“It’s not what you look at that matters,” Henry David Thoreau wrote, “it’s what you see.”
As movement analysts, we often want to look at every BESS movement parameter. But it is not necessary to see everything to produce meaningful results.
In Movement Pattern Analysis, we look at every movement the client does. But what we see are the effort and shape qualities that are consistent through the body as a whole. That is, out of a seemingly random tangle of actions, we tease out the moments of integration. The relative frequencies of these integrated effort and shape qualities provide the data we need to discern an individual’s characteristic approach to decision making.
How to choose parameters? Martha Davis’s book, Towards Understanding the Intrinsic in Body Movement, is a good place to start. She matched the questions of nonverbal communication researchers with the movement parameters they chose. Her chart, “Theoretical Correlations Between Movement Parameters and Specific Behavioral Phenomena” remains a fertile place to begin any observation task.