Joseph Lee James Bendoski began winning awards for writing at an early age, and at the age of 7 was annually invited to attend the Young Authors Conference to develop his writing skills. In high school he took his first introductory Psychology class and has been fascinated with human behavior ever since. In college he switched back forth between majors focusing on English and Psychology unable to decide which he liked better, studying human behavior or writing. It was his love of both that has lead to his writing career, an opportunity to take the incredible research and science of human behavior and make it available in a practical use format. In his own words “So many times I came across incredible concepts in my classes and the teachers would just gloss over them, not spending more than 10 minutes on the topic, then a few years later I would read a book about it and think this is amazing. Why didn’t they teach us about this so we could realize how amazing it is, and use it?”
His style is very concise and represents constant work to convey the information clearly without wasting time. As he says “once I finish a draft the first goal is to make it half as long. If that is possible then I try to do it again until it reaches that point where the information is balanced with entertainment, without all the excess.”
Authors Note
I wrote The Language of Emotion in part to answer a lot of questions I had about body language. When I first started studying body language I had hoped to discover a key to understand people’s thoughts and feelings, but instead was greeted with a vague probability. It was presented in the form that if a person did this with their arms or legs, then it could mean this, but nothing was definite. I wanted to know more, and I believed there was more to know. I continued to study body language and that eventually led me to facial expressions. I learned that in the thousands of facial expressions that are possible there are a select few that are universal. Everyone in the world will produce the exact same facial expressions in reaction to the exact same emotion, even if people have been blind form birth and never seen a human face, the expressions are identical.
The power of the face to communicate didn’t stop there. Each of these emotions is also closely related to specific action that we take, or want to take. Our emotions generate our motivations, in the moment that we experience them, by learning to read people’s faces we can see exactly how they feel about something and how they want to react to it. This can give you tremendous power in understanding people and interacting with them because we not only understand their current motivations, but where those motivations are coming from.
In The Language of Emotion I try to teach people not only to differentiate genuine emotional expression from all the other expressions of the face, but about the meaning behind those expressions and the actions those emotions are driving us towards. I present the material as clearly as possible, but also as compact and concise as possible, while trying to maintain a balance of information and entertainment. In fact some of the earlier drafts of book were even shorter and there were several comments to add more examples and slow down the pace of the book, which I have done to make it both easy and enjoyable for the reader to consume.
Listen to a 10 minute sample of The Language of Emotion: