Acidity. Emotional causes, effects, and multimodal communication

The paper overviews the notion of acid communication and analyzes its multimodal communication. Two studies are presented. In the former a questionnaire was submitted to subjects, and its qualitative analysis showed that the idea of acid communication has a psychological reality: subjects can recognize it and provide examples of it, they define it, describe it, and attribute it to specific emotional causes in a consistent manner. Acid communication is a sort of half-inhibited aggression, expressed subtly or indirectly, caused by a mix of emotions like anger, bitterness, revenge and impotence. The latter study asked subjects to impersonate scenes of acid communication and analyzed their multimodal communicative behavior, finding differences according to whether acidity is expressed in an ironic or non-ironic way, and according to whether the relationships between characters are affective or instrumental and peer or hierarchical. The analysis demonstrates the importance of gaze, facial expression and posture in the communication of acidity, and singles out the items typical of acidity in these modalities.