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Graphology News: Handwriting clue to heart disease

File this under "Something to Keep in Mind". A graphologist is conducting a study to find out whether handwriting can reveal the early signs of heart disease.

Graphology Graphologist Christina Strang compared handwriting samples of 61 cardiac patients in Englan with those of healthy people and found statistical differences in the two groups. Ms Strang says that when writing we rest the pen for milliseconds and these so-called "resting dots" could show possible heart malfunctions. Her research showed twice as many "resting dots" among the cardiac group.

Strang is following in the work of Professor Alfred Kanfer who was a handwriting consultant in the Austrian government in the early 1900s. A concentration camp survivor, Kanfer worked with the American Cancer Society in the 1950s exploring the possible early detection of malignant diseases through the analysis of handwriting.

Graphology, the study of handwriting, can reveal all sorts of interesting information about a person. Try your "hand" at it:


Handwriting and the Election: What Graphology Says About the Candidates

Handwriting I just saw this interesting analysis on Yahoo. Virginie Monte says that, through her handwriting, Hillary Clinton is smart and forceful, John McCain is proud but has a volatile temper, and Barack Obama is a diplomat who deals well with different people and situations.

"Handwriting is a reflection of the inner personality. It shows a person's ego strength, how good they feel about themselves, their intellectual, communication and working styles," graphologist Sheila Lowe.

Graphology – the study of one’s handwriting, is very popular in sophisticated markets such as France where recruiters often ask for a handwriting analysis as part of the job consideration process.

In the U.S. handwriting analysis has it waves of interst. Consider the election cycle. "Each time there are elections, I get invited to TV shows, radio shows," Lowe said. "There is always somebody who wants to know something, even if they don't take graphology seriously." Just the signatures of the candidates are revelatory -- at least to the eye of an expert.

Republican John McCain's signature shows a proud, idealistic but impulsive, if not uncontrollable man, according to the experts. New York graphologist Roger Rubin agreed, and also saw a powerful ego at play in the senator from Arizona because of the unevenness of McCain’s signature. "The capital J is the largest letter, which shows his strong belief in his own ego. The size of 'John' overwhelms the size of 'McCain' -- this shows how distant he is from his family roots."

Obama's signature reveals similar traits. The vertical straight line of the B in Obama cuts through the large O -- which is nonetheless smaller than the B in Barack. "The very large B shows he also has a very strong sense of his own ego," Rubin said. "And he is crossing out his family name," he added, recalling that Obama's father left the family when the front-runner for the Democratic nomination was just a young boy.

Yet another graphologist had a different interpretation of the bisected O: "He draws that circle and a line through it, and it's really like he has two different worlds," said Paula Sassi. "I think it shows his black and white heritage." The fluidity of Obama's signature is a sign of high intelligence, while its illegibility shows he is protecting his privacy. The large letters in Obama's signature show that he is ambitious, self-confident and views himself as a leader.

Clinton's legible, balanced signature shows a woman of great intelligence. It's simplicity portrays a "what-you-see-is-what-you-get" personality, said Lowe. Her straight-up-and-down writing indicates that she "thinks with her head, not with her heart," said Sassi. "But there is enough roundness in her writing to show that she cares about people," said Imberman. The fact that the second leg of the H and the second L in Hillary are higher than the first show ambition.

It is difficult, the experts say, to tell the sex of a person from their handwriting, or to discern if they are left- or right-handed. But, interestingly enough, Obama and McCain are lefties -- just like four out of five US presidents immediately before them: Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr and Bill Clinton.

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Learn more:
Handwriting Analysis: Putting It to Work for You
Sex, Lies, and Handwriting: A Top Expert Reveals the Secrets Hidden in Your Handwriting

Visualization Challenge

This link is to Science Magazine's 2006  Visualization Challenge winners. These winners are photographers who create such unusual photos such as a portrait of a cockroach (surprisingly beautiful) and flight patterns.

My favorite is a "landscape" of a letter E which started out as an effort to aid handwriting analysts.

According to independent media artist Curtis DuBois, "every individual has a characteristic way of using pressure in their writing," resulting in a unique pattern of pressure points. He used a 3D ray-tracing program to convert the shades of gray in a digitally scanned image of the handwritten letter "e" into variations in virtual altitude. By turning the darker spots into deeper areas in the image, DuBois was able to highlight the "hot spots" or pressure points and thus increase the amount of information available in the writing. He then added color and "atmospheric effects" for "aesthetic impact" of the image.

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Who would like to "read" this photo and tell me what the E means?


How to Read Your John Hancock

Sheila Kurtz is a handwriting expert. Her company Graphology Consulting Group helps individuals and businesses delve into one's personality and proclivities through their handwriting.

As her site states: Handwriting analysis is the scientific method of interpreting the actual state of one's personality by examining his or her personal script. Each person's handwriting is as unique as a fingerprint. With the arrival of the computer age, handwriting analysis, one of the oldest psychological studies, has leapt into the 21st century. As an artful science patronized by royalty and aristocracy in Europe and the Near East, handwriting analysis or graphology, as it's called in the trade was for centuries a laborious, painstaking search for the indications of personality in the marks made by writing instruments on a surface.

The New York post recently followed up with a story on Ms Kurtz, providing us with some tips on how to analyze our own script. Read it here: How To Read Your John Hancock and see what she has to say about Britney Spears and Michael Jackson.


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