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Tuesday, August 09, 2011

Stressed Brokers Can't Keep Their Hands Off Their Faces. Why?

When we witness a terrible accident, hear bad news or are in disbelief, putting our hands over our mouths is physically expressing that we can’t emotionally take anything else in.

We've seen the facepalm in the now all-too-familiar images of woeful stock brokers, hands on their faces as they receive news of the plummeting stock market. (There's even a Tumblr, The Brokers With Hands on Their Faces Blog, devoted to cataloging images of, well, brokers with hands on their faces.) We witnessed it when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton covered her mouth as she watched Navy Seals execute Osama bin Laden (although she blamed it on allergies) -- and we even see this gesture when beauty pageant contestants are crowned.

When humans are scared or shocked, we tend to put our hands over our mouths, hold our foreheads or place our hands over our cheeks. But why?

“It’s called the pacifier gesture,” says Janine Driver, president of the Body Language Institute in Washington, D.C. “It’s like a kid sucking his thumb. When our hands go up and touch our faces, it’s saying to ourselves ‘It’s OK, it’s safe.’ It’s like our mother giving us hug. It says we’ll get through this.”

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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

yeah very much the gamblers demise
they don't know what they are doing
they are playing a game with our money...............driven buy commissions and no reguard for whoms capitol they are loosing

Anonymous said...

They are hiding their smiles. They get paid on bad stocks just as well as good stocks. If these blood suckers are that worried, open a window.

Anonymous said...

They need to keep their hands over their face , it ain't over yet. The DOW will drop again shortly.
This 430 point gain was just enough for the market to advance to another sell-off.
Prediction :Botton will be around 6500 , they are the 401k and others who don't look at their holdings.

Anonymous said...

Obmama will fix it right?

Anonymous said...

Can you say "full of crap"?

Why does the market drop? Because folks are selling off! These guys have bought up plenty of stock for cheap cheap cheap, as the market recovered from the doldrums of the 7000's over the last 2 years. Now they are pocketing these profits and repositioning. Don't fall for the hype coming from all the media. They champion the stock market when it's booming and scare you from getting in when it's a slump. Meanwhile corporate profits skyrocket and the rich get richer. See any connection here?