Study fingers reasons behind hand-talking
Research reveals the psychology of our gestures
On first glance, storytelling does not seem like something you do with your hands.
But if you watch someone tell a story, odds are it will be punctuated by gestures, simple little physical actions and cues by which the narrator guides the audience.
It could be a cyclical motion of the index finger to indicate the progression of time, like hands on a clock. It could be a finger pointed over one’s shoulder to indicate the past, or to the left on an imaginary timeline that runs left to right (like many languages, notably English). Gestures can be literal, like moving one’s arms to show a character is running, or metaphorical like snapped fingers to indicate ease, or they can simply punctuate an point in the narrative.
The joke is that Italians can’t speak if you tie their hands, says Elena Nicoladis, professor of psychology at the University of Alberta, who has investigated cross-cultural variation in hand-talking. Americans gesture more than Chinese, for example, as other researchers have shown. French people say they talk with their hands a lot because they are French. That is what they do. But why they do so is elusive, and research has not proven the stereotypes.
The common intuition is that these patterns are related to culture, Nicoladis said. Individuals may differ in how much they gesture, based on personalities or cognitive abilities or circumstance, but overall, there are cultures that are into hand-talking, and others that are not so much.
New research by Nicoladis published in the journal Language and Cognition suggests this variation might be more than just a simple question of style. It might reflect a deeper psychological insight, not just about how people use their hands, but how they construct stories in their minds.
This is a more provocative hypothesis, but there is reason to think it is correct, Nicoladis said.
Previous research has shown patterns in how the gestures of hand-talking reveal the activation of “visuospatial mental images” in the mind. For example, people describing a picture they have seen before tend to gesture more often if the image is in front of them, and less often if it has been removed. Likewise, if people are encouraged to gesture while solving a tricky spatial problem, they tend to perform better. In children, gesture frequency is linked with the length of the story — the more details, the more gestures.
There are cultural differences in storytelling styles too. In one revealing study, Greek and American adults were asked to recount a film. The Americans were literal and chronological about it, and spoke longer, retelling the detailed story as they experienced it. The Greeks on the other hand tended to interpret the characters’ roles and were “more likely to philosophize about the deeper meaning of what happened in the film.”
This reflects two main ways of telling a story, as a summarized chronicle of how it happened, or as a fable focused on the moral of why it happened.
Nicoladis’s hypothesis was that gesturing is indeed related to culture, but indirectly, through what she calls “discourse style,” or the cultural preference for presenting a story as either a summary or a fable.
If you think of a story as a sequence of events, you might be more likely to gesture while telling it, Nicoladis said. Conjuring visual images in the mind invites physical reproduction of those images by the hands.
If you think of a story as a revelation of meaning and morals, however, these abstract ideas do not lend themselves as readily to acting out with gestures.
This is the factor that strongly varies among cultures, Nicoladis concluded. Her research showed that native speakers of the Asian languages Hindi and Mandarin showed a clear preference for fables, as compared to the chronological summaries of native French or Spanish speakers.
In an experiment on 48 adults who learned English as adults, Nicoladis and co-authors showed each subject a short video, then asked them to recount it, both in English and their first language.
It was the simplest cartoon with no dialogue, of the Pink Panther becoming annoyed by a bird in a cuckoo clock, tossing it in a river, then coming to regret it.
They found native speakers of Romance languages like Spanish and French took this as an invitation to tell an amusing story about what they experienced in watching the video, punctuated by many gestures, and typically longer. Speakers of Asian languages like Hindi or Mandarin, the other hand, took it as an invitation to tell a moral, a lesson to be learned, a shorter story with much less hand-talking.
“It’s actually really clear. It’s indisputably clear what style of story somebody is using,” she said. French and Spanish speakers were rattling off vivid details, “and then, and then, and then.” Hindi and Mandarin speakers were focused on evaluating events, what was funny, what was important, how they felt, how characters might have felt, focusing not only on what happened, but why and why it was important.
“There seems to be something about using hands that is associated with reliving something in your mind’s eye, coming up with a vivid spatial image. When you’re thinking morally, you’re thinking abstractly, which doesn’t correspond quite as well with visual spatial processing,” Nicoladis said.
She said future research could inquire whether the origin of this pattern is in diverse teaching styles, as the study participants were all educated in their native language — in Asia, South America, or other parts of Canada — before eventually learning English and moving to Edmonton, where the study was conducted.
“That’s our intuition, that the origins are in the education system,” Nicoladis said.
THE JOKE IS THAT ITALIANS CAN’T SPEAK IF YOU TIE THEIR HANDS.