That's bull****. That's spelled b-u-l-l-*-*-*-*. Bull****. That's nonsense.
Sure, if you know somebody really well, you can pick up on the fact that something's bothering them. My wife does it with me all the time. Children are usually pretty transparent. But how you tell the difference between an adult who is upset because of reason A and an adult who is upset because of reason B, I don't really know.
Police are forever thinking that during the course of an interrogation somebody looks like they're upset. That of course leads them to think that the person they're interrogating is showing guilt, but they can't tell the difference between someone showing guilt and someone showing distress because of something they didn't do. All the research shows that, if anything, the more training you've got to read body language the worse you are at it. There's a study by a guy named [Paul] Ekman, who's acknowledged as the guy who studies this, and he showed that law enforcement officers who were given training in reading body language were less likely to be accurate than people with no training, people who weren't even law enforcement. It just misleads them. Except for the grossest sort of circumstances where you don't need any training to see that someone's upset, to make fine discriminations, it just can't be done.
