Personalia
Markus Koppensteiner, born in Austria, in 1974. Ph.D. from University of Vienna. Post Doc Researcher of Human Behavior at the University of Vienna.
EURIAS Fellow (1 Sept 2016 – 30 June 2017)
Body motion has an impact. Simple motion cues from politicians’ body movements affect people’s impressions
Project Description
It has been shown that very simple motion cues contained in the behavioral stream can serve as predictors of someone’s first impressions. In particular, the information belonging to the social categories extraversion, dominance, agreeableness and trustworthiness can be conveyed by body motion. Thus, we were already able to show that position shifts of a speaker’s whole body are linked to people’s judgements on these categories. To extend these findings and make them applicable to a wider range of research questions I plan to:
1) Extend my methodology of motion capturing and make it less time consuming by applying methods such as optical flow and frame subtraction. To test the validity and accuracy of these methods I will use data from our previous study (accuracy of data collected by human encoders will be compared with methods developed in the planned project).
2) Extend the data-base and use the motion capturing tools to analyze longer pieces of video material as in our previous work. This will be done by extracting simple motion cues and by examining if they can serve as predictors of people’s reactions (e.g., by determining the applause speaker’s received). It will be possible also to examine if speakers show similar patterns of motion at different occasions.
3) Use the new tools to examine the body motion of political candidates running for a public office (in cooperation with Patrick Stewart – a political scientist who is an expert in analyzing facial expressions).
Selected Publications
Koppensteiner, M., Stephan, P., & Jäschke, J. P. M. (2015). From body motion to cheers: Speakers’ body movements as predictors of applause. Personality and Individual Differences, 74, 182-185.
Koppensteiner, M., & Stephan, P. (2014). Voting for a personality: Do first impressions and self-evaluations affect voting decisions? Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 62-68.
Koppensteiner, M., (2012). An introduction to OpenCV. Displaying and Manipulating Video and Motion Data. Article and source code at http://www.codeproject.com