Wies Ruyters

The face of populism: examining differences in facial emotional expressions of political leaders using machine learning - Journal of Computational Social Science Populist rhetoric employed in online media is characterized as deeply impassioned and most often imbued with strong emotions. This paper investigates the differences in affective non-verbal communication of political leaders. We use a deep-learning approach to process a sample of 220 YouTube videos depicting political leaders from 15 different countries, analyze their facial expressions of emotion, and then examine differences in average emotion scores representing the relative presence of six emotional states (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) and a neutral expression for each frame of the processed YouTube video. Based on a sample of manually coded images, we find that this machine learning approach has 53−60% agreement with human annotation. We observe statistically significant differences in the average score of expressed negative emotions between groups of leaders with varying degrees of populist rhetoric. Overall, our contribution provides insight into the characteristics of non-verbal emotional expression among political leaders, as well as an open-source workflow for further computational studies of their affective communication.

#ShoutoutSunday: Major & Tomašević, 2025: The face of populism: examining differences in facial emotional expressions of political leaders using machine learning (doi.org/10.1007/s420...) | Innovative research methods applied to a highly relevant phenomenon: populist (and pluralist!) facial gestures

Embedding, embedding on the wall; who is the most prominent politician of them all? Exploring automated methods to study multimodal political news coverage Although it is widely acknowledged that political communication is multimodal and that textual and visual modalities have an interactive effect on how content is interpreted, research thereto is st...

"Embedding, embedding on the wall: who is the most prominent politician of them all?" - read all about the gains and risks of applying automated methods to study multimodal political news coverage in my first PhD paper here: doi.org/10.1080/1931.... Let me know what you think!

wies ruyters

"Hello world!" - I finally made my website: wieswies.github.io. Soon to be updated with a lot more things I'd like to share with you... check it out :)