from simple leg-cross |
| 64 | Tapping | — | Context-dependent: boredom, thought, nervousness, tension release |
| 65 | Fidgeting | — | Peripheral anxiety burn-off; farther from head = harder to control |
| 66 | Two-Handed Grasping | — | Closed, reassurance/control-seeking |
| 67 | Hands on Back of Neck | — | Stress, anxiety, or deep contemplation |
| 68 | Lint Picking | — | Self-conscious displacement activity, conversational-lull filler |
| 69 | Wrist to Forehead | — | Pacifying/self-assurance gesture |
| 70 | Barrier Gesture | — | Arm bisecting interviewer/subject line; unconscious protection |
| 71 | Barrier Cross | — | Distinct from comfort leg-crosses; withholding/concealment |
| 72 | Palms Down | — | Unwillingness to be transparent; often precedes exposed flaws in a statement |
| 73 | Genital Protecting | Gpr | Innate vulnerability response under verbal/physical/psychological threat |
| 74 | Hushing | Hu1 (cough-cover), Hu2 (finger-to-lips), Hu3 (nose-scratch) | Self-consciousness about what's being said/thought (Pease & Pease, 2006) |
| 75 | Groin Exposure | — | Trust, vulnerability, honesty signal |
| 76 | Leg Crossing | — | Trust/comfort toward the person crossed toward; uncrossing signals the opposite |
| 77 | Toes Up | — | Antigravity elation gesture |
| 78 | Breathing Rate | — | Baseline 12–20 breaths/min; rises with stress |
| 79 | Torso Facing | FcT (toward), FcA (away) | Direct engagement vs. disengagement marker |
| 80 | Postural Tilt | PtT (toward), PtA (away) | Mutual interest (both lean in) vs. status/disinterest (one leans back) |
| 81 | Knee Hugging | — | Rare; self-as-imaginary-companion pacifying gesture |
| 82 | Digital Flexion | Df | In-the-moment anxiety barometer; deeper flexion = higher momentary anxiety |
| 83 | Binding Legs | — | Secretiveness, fear, mistrust |
| 84 | Locked Ankle | — | Withholding; correctable by inducing subject to stand/move |
| 85 | Grooming Gestures | — | Appearance-maintenance under anxiety, upbringing-dependent frequency |
| 86 | Clasping the Thighs | — | Autocontact; attraction/arousal or stress self-soothing |
| 87 | Wrist Touching | Wt1 (adjusting), Wt2 (grabbing) | Comfort/barrier (1) vs. anger/self-restraint (2, "red lettering") |
| 88 | Inward Toe Pointing | — | Self-consciousness; paired with barrier behaviors signals concealment |
| 89 | Eyelid Rubbing | — | Mostly male; need to stop a train of thought |
| 90 | Knee Clasp | Kc | Seated-only; inner desire to leave/end conversation, often with a long inhale |
| 91 | Foot Withdrawal | Fw | Sudden trust loss or self-consciousness (Navarro, 2011) |
| 92 | Finger to Nose | — | High-rated hushing variant; rarely appears alone (Wolfe 1948; Pease 2006; Morris 1979) |
| 93 | Interaction with Others' Property | Opi (willing), –Opi (unwilling) | Comfort/contempt-toward-owner proxy |
| 94 | Object Interaction | — | Willingness to touch/rearrange environment tracks comfort and control-seeking |
| 95 | Shoe Removal | — | Comfort, confidence, trust |
| 96 | Belonging Carelessness | — | Aloofness/carelessness toward the interaction |
| 97 | Watch Checking | — | Watch for two-handed checking and tension in the opposing hand |
| 98 | Jacket Buttoning | — | Stopping point in trust/withholding; temperature-affected |
| 99 | Clothing Covering | — | Body-coverage adjustment; temperature-affected |
| 100 | Object Barrier | — | Using any object as a body shield; insecurity/protection need |
| 101 | Chair Arms | — | Self-restraint; asymmetric grip pressure is diagnostically useful |
| 102 | Groin Shield | — | Object-barrier variant specific to genital protection |
| 103 | Personal Belonging Security Check | — | Mistrust/nervousness/insecurity (purse-pull, wallet-check, phone-pull-closer) |
| 104 | Fists on Table | — | Aggressive; appears in both deceptive and genuine subjects — timing (simultaneous vs. staggered) is the tell |
| 105 | Object Concealment | — | Phone/screen angling; object functions as a surrogate for withheld information |
| 106 | Jewelry Play | Jp | Self-pacifying, identity-linked (Vrij 2001; Pease 2006) |
| 107 | Feet Around Chair Legs | Cl | Self-restraint; withholding/unwillingness to participate |
| 108 | Vocal Hesitancy | — | Pre-answer pause for internal story-checking |
| 109 | Psychological Distancing | Psd | Euphemism substitution ("hurt" for kill, "touch" for molest) to reduce felt guilt |
| 110 | Rising Vocal Pitch | — | Deviation-only measure; invalid if it's the subject's baseline |
| 111 | Increase in Vocal Speed | — | "Get it over with" stress-reduction strategy |
| 112 | Nonanswer Statement | — | Lengthy reply that never answers the question asked |
| 113 | Pronoun Absence | — | Cognitive-load marker under deception |
| 114 | Résumé Statements | — | Character-defense listing instead of a direct answer |
| 115 | Noncontracting Statement | — | "Did not" instead of "didn't" — subconscious clarity-performance |
| 116 | Question Reversal | — | Aggressive turning of the question back on the interviewer |
| 117 | Ambiguity Statements | — | Vague recounting to avoid commitment to specifics |
| 118 | Politeness | Pol | Only scoreable as a shift in politeness level, not politeness itself |
| 119 | Overapologizing | — | Subconscious apology-by-proxy for unstated wrongdoing |
| 120 | Miniconfessions | — | Small confessions offered to appear open and forestall bigger questions |
| 121 | Exclusions | — | "As far as I know," "to the best of my knowledge" — polite withholding |
| 122 | Direct Chronology | Chr | Perfect chronological recall; void if the interviewer explicitly requested chronological order |
Two structural notes the table alone doesn't carry: first, cells 0–58 sit in the chart's upper/mid body-region rows (head, face, torso, arms), while 59–122 run from pelvis down through legs, feet, objects, and finally the two bottom rows of verbal/external behaviors — confirming the page's existing "top of chart = top of head" architecture claim against the actual cell sequence, not just the book's summary description of it. Second, several 2017-book cells (Résumé Statements, Non-contracting Statement, Palm Exposure, Single-Sided Shoulder Shrug) are the exact named components of the Mr. Phillips example above — the catalog and the worked example are one integrated system in the source text, not independently sourced.