ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the face as the key component of political communication, emphasizing displays that are flexible and momentary and that may signal behavioral intent, by taking an ethological perspective. Specifically, it considers the major theoretical framework for understanding dominance relationships between leaders and followers, and how nonverbal communication plays a role in it. The chapter analyzes an extended selection of published experimental studies considering the influence of nonverbal behavior by politicians on research subjects in terms of stimuli, measures, and subject pool. It revisits elaboration on the Dartmouth group's typology of facial display behavior, which has been used as observational categories for field studies, media content analyses, and experiments assessing the influence of leader displays. The chapter considers technological and theoretical advances in recent years that can affect future political communication research concerning facial display behavior of political figures.
