“Humble” Politicians and Their Multimodal Communication

The present study deals with the representation and automatic detection of the multimodal communication of humble politicians. Studies in the psychology of political communication have stressed the role of dominance in the self-presentation of politicians, while implicitly excluding the very hypothesis that a political leader can be o can present himself as humble. This work presents two studies on humility and humble politicians. First a survey study has investigated how laypeople define humility, trying to extract the defining features of this notion, such as non-superiority, empathy, equality and others. Then a qualitative analysis has investigated, in the multimodal communication of four humble leaders, which postures, prosodic features, gaze and face expressions specifically convey the semantic features of humility previously hypothesized, and what emotions, detected through Ekman’s Action Units, are displayed by those leaders and how they are linked to the features of humility.