Boyce wrote:
Then the facilitator paired us and gave one of each pair a little card that had the word for a common emotion. He asked each person with a card to use facial expressions and body language to depict that emotion and the paired instructor to guess the word.
Well you are probably anticipating what happened. The success rate was near zero and the point of the lesson was to talk with the students and get them to open up about what they are thinking because body language cannot be easily interpreted.
People are lousy actors. I have taken a few peer counselling courses, it is really hard to work with people when they are faking their issues. Their body language will contradict itself. When you make people use real issues it is much easier, even stupid issues like "housework", will be more helpful in learning counselling skills ten any heavy weight but fake issues.