Aycorn

Re Point # 3 - my thought is to not trap characters in situations where they would have no hope of survival.  Perhaps they may witness a major Mythos beastie devouring a group of cultists, rather than get caught in the frenzy themselves.  Maybe some helpful police, etc, show up in time to help or get them out of harm's way during a major shootout with baddies.  

But also, I would factor in player choices.  One GM I learned from when I was a young `un used to put it this way: "I won't go out of my way to kill you, but if you go storming a castle single-handed, naked and armed with only a butterknife, well....."

As a hypnotherapist who ran his own hypnotherapy biz for awhile, I find this pretty interesting.  There are doubtless Ericksonian and NLP techniques that would work well in GMing.  I'll have to think on this a bit myself.

One thing I did at my most recent (first in a long time) session, was to have each player make a 10-30 second "elevator speech" about their character.  Tell us something, anything - who are you?  Naturally some struggled a bit and some spun a tale easily, but in the end everyone came up with something(s) and it seemed to help a lot in engaging them.

You mention body language - definitely.  Players leaning in to the table instead of reclining, excited, engaged demeanor, etc.  All good thoughts