Hand Gestures: A lot more impactful than you thought

During the second half of the semester, our lecture hall had the honor of hosting one of the scientists that worked on the scientific article “How our hands help us learn”, Dr. Selma Wagner. This article brought forth an extremely thought provoking topic, one that I had personally not thought of until the talk, and one that I hope to study further into my academic career. This research introduced the topic of ‘gesture-speech mismatches’, a phenomena where speech and hand gestures differed, which indicated that the subject was on the verge of making progress in some sort of task. The study also said that if someone was unable to properly articulate their thoughts with only their speech, they would use hand gestures as a way to supplicate bringing forth their thoughts and to try and fully articulate themselves. 

An article with a similar premises to this study that I found was; “Hand gestures that illustrate speech boost persuasiveness, study shows”, introduces the concept of using hand gestures in conjunction to speech when you are presenting a topic or idea you wish to convey makes the speaker more persuasive and confident, using both modes of communication to convey their idea. The article also brings up that the more gestures the speaker uses, the more of an impact the speaker will have on their audience. This however is not completely clear, as certain hand gestures have more of an impact then others. ‘Illustrator’ gestures convey spoken content and are the gestures with the strongest effect. ‘Highlighter’ gestures usually point at an object when speaking, and these types of gestures did not have as much of an impact compared to ‘Illustrator’ gestures. One of the researchers and study co-authors, Dr. Mi Zhou, further emphasizes this point: "If a person uses their hands to visually illustrate what they're talking about, the audience perceives that this person has more knowledge and can make things easier to understand,"

Comparing these two articles side by side and it is clear that gestures and verbal speech are quite interconnected. Whether using hand gestures to relay something you are unable to verbally, or using them in conjunction to your speech to highlight or bring more close attention to a specific point, it is clear to see that they have more in common than they do in difference. With Dr. Wagner’s research, and future research, perhaps one day there will be a study that further goes into the ‘gesture-speech mismatch’ phenomena and will be one where the topic of how these gestures truly work in our minds.