Courtship Initiation Behaviour in Online Personals

A personal advertisement has two aims; to promote its author and to attract potential love interest. In addition to providing textual information about physical appearance, occupation and interests, accompanying images in personal ads create meanings that are instrumental in building imaginary relations between the advertiser and the readers. This paper explores the notions of body language and interpersonal attitude and courtship initiation behaviour in online personal ads. Using Kress & van Leeuwen’s Grammar of Visual Design (2006) and Mehrabian’s dominant and affiliative dimensions (1981) this study examines how interpersonal relations are represented through the embodiment of affiliative and non-affiliative attitudes in images. Analysis of 581 images reveals several common visual personas through specific clusters of bodily stance and facial articulation that are instrumental in creating and establishing represented affiliation between the participants in the images and the viewers. As such this study is a contribution to scholars working in the area of visual analysis, identity and social semiotics as it identifies non-verbal realizations of affiliative and non-affiliative attitudes and demonstrates their interaction through a corpus-based analysis of personal ad images.


Introduction
A personal advertisement constitutes a distinct generic form, which is related to the small ad family of genres.While small ads traditionally offer a thing (e.g. a car) or a service (e.g.plumbing), the personal ad 'offers but, most essentially, seeks' (Shalom, 1997) a romantic partner.Accordingly, a personal ad is used for the purpose of 'selling' oneself and of 'seeking' a desired other for short and long term relationships (Shalom, 1997;Marley, 2000;Gibbs et al., 2006).Each construed identity in a personal ad is an offer that is intended to be exchanged for what is sought by others in the dating scene.The self becomes a commodified entity and advertisers compete for the time and effort of other members to read and respond to their profiles.With these aims in mind, advertisers are pushed into crafting an advert that will positively highlight their identity in ways that they believe will help them achieve these objectives.
Virtual dating site creates courting potentiality that begins online and then moves on to offline face-to-face interactions, forming what is termed as a mixed-mode relationship (Walther & Parks, 2002).An interesting myth about online daters is that they are social isolates in the real world (Fiore, 2004).There may have been some truth to this perception when online dating was in its infancy (Klement, 1997).However a survey among Canadian online daters at the end of 2000 revealed little evidence to support this generalization.The results of the survey revealed that online daters are sociable individuals who tend to be members of social networks, are family-oriented and frequently engage in social and leisure activities with others (Brym & Lenton, 2001).Partly due to the above stigma, self-advertisement in Malaysia was initially perceived as an unconventional way of meeting people and was therefore a less popular method than the traditional approach of formal face-to-face meetings.However, the recent creation of reality matchmaking shows on Malaysian television channels and an increasing number of local online dating and marital sites have demonstrated a change in attitude towards this alternative mode of meeting people.A survey recently revealed that 46% of Malaysian Internet users visit social networking sites, which include some matchmaking sites (The Star, 2007).Additionally, a search for "Malaysian online dating sites" on Google revealed 23,800 results.Based on the growing number of users and dating programs and sites in the media and on the Internet, the phenomena of online dating has established its position as a new social practice in the act of courtship initiation.2010), and also body posture, drawing on work in social behavioural science by Mehrabian (1971Mehrabian ( , 1981) ) and Argyle (1988).
Based on the framework of social semiotics, social behavioural science and corpus linguistics techniques, this paper specifically addresses the following questions.
1. What are the dominant patterns of non-verbal features displayed by the men and women in their personal ad images?
2. What are the types of interpersonal attitude represented through the advertisers' body language and the resources they use to affiliate with viewers on Match.com?

3.
To what extent are the realizations of face-to-face courtship initiation behavior represented in the advertisers' images?
The following sections will describe the concept and features of body language in the fields of social semiotics and social behavioural science.

Body Language in Behavioural Science
Research on non-verbal communication in social behavioral science goes at least as far back as Darwin's 'The Expression of the Emotion in Man and Animals' in 1872 which focused on his observation of facial expressions and body language from an evolutionary perspective (Ekman, 1992).At its most basic, the phrase "nonverbal communication" (henceforth NVC) is identified with message sources that are not a part of written and spoken language (Knapp et al., 1978).Generally, NVC is used to refer to "all of the ways in which communication is effected between persons when in each other's presence, by means other than words.It refers to the communicational functioning of bodily activity, gesture, facial expression and orientation, posture and spacing, touch and smell, and of those aspects of utterance that can be considered apart from the referential content of what is said" (Kendon, 1981, p. 3).
The first part of my image analysis focuses on the resources that are used by the advertisers to enact interpersonal relationship with the viewers.The aim here is to systematically describe and codify visual interpersonal resources in personal ad images.These resources are somatic in nature as they involve features of body language such as facial expression and posture.Argyle (1988) provided a list of features that are categorised as non-verbal communication based on the findings of previous scholars.These are facial expression, gaze, gestures, posture, bodily contact and other aspects of appearance and non-verbal vocalizations.Each of these can be subdivided into a number of variables or discrete choices.For example, Argyle (1988) distinguished between three main human postures: 1) sitting, squatting and kneeling; 2) standing and 3) lying.He explains that each of these has variations corresponding to different positions of the arms and legs and different angles of the body.He proposed a number of terms that are commonly adopted in describing postures which are used to encode the advertisers' bodily stances in this study:

Body Language and Systemic Functional Grammar
Systemic functional scholars have generally drawn on the grammatics of systemic functional linguistics to analyze and systematize non-verbal language into modes of meaning and expression, motivated by the metafunctions.System networks have been adapted as one way of representing meaning making choices in bodily and facial expressions, in real-time interaction or static representation in images (e.g.Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996;2006;Martinec, 2001Martinec, , 2004;;Hood, 2011;Painter & Martin, 2009).Through a system network, body language is modeled as sets of alternatives or 'systems' of meaning choices with specific realizations (see section 2.3.4),akin to the one provided for language by Halliday (1966) and Halliday & Matthiessen (2004); and choices are generally organised according to their ideational (e.g.Martinec, 2001Martinec, , 2004)), interpersonal (e.g.Hood, 2011;Painter & Martin, 2009;Zappavigna et al., 2008) and textual (e.g.Hood, 2011) metafunctions.While most of these studies are based on the recorded motion of the face and body in real-time interaction, this study focuses on the encoding of still body language in images.Accordingly, the interpersonal function provides the basis for interpreting attitudinal meanings in body language.
Guided by the principles of SFL, Kress and van Leeuwen's (2006) grammar of visual design presents an extensive description of visual resources based on examples from contemporary visual design in 'Western' cultures.Their tools provide a significant starting point from which images in other contexts can be explored.As my visual analysis deals with attitudinal meanings, the following paragraphs describe the interpersonal resources for codifying eye contact, framing and perspective in images.
The system of contact deals with whether the depicted participant is represented as having eye contact with the readers/viewers or otherwise.Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) explain that A depicted person may be shown as addressing viewers directly, by looking at the camera.This conveys a sense of interaction between the depicted person and the viewer.But a depicted person may also be shown as turned away from the viewer, and this conveys the absence of a sense of interaction.It slows the viewer to scrutinize the represented characters as though they were specimens in a display case.(2006:43) The proximity of the represented participants to the viewer is represented by the system of social distance, realized by the choice between close-up, medium-shot and long-shot of the participant.Van Leeuwen explains that 'in pictures, as in real life, distance communicates interpersonal relationships.We "keep our distance" from strangers (if given the chance); we are "close to" our nearest and dearest; we "work closely" with someone; and so on.Distance indicates the closeness, literally and figuratively, of our relationships...In pictures, distance becomes symbolic.People shown in a 'long shot' from far away, are shown as if they are strangers; people shown in a 'close-up' are shown as if they are one of us ' (2006: 138).So, distance in images is represented by the type of shot or the size of the frame in relation to the human body (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006, p. 124).The most common types of shot in my data are the close shot, medium close shot, medium shot and medium long shot.The description of each shot and its corresponding distance type is presented and illustrated by images taken from the corpus.
Perspective is concerned with the various depicted camera angles for representing power and involvement (van Leeuwen, 2006, p. 139) in images.According to Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) there are two types of angles, the vertical and the horizontal.The vertical or the camera height is an important means for creating symbolic power differences between participants in the image or between them and the viewer.
"If a represented participant is seen from a high angle, then the relation between the interactive participants (the producer of the image, and hence also the viewer) and the represented participants is depicted as one in which the interactive participant has power over the represented participant -the represented participant is seen from the point of view of power.If the represented participant is seen from a low angle, then the relation between the interactive and represented participants is depicted as one in which the represented participants has power over the interactive participant.If finally, the picture is at eye level, the point of view is one of equality and there is no power difference involved."(Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006: 140).
The variables from social semiotics and social behavioral science form the basis for the systematic coding of body language in the advertisers' images.Results are discussed in terms of common and frequent patterns of features between the men and women with regard to courtship intiation behavior.Analysis will also focus on how these features cluster in the images to form various visual personae.The next section discusses body language and interpersonal attitude in interaction.

Body Language and Interpersonal Attitude
Generally, body language perform five types of function.These functions are to express emotions, to communicate interpersonal attitudes, to support and accompany speech, to represent identity through appearance and voice and finally to enact rituals such as greetings and praying (Argyle, 1988).With regard to interpersonal attitude, the most frequently used model is based on the work of Mehrabian (1971Mehrabian ( , 1981)).He wrote that "We form distinct first impressions of many people whom we meet; we feel that they are extroverted, introverted, domineering, pleasant, obnoxious, self-assured, active, argumentative, hostile, or even bland.
There is something about each person, a pervasive style that applies to almost everything he or she does that enables us to form an impression before any exchange of words…the gestures or movements of these different people suggest the character or style of their personalities without the aid of words.(1981, p. 90).
Mehrabian identified two fundamental dimensions, affiliation and dominance, that can be used to explain the meanings of non-verbal behaviour in face-to-face interaction.[direct]

Meanings
[up-curved], [level] angle  It is also i male adve three mout arm orient gaze, the r ( 24   initiation ritual to determine if face-to-face behaviours are replicated in the advertisers' poses.The findings presented thus far show that the cluster of an up-curved mouth shape, a direct gaze and a close shot are the most frequently tendered resources by the men and women, therefore bearing the most mate-ability value in the corpus.The advertisers appear to orient to what is expected in the context of courtship initiation in this particular genre, and are able to produce socially specific visual practices that are comparable to the attraction phase in a face-to-face courting ritual.Their poses are adopted for the purpose of attracting and engaging with others, because as the advertisers deploy the realisation resources of the attraction phase in the images, what they are also doing is instantiating specific attitudes (i.e.affiliative and dominant) and performing a friendly or suggestive persona through which they affiliate with others on my.match.com.

ng away, spec ossing, neck p 'dancing' in t
Affiliative attitude is associated with close proximity (e.g.leaning forward), open posture (e.g.open arms and legs) and positive facial expression (e.g.eye contact and a smile).Non-affiliative attitude is shown by averting eye contact and by more distant postures that