Multimodal Analysis of Low-Stakes Conflicts: A Proposal for a Dynamic Model - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 269

left movements with her head (shakes) express her amazement and hopelessness,
one short up- and downward movement with her shoulders (a shrug) expresses her
disbelief.
When speaker B attacks speaker A and his wife with a serious accusation of being
bad parents, A begins to shake his head. As shown in the extract presented below, his
head shaking—the man is turning his head left and right along the transverse plane
repeatedly in quick succession from extreme kin A to extreme kin B—follows the
rhythm of the words uttered by Speaker B, probably to indicate disagreement or
denial of what the woman is saying. This can be interpreted as a form of automatic
response or even as an accommodation process (an “alignment-related process”
according to Karpi nski et al. 2014 ) of head movements with phonetic prominences
of Speaker B:
00:10:080 - extreme kin A
00:10:200 - extreme kin B
The man seems unable to answer, he merely listens in silence to what the
woman is saying, nonverbal signals give information about his emotional state of
helplessness and confusion. An active reaction (proactive behavior) of speaker A,
who up to this point seems to be merely a helpless victim of speaker B, comes
suddenly with the utterance: “so (.) jetzt muss ich dich unterbrechen” ( I'm afraid
I have to interrupt you now ), which can be interpreted as an attempt to force the