Postural Dynamics & Social Status

This experimental research on nonverbal communication focuses on two issues: defining postural dynamics and how social manifest itself. For postural dynamics I propose a new coding system which combines the biomechanical model used by body therapist with the Time Series Notation System developed by professor Siegfried Frey and his collaborators. The postural code includes an analysis of how body parts influence each other as they move. One of the findings was that self-touch seems to be more omnipresent than what was then mentioned in the literature. Since then Beatrice Beebe has made similar observations. Concerning status expressions, we noticed that there is no typical behavior, but rather repertoire variations that influence how much variation is possible. For example, higher status subjects displayed a particularly varied repertoire of postures. These results can be associated with those on gender difference, where one assumes there must be differences, but the result remainfat from current expectations. Individuals seem to have an intuitive automatic capacity to detect gender or status differences, but incapable of spelling out what their intuition is based on.