Abstract
In political persuasion the persuader, beside bearing logical arguments and triggering emotions, must present one’s own image (one’s ethos) of a credible and reliable person, by enhancing three dimensions of it: competence, benevolence and dominance. In a parallel way, s/he may cast discredit on the opponent by criticizing, accusing or insulting on the same three dimensions. The work provides a description and a typology of multimodal discrediting moves focusing on the discrediter’s multimodal behavior. Based on an Italian corpus of political debates the analysis points out which facial expressions, gaze behavior, gestures, postures and prosodic features are used to convey discredit concerning the three target features of competence, benevolence and dominance. The qualitative study of discredit signals highlights the close relation with emotions and in this sense particular attention is given to them as triggers of the Audience’s evaluation
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Pentland, A.: Honest Signals. How Do they Shape our World. MIT Press, Cambridge (2008)
Aristotle (360 b.c.). On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, 2nd edn. Oxford University, New York (2007), Kennedy, G.A (trans.)
Poggi, I.: The Goals of Persuasion. Pragmatics and Cognition 13(2), 297–336 (2005)
Poggi, I., D’Errico, F., Vincze, L.: Discrediting Moves in Political Debates. In: Ricci, F., et al. (eds.) Proceedings of Second International Workshop on User Models for Motivational Systems: The Affective And the Rational Routes to Persuasion (UMMS 2011) (Girona). LNCS, pp. 84–99. Springer (2011)
Woods, J., Walton, D.: Argument: The Logic of the Fallacies. McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Toronto (1982)
Walton, D.: Types of Dialogue, Dialectical Shifts and Fallacies. In: van Eemeren, F.H., Grootendorst, R., Blair, J.A., Willard, C.A. (eds.) Argumentation Illuminated, pp. 133–147. SICSAT, Amsterdam (1992)
Walton, D.N.: Ad Hominem Arguments. In: Studies in Rhetoric and Communication. University of Alabama Press (1998)
van Eemeren, F.H., Grootendorst, R.: Argumentation, Communication, and Fallacies: A Pragma-Dialectical Perspective. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale (1992)
Hovland, C.I., Weiss, W.: The Influence of Source Credibility on Communication Effectiveness. Pub. Opinion Quart. 15, 635–650 (1951)
Rosenberg, A., Hirschberg, J.: Charisma Perception from Text and Speech. Speech Communication 51, 640–655 (2009)
Weiner, B.: An Attributional Theory of Motivation and Emotion. Springer, New York (1986)
Seligman, C.R., Tucker, G.R., Lambert, W.E.: The effects of Speech Style and other Attributes on Teachers’ Attitudes Toward Pupils. Lang. in Soc. 1, 131–142 (1972)
D’Errico F., Poggi I., Vincze L.: Discrediting signals. A Model of Social Evaluation to Study Discrediting Moves in Political Debates. J.M.U.I. (2012), doi: 10.1007/s12193-012-0098-4
Peeters, G.: The Positive-Negative Asymmetry: On Cognitive Consistency and Positivity Bias. Europ. J. Soc. Psych. 1(4), 455–474 (1971)
Catellani, P.: Attacco e Difesa nella Comunicazione Massmediale. In: Catellani, P., Sensales, G. (eds.) Psicologia della Politica, pp. 97–112 (2011)
Entman, R.M.: Framing: Towards a Clarification of a Fractured Theory. J. Comm. 43(4), 51–58 (1993)
Mazzoleni, P.: La Comunicazione Politica. Il Mulino, Bologna (2004)
Fiske, S.T., Cuddy, A.J.C., Glick, P., Xu, J.: A Model of (often mixed) Stereotype Content: Competence and Warmth Respectively Follow from Perceived Status and Competition. J. Personality and Soc. Psych. 82, 878–902 (2002)
Ekvall, G.: The Organizational Culture of Idea-Management: A Creative Climate for the Management of Ideas. In: Henry, J., Walker, D. (eds.) Managing Innovation, pp. 73–79. SAGE Publications Ltd., London (1991)
Leach, C.W., Ellemers, N., Barreto, M.: Group Virtue: The Importance of Morality (vs. competence and sociability) in the Positive Evaluation of Ingroups. J. Personality and Soc. Psych. 93, 234–249 (2007)
Castelli, L., Carraro, L., Ghitti, C., Pastore, M.: The Effects of Perceived Competence and Sociability on Electoral Outcomes. J. Experiment. Soc. Psych. 45, 1152–1155 (2009)
Catellani, P., Bertolotti, M.: Leadership Attacks versus Morality Attacks: Their Effects on the Evaluation of Politicians. Talk held at the XVI General Meeting of the European Association of Social Psychology, Stockholm, July 12-16 (2011)
Calbris, G.: L’Expression Gestuelle de la Pensée d’un Homme Politique. Éditions du CNRS, Paris (2003)
Kendon, A.: Gesture. Visible Action as Utterance. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2004)
Streeck, J.: Gesture in Political Communication. A Case Study of the Democratic Presidential Candidates during the 2004 Primary Campaign. In: Lang. and Soc. Interact. (2007)
Quintilianus M.F.: Institutiones Oratoriae. The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian (The Loeb Classical Library). Putnam and Sons, New York, He, B. (trans.)
Burgoon, J.K., Birk, T., Pfau, M.: Nonverbal Behaviors, Persuasion, and Credibility. Human Communication Research 17, 140–169 (1990)
Maricchiolo, F., Gnisci, A., Bonaiuto, M.: Political Leaders’ Communicative Style and Audience Evaluation in an Italian General Election Debate.This volume
Poggi, I., Pelachaud, C.: Persuasion and the Expressivity of Gestures in Humans and Machines. In: Wachsmuth, I., Lenzen, M., Knoblich, G. (eds.) Embodied Communication in Humans and Machines, pp. 391–424. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2008)
Poggi, I., Vincze, L.: Gesture, Gaze and Persuasive Strategies in Political Discourse. In: Kipp, M., Martin, J.-C., Paggio, P., Heylen, D. (eds.) Multimodal Corpora. LNCS, vol. 5509, pp. 73–92. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Ekman, P.: About brows: Emotional and Conversational Signals. In: von Cranach, M., Foppa, K., Lepenies, W., Ploog, D. (eds.) Human Ethology: Claims and Limits of a New Discipline: Contributions to the Colloquium, pp. 169–248. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1979)
Attardo, S., Eisterhold, J., Hay, J., Poggi, I.: Multimodal Markers of Irony and Sarcasm, Humor. Internat. J. Humor Research 16(2), 243–260 (2003)
Poggi, I., Cavicchio, F., Magno Caldognetto, E.: Irony in Judicial Debates: Analyzing the Subtleties of Irony while Testing the Subtleties of an Annotation Scheme. J. Lang. Resources and Eval. 4(3-4), 215–232 (2007)
Poggi, I.: Multimodality and political functions of irony and ridicule in a political trial. In: Vion, R., Giacomi, A., Vargas, C. (eds.) La Corporalité du Langage, pp. 41–54. Presses Universitaires de Provence, Aix-en- Provence-Marseille (2012)
Conte, R., Castelfranchi, C.: Cognitive and Social Action. University College, London (1995)
Miceli, M., Castelfranchi, C.: The Role of Evaluation in Cognition and Social Interaction. In: Dautenhahn, K. (ed.) Human Cognition and Agent Technology. John Benjamins, Amsterdam (1998)
Castelfranchi, C.: Che figura. Emozioni e Immagine Sociale. Il Mulino, Bologna (1988)
Poggi, I.: Types of Emotions and Types of Goals. In: Proceedings of the Workshop AFFINE: Affective Interaction in Natural Environment, Post-Conference Workshop of ICMI, Chania, Crete, September 24 (2008)
Castelfranchi, C., Falcone, R.: Trust Theory. A Socio-Cognitive and Computational Model. John Wiley, Chichester (2010)
Castelfranchi, C.: Micro-Macro Constitution of Power. ProtoSociology. Internat. J. Interdisciplinary Research 18-19, 208–265 (2003)
Poggi, I., D’Errico, F.: Dominance Signals in Debates. In: Salah, A.A., Gevers, T., Sebe, N., Vinciarelli, A. (eds.) HBU 2010. LNCS, vol. 6219, pp. 163–174. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Austin, J.L.: How to do Things with Words. Clarendon Press, London (1962)
Jonasson, J.: The Centenarian who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared. Carl’s Books (2010)
D’Errico, F., Poggi, I.: Blame the Opponent! Effects of Multimodal Discrediting Moves in Public Debates. Cognitive Computation 4(4), 460–476 (2012), doi:10.1007/s12559-012-9175-y, ISSN 1866-9956
D’Errico, F., Poggi, I., Vincze, L.: Discrediting Signals. A Model of Social Evaluation to Study Discrediting Moves in Political Debates. Special Issue in “Social Signal Processing”. JMUI 6(3-4), 163–178 (2012), doi:10.1007/s12193-012-0098-4
Poggi, I., D’Errico, F., Vincze, L.: Ridiculization in Public Debates: Making Fun of the Other as a Discrediting Move. In: Calzolari, N., et al. (eds.) Proceedings of the 8th Conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012), May 21-27, pp. 44–50. ELRA, Istanbul (2012)
Poggi, I., D’Errico, F., Vincze, L.: Comments in Words, Face and Body. JMUI 10 (2012), doi:1007/s12193-012-0102-z
Poggi, I.: Mind, Hands, Face and Body. A goal and belief view of multimodal communication. Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin (2007)
Du Bois, J.W.: The Stance Triangle. In: Englebretson, R. (ed.) Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction. Benjamins, Amsterdam (2007)
Jaffe, A.: Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Oxford University press, Oxford (2009)
Poggi, I., D’Errico, F., Leone, G.: Pedagogical Stances and their Multimodal signals. In: Chair, N.C.C., et al. (eds.) Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012), pp. 3233–3240. European Language Resources Association, Istanbul (2012)
Kendon, A.: Gestures as Illocutionary and Discourse Structure Markers in Southern Italian Conversation. J. Pragmatics 23, 247–279 (1995)
Weiner, B.: An Attributional Theory of Motivation and Emotion. Springer, New York (1986)
Müller, C.: Forms and Uses of the Palm Up Open Hand: A Case of a Gesture Family? In: Müller, C., Posner, E. (eds.) The Semantics and Pragmatics of Everyday Gestures. Weidler, Berlin (2004)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
D’Errico, F., Poggi, I., Vincze, L. (2013). Discrediting Body. A Multimodal Strategy to Spoil the Other’s Image. In: Poggi, I., D’Errico, F., Vincze, L., Vinciarelli, A. (eds) Multimodal Communication in Political Speech. Shaping Minds and Social Action. PS 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7688. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41545-6_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41545-6_14
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-41544-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-41545-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)