Our research explores the fundamental building blocks of human communication by examining how nonverbal behaviors—particularly movements of the body, head, and face—communicate social rank, emotion, personality, and mental health. Our work integrates social, cognitive, and affective science with advanced quantitative and computational methods to uncover the nonverbal cues and visual mechanisms that guide social perception and social interaction.
A core priority of our research is ensuring the generalizability of our findings across populations and ages. To do this, we recruit participants from diverse regions spanning six continents, members of an isolated small-scale indigenous society with minimal exposure to the Western world (the Mayangna), and children as young as two years old. These efforts have yielded impactful, multidisciplinary collaborations demonstrating that many aspects of nonverbal communication are broadly shared across cultures and emerge early in development.
Our work has been published in leading journals such as Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, Nature Human Behaviour, Emotion, and PNAS Nexus, and is currently supported by a grant from the University of Amsterdam’s Data Science Center and the Australian Research Council.
Zak Witkower
Lab Director and Principal Investigator
Research findings
We study how nonverbal behavior is used to shape social judgments, decision-making, and social rank. Our research shows that humans use distinct nonverbal displays to communicate dominance and prestige, and that these nonverbal signals may be universal features of human communication (Witkower et al., 2020, JPSP; Witkower et al., 2024, JEP:G).
We study how head movements co-opt facial expression perception by altering the apparent structure of the face. This “action-unit imposter” mechanism influences perceptions of both neutral and expressive faces, and may be a universal feature of human communication (Witkower & Tracy, 2019, Psychological Science; Witkower & Tracy, 2020, Emotion; Witkower et al., 2022, Scientific Reports).
The dissertation reporting this work received nationwide recognition with the CAGS/ProQuest National Dissertation Award, which recognizes the most outstanding and original doctoral thesis across the social sciences, arts, and humanities in Canada.
We study whether body movements and postures are fundamental features of emotion communication. Our research shows that people effectively recognize emotion from bodily expressions, including across diverse cultural groups and ages (Witkower & Tracy, 2019, Emotion Review; Witkower et al., 2021, Affective Science; Witkower et al., 2021, Journal of Nonverbal Behavior).
We study how posed smiles reveal personality. Our research shows that subtle differences in smiling encode information about a person’s traits, and that observers use these cues to make slightly more accurate personality judgments from smiling faces than from neutral faces (Witkower et al., 2024, PNAS Nexus).
Research on face perception fundamentally depends on accurately and precisely quantifying differences between faces. However, there are relatively few objective and scalable methods for quantifying morphometric variation in socially meaningful facial appearance cues. This research develops new techniques for quantifying faces, and identifies the visual mechanisms that guide face perception all around the world.
This research was partly supported by a grant from the University of Amsterdam Data Science Center.
In our modern world filled with screens and selfies, smiles are ubiquitously posed for photographs that are widely shared for social and professional networking. Yet, subtle variations can be observed in the specific facial muscles people use to configure their smile, and the intensity of each facial muscle activation.
But what might our posed smiles reveal, and to whom?
This work seeks to establish individual differences in posed smiles – including those widely shared across the internet – as a form of self-expression that reveals well-being and personality to lay observers and machine-learning algorithms.
We form judgments about people based on their nonverbal behavior, and rely on those judgments to guide our own behavior and decision-making: who to approach, follow, fear, avoid, learn from, and select into positions of power. This research investigates if and why nonverbal behavior enables individuals to influence others’ behavior and decision-making, and to attain positions of power while working in teams.
We argue that humans evolved to associate geometric angularity with threat and danger (e.g., sharp and angular = dangerous), and that, over time, this cognitive association became co-opted for the nonverbal communication of threat, such that humans today use a variety of threat-signaling behaviors that function by increasing the visual angularity of facial and bodily features.