‘I represent a country that wants peace.’ Compassionate leadership in Maia Sandu’s address on the 77th Session of the UN General Assembly

The paper discusses the case study of Moldovan President Maia Sandu’s speech in the general debate during the 77th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2022 in the context of the war in Ukraine. It considers compassionate leadership as a communicative strategy in political crisis management and investigates the congruency between the contents of narrative and nonverbal immediacy as its measure in political communication. The presented study is based on data collected with a content analysis of the address and the automated coding of facial expressiveness with FaceReader 9 (Noldus IT) in the recording of Sandu’s speech. The timeline analysis compared the narrative with the intensity of neutrality, basic emotions, sympathy, pain, attention, emotional arousal, valence, and the RPPG-estimated heart rate, describing displayed emotionality, motivation, and physiological stress. The standardized results suggest increased nonverbal signaling of emotions, oriented towards surprise, considered a substitute expression of compassionate responsiveness, sympathy, and sadness, while violent emotions (anger, disgust, and contempt) were marginalized. Moreover, the analysis provided evidence of the consistent, verbal, and nonverbal presence of core assets of compassionate leadership in Sandu’s address to the UN General Assembly.