From Personalization to Parrhesia: A Multimodal Analysis of Autobiographical Recalls in Barack Obama’s Political Speech - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 342

events. What we expect, in fact, is that not only words, but also all bodily
communication when conveying them would turn out to be important when a
parrhesiastic communication is delivered to an audience. In the case of Barack
Obama, we expect more in particular that his body communication, when recalling
in a parrhesiastic way his difficult childhood as a pariah, would express at the same
time the negative emotions enacted by these memories and the emotions' regulation
(Frijda 2013 ) needed to turn these aspects of his life into a tool to communicate to
audiences a trusting attitude toward his political proposal of empowerment and of
social change.

17.2.1 Methodological Choices

The analysis was conducted on a selection of four public speeches made by Barack
Obama in the period from 2004 to 2009. The first speech was made in the United
States, when he was still a senator from Illinois. The other three speeches were
made abroad during his international trips after becoming president of the United
States. In all the speeches there reoccurs, as a constant of his political discourse, the
choice to share with his listeners some of his autobiographical memories. These
moments of reminiscence were studied by combining a multimodal analysis of
communication (Poggi 2007 ) and an analysis of facial expression and emotions
conducted through the use of “facial action coding system” (FACS) (Ekman and
Friesen 1978 ).
The coding of the facial expressions through “facial action coding system”
(FACS) begins with the assumption, originally proposed by Darwin [1872], of the
regularity of muscular movements in the face as an emotional reaction, which was
linked to the idea that the communication of emotions is innate and universal. This
analysis permits, then, the detection of the expression of emotions through the
recognition of a typical configuration of movements of facial muscles, present in
the atlas of possible facial expressions given by FACS.
A multimodal analysis of communication begins instead with the assumption
that, just as a set of rules exists that, acting together, create a language, so
communication is created by the joint actions of the rules that underlie facial
expressions, modulation of the voice, gestures, and body movements.
Thus, this technique of analysis proposes considering jointly five principal
modalities of transmission of communicative signals:

• Verbal modality : based on the analysis of words;

• Prosodic-intonative modality : based on the analysis of the voice, with attention

to the temporal aspects of the speech, the rhythm, pauses, length of the vowels
and accents, intensity, and tone;

• Gestural modality : analysis of gestures based on hand, arm, and shoulder

movements;