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Hannah Gruebsch 

BSc [Hons] Applied Psychology

My name is Hannah Gruebsch and I have recently just completed the practice path route of the BSc in Applied Psychology at IADT. Among the many subfields of psychology we covered in this course, developmental psychology and abnormal psychology were my main areas of interest. I thoroughly enjoyed the topics relating to anxiety, developmental disorders, educational and cognitive psychology. After graduating from my degree in Applied Psychology, I aspire to continue my learning with children in the field of Art Therapy and pursue a career in Psychotherapy.

Sean Henriques, the Psychology technician played a huge role in guiding me through the creation of the video's as he allowed me to use his camera and lighting to ensure high quality video's were produced.
Project Description

My final year research projects focused on how the use of body language can effect persuasive communication and how it impacts perception of an audience. Specifically, the project examined the aspect on sustainability and how an audience responds to negative and positive messages on recycling coffee cups. There is a lot of research on how body language impacts the engagement of an audience however, no study was found focusing on sustainability as well gender in particular. The project aims to explore how the specific demography of Irish college students perceive the effectiveness of messages in relation to speaker gender, body language, and message framing.


Project Objectives

My title of my project was "The effects of body language on persuasive communication and how it impacts audience perception and engagement". The main aim of the project was to examine how Irish college students perceive the effectiveness of messages in relation to speaker gender, body language, and message framing. The study consisted of 42 participants (21 females and 21 males). The data was gathered through eight originally created videos, four featuring a male speaker and the other four featuring a female speaker. Each participant was assigned one of the eight videos which matched a particular condition such as body language or neutral, and the message being framed in terms of gain or loss. The results from the questionnaire and opened ended questions participants filled out after the test were examined using a three-way between groups analysis of covariance to analyse the data.


Project Outcomes

The findings of the results suggest that there is no correlation between body language, gender and message framing on perceived message effectiveness. There was no significance difference found between the groups and the conditions. However, strengths of this study included using the psychology lab to ensure a controlled environment was created, video's were pilot tested and the creation of customised stimuli. Limitations of the study such as a small sample size and the video duration being too short may have negatively impacted the outcome of the study. For future research, the use of eye movement detection could be explored using AI to deepen out understating of body language, a bigger sample size and finally incorporating a repeated measures design.


Thesis Title

The effects of body language on persuasive communication and how it impacts audience perception and engagement

Applied Psychology
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