Understanding Body Movement

This book is an interdisciplinary guide to empirical research on nonverbal behaviour. It focuses on tools and procedures to investigate body movement and gesture and the relation to cognitive, emotional, and interactive processes. NEUROGES is an objective and reliable coding system for movement behaviour and gesture. Its combination with the multi-media annotation tool ELAN results in an effective movement analysis. Rater training and rating procedures constitute an important component in movement behaviour studies. A novel algorithm assesses interrater agreement for the segmentation of the ongoing flow of behaviour. Recommendations for study designs and statistical data evaluation are given, including innovative procedures for the analysis of interactive partners’ body movements.

Hedda Lausberg, Univ.-Prof. Dr. med., Full Professor of Neurology, Psychosomatic Medicine, and Psychiatry, German Sport University Cologne; Dance Movement Therapist; in research, she focuses on movement behaviour and gesture and the relation to cognitive, emotional, and interactive processes. Behavioural and neuroimaging examinations on healthy participants as well as studies on patients with psychosomatic disease and brain damage, incl. split-brain patients, constitute her main approach. She aims at the clinical application of the research findings to improve diagnostics and therapy. The progress of movement behaviour research methodology has been a major concern of hers, resulting in the development of two objective and reliable tools for movement analysis: NEUROGES and BAST.