Motion patterns in political speech and their influence on personality ratings

When people form impressions about others, they are mostly influenced by non-verbal cues. Thus, politicians and other leaders are judged by the behavior they display. To analyze the relation between non-verbal behavior and impression formation body movements of politicians giving a speech were transformed into animated stick figures. Subjects then rated the stick-figure movies on the five factor model of personality. Motion analysis revealed that observers associate extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and openness with different motion qualities such as the amount of motion and its flow. Additionally, we found significant correlations between these personality traits and dominant activation of different body parts. The current study underlines that body motion is a powerful signal in human communication.