Comprehensive descriptive systems

Comprehensive systems for the analysis of the whole body moving in space have been developed based on the work of the dance theorist Rudolf Laban (e.g.

Laban, 1950). The Labannotation / Kinetography Laban is designed to annotate dancers' movements. Its symbols note the direction and level of the movement, the part of the body doing the movement, the duration of the movement, and the dynamic quality of the movement. Comparable to notations for pieces of music, the notation system is so precise and detailed that it enables to replicate choreo-graphies.

The Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) is an analysis system comprising four main categories: body, effort, shape, and space. As an example of this compre-hensive analysis, the main category effort is described here. It refers to the movement quality, i.e., how the body concentrates its exertion (Dell, 1979). The main category effort comprises the categories flow (variations in bodily tension representing ease or restraint of movement), weight (force or pressure exerted in movement), time (compensation to outward time demands, or attitude toward duration of action), and space (attention or orientation to space, how energy is focused in action, selective versus free-floating attention). Each category con-tains two polar values, which can be organized in scales with 3, 5, or 7 grada-tions. The category flow include values from free to bound, weight from light to strong, time from sustained to sudden, and space from indirect to direct. Fur-thermore, the main category shape is noteworthy as it refers to the movement of the body as a whole (in contrast to coding the movements of parts of the body).

It includes the categories shape flow ("where the body form results only from changes within the body parts", such as growing, shrinking, opening, closing), directional movement ("spoke-like or arc-like movement linking the body with a place in space"), and shaping ("where the body form results from the body clearly moulding itself in relation to the shape of space, whether it creates the shape of space, as in dance, or adapts to it, as in many work movements", such as spreading, enclosing) (p. 44, Dell, 1979).

The LMA values are descriptive and neutral, i.e., originally they imply no positive or negative valence. The main field of the LMA application is dance training and dance movement therapy. Depending on the therapist's theoretical orientation and her/his patient population, different aspects of the LMA have been elaborated (e.g. Bartenieff, 1991; Bernstein, 1991; North, 1991). For cer-tain categories and values, hypotheses and theories have been set up concerning their association with personality traits, stages of child development, or mental functions. For example, the Kestenberg Movement Profile (KMP) is a develop-mentally oriented elaboration on Laban’s concepts. The child psychoanalyst Ke-stenberg (1965, 1967) classified the childrens' movement behaviour according to tension flow rhythms and tension flow attributes to evaluate child development.

The interrater reliability of trained raters using the KMP has been examined (Sossin, 1987). However, the validity of the KMP categories with regard to

psy-choanalytically oriented developmental stages in children requires more investi-gation.

Based on the LMA, the author has developed a coding system with operation-alized scales for empirical research (BAST) (Lausberg et al., 1996). Its three main categories refer to (i) the use of the body with the categories body in-volvement, body-half preference, movement initiating body part, weight shift;

(ii) the use of space with the categories movement area, contact with floor, floor patterns, movement level, kinesphere; and (iii) the use of efforts with the catego-ries flow, time, weight, and space. It is suited for basic research on whole body movement in space. The BAST analysis can be applied in combination with a diagnostic movement test and with a questionnaire for the self-assessment of one's movement behaviour. The operationalized scales are available as a printed version and as a template for application with the annotation tool ELAN (http://www.latmpi.eu/tools/elan/thirdparty) (for ELAN, see Chapter 7). After a standardized training, raters show good interrater agreement (Lausberg, 1997;

Lausberg, 1998; Gazzarata et al., 2010; Büning, 2011; Degener, 2013). The BAST analysis differentiates significantly between patients with psychosomatic and psychiatric diseases and healthy controls, and it is sensitive to therapy and training progress (Lausberg et al., 1988; Lausberg et al., 1996; Gazzarata et al., 2010; Marian et al. 2010; Paarmann et al., 2012; Büning, 2011; Degener, 2013).

A different approach to the analysis of whole body movement was made by Birdwhistell (1952), a researcher with the background of cultural anthropology and structural linguistics. Birdwhistell developed his system kinesics in analogy to linguistics. Body movements coded in kinemes are regarded as arbitrary signs that serve the maintenance and regulation of interaction. Given the theoretical background that body movements per se have no meaning, the system is purely descriptive. Birdwhistell developed an extensive list of kinegraphs to annotate movements of the head, face, trunk, shoulder - arm - wrist, hand - finger, hip - leg - ankle, foot, and neck. Examples for kinegraphs are moistening lips or foot shuffle. Qualitative aspects such as norm, stress, or oversoft can be annotated as well. Possibly because of the complexity of the system and the large number of kinegraphs that have to be learned for application, Birdwhistell's system has, up to now, obtained little acceptance in movement behaviour research. To the au-thor's knowledge, there are no reports on interrater agreement.

Another comprehensive system, the Movement Signature Analysis (MSA), has been developed by the psychologist and psychotherapist Davis (1991). The MSA is a method for registering patterns of an individual’s movement behav-iour that appear to persist over long periods of time and in different contexts (for the relevance of movement patterns, see Section 2.3). The MSA comprises the classes facial expression, gaze direction, head movements, trunk orientation, weight shift, postural shift, trunk shape, positions, gesticulation, hand configura-tion, direcconfigura-tion, reach space, path type, self touch, and instrumental actions.

Qualitative aspects, derived from the LMA, are considered in the categories dy-namic intensity, directional and shaping, and pathology. To give a rough orien-tation, the MSA quasi combines the approaches of Birdwhistell (what kind of a movement a person performs) and Laban (how the person performs the move-ment). The interrater agreement is good, but somewhat lower for the categories referring to qualitative aspects (e.g. Davis et al., 2005).

The MSA involves laborious microanalysis of a few examples of the person’s most complex and animated nonverbal behaviour for a detailed recording of how movement values are distinctively patterned (Davis & Dulicai, 1992;

Davis, Dulicai, Hadiks, & Berger, 1992). As the MSA is a suitable method for the identification of individual and intra-dyadic movement patterns, it can be applied for the contrastive analysis (Davis & Hadiks, 1995). The contrastive analysis reveals fluctuations in the individual's movement repertoire, i.e., from her/his baseline to being minimally active or maximally complex and animated.

Patterns within the behavioural stream of movements can be detected by visual scan of the movement annotations.

Possibly, the MSA could be combined with algorithms for automatize pattern detection (e.g. THEME by Magnus S. Magnusson). The contrastive analysis has been primarily applied to detect mental state changes within psychotherapy ses-sions or across sesses-sions. Also THEME, in combination with other coding sys-tems, has already been used for pattern detection in therapist-patient interaction (Spang et al., 2011).

To summarize, the LMA-based systems are designed to analyze the behaviour of the body as a whole moving in space. The Kinesic analysis and the MSA are primarily tailored for the analysis of the stationary body in communication.

These coding systems use descriptive values that refer to the visually perceiv-able aspect of movement behaviour. The values are not confounded with values for assess cognitive, emotional, and interactive functions. The systems are com-prehensive in the sense that they comprise several classes of movement behav-iour (what) such as positions, and the quality of movement behavbehav-iour (how) such as efforts. They register the movements of the body as a whole or of sev-eral parts of the body, including the latsev-erality of the moving limb. Thereby, they enable to detect recurrent combinations of the simultaneously display of two or more movement types, e.g. head nod combined with opening of the arms. Fur-thermore, as all movement of a part of a body or of the body as a whole are coded in time, recurrent sequences of movement types can be detected. Thus, these systems provide a complete picture of an individual's movement behav-iour. After an intensive rater training, a good reliability is achieved, but values referring to movement quality show less reliability.

To conclude, these systems are suited for basic research. However, while the comprehensiveness is the strength of these systems, it is also their weakness.

Particularly, the Kinesic analysis it takes time to learn their application, as it comprises numerous kinegraphs. For all systems, the analysis is

time-consuming and therefore, limited to a few minutes of an individual's movement behaviour. Furthermore, the codings of the current versions of these systems re-quire substantial processing before they can be submitted to a quantitative statis-tical analysis.