Research Overview
I examine how subtle movements of the body, head, and face communicate social rank, emotion, and personality, influencing decision-making and leadership emergence. I rely on complex quantitative methods, automated and manual behavioral coding, and psychophysiological measurements to reveal how nonverbal behavior shapes social perception and guides social interactions. To ensure the generalizability of my research findings, I conduct research around the globe and across age groups, including recruiting participants from six continents, adults from non-Western and small-scale traditional societies, and children as young as two years old.
Previous research:
DISTINCT NONVERBAL DISPLAYS OF DOMINANCE AND PRESTIGE
Humans use two distinct strategies to influence others and gain social rank: dominance, which involves the use of aggression to elicit fear, and prestige, which involves the demonstration of knowledge and expertise to gain respect and admiration. I uncovered the first evidence that dominance and prestige are associated with distinct sets of nonverbal behavior, which are spontaneously demonstrated by leaders, enabling them to ascend the hierarchy by guiding team members’ judgments and decision making (Witkower et al., 2020, JPSP). These displays are widely generalizable, and potentially universal features of human communication (Witkower et al., 2024, JEP:G).
THE ACTION UNIT IMPOSTER
I proposed the action unit imposter account (Witkower & Tracy, 2019, Psychological Science), which argues that tilting the head down co-opts the psychology of facial-expression perception by creating the visual illusion of facial dynamics. Specifically, this head movement causes the eyebrows to take on an apparent V-shape, mimicking the appearance cues that occur when activating the corrugator muscle — a movement that communicates threat across cultures. Tilting one’s head downward therefore serves as an “action-unit imposter”, increasing perceptions of dominance by changing the appearance of the face without activating facial muscles. This phenomenon is widely generalizable, and possibly a universal mechanism guiding perception (Witkower et al., 2022, Scientific Reports; Witkower & Tracy, 2020, Emotion).
This research served as the foundation of my dissertation, and received nationwide recognition with the CAGS/ProQuest National Dissertation Award, which recognizes the most outstanding and original doctoral thesis across the social sciences, arts, and humanities, in all of Canada.
BODILY EXPRESSION OF EMOTION
While facial expressions are crucial for social communication, nonverbal cues from the body also convey valuable emotional information — especially when the face is turned away or hidden (e.g., masks), and across long distances. My research shows that the body effectively communicates emotion (Witkower & Tracy, 2019, Emotion Review) and that these expressions are consistent across diverse populations (Witkower, Hill, Koster, & Tracy, 2021, Affective Science) and ages (Witkower, Tracy, Pun, & Baron, 2021, Journal of Nonverbal Behavior).
Current Research
SMILES provide A WINDOW INTO OUR PERSONALITY
My current research goes beyond the conventional understanding of smiles as mere expressions of spontaneously felt positive emotion, instead establishing them as a form of self-expression that, when posed, offers a valid window into well-being and personality, enabling accurate assessments of dispositions by machine-learning algorithms and lay observers. This can revolutionize the landscape of well-being and mental health assessment; posed smiles may serve as a viable and readily accessible tool for detecting those who may benefit from well-being or mental health resources. For the first evidence that smiles reveal personality, and enable observers to form accurate personality judgments, see Witkower, Tian, Tracy, & Rule (2024, PNAS:Nexus).
ANGULARITY IS A FOUNDATION OF HUMAN THREAT COMMUNICATION
For decades researchers have documented the precise nonverbal behaviors that humans use to communicate threat. Yet it remains largely unknown why any particular behavior or display leads to reliable perceptions of threat, and what the vast suite of threat-communicating behaviors have in common. One possibility is that humans evolved to associate geometric angularity with threat and danger (e.g., sharp and angular = dangerous), and that, over time, this cognitive association became co-opted for the nonverbal communication of threat, such that humans today leverage a variety of threat-signaling behaviors that function by increasing the visual angularity of facial and bodily features. In recent work, I demonstrate that individuals’ association between geometric angularity and danger indexes their perception of prototypical human threat expressions as dangerous, across all visual channels of nonverbal communication: facial expressions, head movements, and bodily expressions. Furthermore, these multimodal effects generalize to at least three different countries on three different continents – USA, India, and South Africa – providing evidence for the generalizability of our account and suggesting that angularity may lie at the foundation of humans’ nonverbal threat communication.
Building on this work, I received a grant from the Social and Behavioral Data Science Center to develop a tool that automates the measurement of facial landmarks, distances, and muscle activations. This tool will allow researchers, including those with no coding experience, to analyze images in bulk using cutting-edge computer vision techniques, and will be free for academics. My goal is to empower researchers to explore how measurable differences between real-world faces guide judgments, attitudes, decision-making, and real-world outcomes. For a sneak peek, email me!