Detecting Emotional Involvement in Professional News Reporters: An Analysis of Speech and Gestures

This study is aimed to investigate the extent to which reporters’ voice and body behaviour may betray different degrees of emotional involvement when reporting on emergency situations. The hypothesis is that emotional involvement is associated with an increase in body movements and pitch and intensity variation. The object of investigation is a corpus of 21 10-second videos of Italian news reports on flooding taken from Italian nation-wide TV channels. The gestures and body movements of the reporters were first inspected visually. Then, measures of the reporters’ pitch and intensity variations were calculated and related with the reporters' gestures. The effects of the variability in the reporters' voice and gestures were tested with an evaluation test. The results show that the reporters vary greatly in the extent to which they move their hands and body in their reportings. Two gestures seem to characterise reporters’ communication of emergencies: beats and deictics. The reporters’ use of gestures partially parallels the reporters’ variations in pitch and intensity. The evaluation study shows that increased gesturing is associated with greater emotional involvement and less professionalism. The data was used to create an ontology of gestures for the communication of emergency