Disaster-Related Public Speeches: The Role of Emotions
Maria Spyropoulou, Khurshid Ahmad · 2016
Disaster managers are dealing with serious situations and their speeches should be factual yet empathetic, they should be objective yet show restraint. Nowadays messages to the public for the preparedness or the recovery phase of a crisis from disaster managers are disseminated through formal and social media, where the authorities delivering them appear surrounded by specialists. The common perception is that words uttered by these managers are the key, no matter how the person is perceived. The focus of technology has been on textual analytics and the acoustic quality of the deliverer's voice. However human beings tend to fuse the verbal information with the nonverbal aspect of communication, like tone of voice and facial expressions. Facial expressions are used in human communication to express the affect and attitudes of the speaker. The human aggregation process fuses data from video stream and audio stream together with the emotion stream (anger, joy, fear). Our analysis deals with the obsevation of facial muscle movements-emotion proxies on face. This paper describes an important contribution to safety and security in disasters, specifically in disaster management and public communications. This initial study is based on four political authorities and their speeches.