What are your moves like?

I'm sure we've all come across 'dads at the disco', dancing like they've had some kind of seizure, content in the knowledge that such drunken endeavours typically only extend their influence as far as the dance floor.

Alas new research suggests that how we move provides quite accurate insight into our characters.  The research was undertaken by Markus Koppensteiner and Karl Grammer from the Institute for Urban Ethology at the University of Vienna.

We've all heard of the non-verbal cues that embellish the spoken word, but Koppensteiner and Grammer went a bit further.  They devised a new system for mathematically describing the movement patterns of forty real German politicians giving speeches in parliament.  Each 16-second, silent video was converted into a stick figure by using an interactive computer programme to place dots on key landmarks such as the elbows, shoulders and forehead.  The movements of these figures were then analysed using mathematical techniques such as the turbulence co-efficient.

A panel of 150 people were then shown the clips and asked to analyse the characters of the stick figures based on their movements.  The interesting thing was that there were clear correlations between the personality characteristics attributed by the students to the stick figures and the motion patterns of those stick figures as identified by the researchers' motion analysis programme.

For instance people that displayed a high turbulence co-efficient (ie they were mostly still but occasionally very active) were regarded by the panel as agreeable sorts, whereas those with a constantly high level of movement were considered extravert.

These findings are still at a pretty exploratory stage so don't get too concerned about what your movements are revealing about you just yet, but it's an interesting finding nonetheless and adds to the growing collection of research around non-verbal communication.