Speaking through the body: Do people associate the body movements of politicians with their speech?. (27th December 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Koppensteiner, Markus; Siegle, Greg
• Is Part Of: Politics and the life sciences. Volume 36:Number 2(2017)
• Page Start: 104
• Page End: 113
• Publication Date: 2017-12-27
• Subjects: Nonverbal communication, -- multimodal signals, -- bodily expressiveness, -- vocal expressiveness, -- gesture, -- impression formation, -- stick figure animation, -- politics; Biopolitics -- Periodicals; Human behavior -- Periodicals; Biology -- Periodicals; Political science -- Periodicals; 320.01
• DOI: 10.1017/pls.2017.23
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0730-9384

Abstract

Abstract : When people speak, they gesture. However, is the audience watching a speaker who is sensitive to this link? We translated the body movements of politicians into stick-figure animations and separated the visual from the audio channel. We then asked participants to match a selection of five audio tracks (including the correct one) with the stick-figure animations. The participants made correct decisions in 65% of all cases (chance level of 20%). Matching voices with animations was less difficult when politicians showed expansive movements and spoke with a loud voice. Thus, people are sensitive to the link between motion cues and vocal cues, and this link appears to become even more apparent when a speaker shows expressive behaviors. Future work will have to refine and validate the methods applied and investigate how mismatches between communication channels affect the impressions that people form of politicians.