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What is Body Movement Analysis Used to Read World Leaders Decision Making Styles?


Reading how people move and gesture can tell you how they will make decisions in the future. Specifically, coders read people in interviews and in videos to see if they are high in Assertion or high in Perspective.  Here is an excerpt from the article. Unfortunately, the academic writing is even more obtuse than the normal journal article. There are not specific body language movement gestures or movements mentioned just generalities. 

In the MPA framework, PGMs are used to generate two Overall Factors—Assertion and Perspective—that together represent a signature decision-making style. The core idea is that individuals have a need to balance their actions/motivations devoted to exerting tangible energy in the environment in relation to pressure, time and attention focus to get results (Assertion), vs shaping the body (with respect to the cardinal planes of three-dimensional space—horizontal, vertical, and sagittal) to position oneself to receive from the environment information to create the result (Perspective). Differences in how individuals achieve their own balance between the complementary processes of Assertion and Perspective are proposed to capture different decision-making styles. For example, individuals high on Assertion may employ a mindset of “nothing happens unless I make it happen.” They rely upon decision-making motivations that include intensively focusing to probe and classify information, applying pressure to support determination, and pacing time to implement a decision at just the right moment. In contrast, individuals high on Perspective are more strategic and get results by positioning themselves. They are receptive to a broad scope of ideas and information alternatives—they shape their bodily position to reflect on the decision's relative value or priority and use movements to strategically anticipate the stages of decision implementation to achieve an overall outcome


Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.