In this article we investigate how political actors involved in TV debates during the 2009 and 2014 presidential elections in Romania manage the relationship between handedness (left/right polarity in hand gestures) and political orientation (left/right polarity in politics),. For this purpose we developed a multimodal analysis for some relevant sequences during these debates. The practice of integrating the meanings of different semiotic resources allows a better understanding of the meaning of verbal discourse, actions and behavior of political actors involved in a particular communication situation. In addition, the Multimodal Professional Analysis Tool, ELAN, allows the annotation and dynamic analysis of the semiotic behavior of the political actors involved in the analyzed sequences.

"According to Reagan et al. (2016) all narratives follow the profile of some emotional arcs. The authors, who start from an idea of the writer Kurt Vonnegut (1995), distinguish between the concept of ‘plot’ – which captures the mechanics of a narrative –, and what they call ‘emotional arcs’, which capture the emotional experience that is evoked in the reader. In this article we propose a critical analysis of the concept of emotional arcs, and test the model of analysis with which the emotional arcs of a narrative are evaluated in the context of specific situations of political communication. The results suggest that for a better understanding of the emotional content of a speech we need to consider the emotional component of each type of semiotic resources that a political actor performs during a speech."

In a world of global communication, where everyone’s life depends increasingly on signs, language and communication, understanding how we relate to otherness, to differences in all their forms and aspects becomes more and more relevant. Today, we often understand the differences in terms of adversity or opposition and forget the value of the similarities.

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