By: Emma Grace Schenck

Have you ever noticed how certain people talk with their hands? And do you ever find yourself staring at their hands the whole time and rarely their face? Me too. Now have you ever noticed how using their hands may affect the way they speak?

From my own experience, I have found that people who use their hands when they speak tend to be more interactive with whomever they are speaking. Why is this the case? Well, it has been proven that gesturing actually affects the way a person talks.

A recent study by Alice Cravotta, M. Grazia Busà, and Pilar Prieto, was conducted on how the encouragement of the use of hand gestures affects a person’s speech. While a lot of research has been done on the effects of strongly discouraging gestures during speech, hardly any has been done on the effects of encouraging gestures.

The researchers had a group of participants explain the events that occurred in a comic strip to another person. One group was not given any instructions pertaining to gestures while the other was strongly encouraged to use gestures. What they found was that those who were encouraged to use gestures increased their length of speech, meaning they used more words in their descriptions. Additionally, the participants also showed increases in their pitch and volume while they were speaking.

While these results alone are quite interesting, I am sure you are wondering what it all means. As the results show, an increase in words used when speaking and using hand gestures can allow the speaker to be more elaborate in their speech. While this may be quite handy for informal interactions, formal interactions tend to require more concise responses, and therefore using gestures may be more hurtful than helpful.

On the other hand, using gestures also showed an increase in volume and higher pitch, which could be an indicator of confidence. In this way, using gestures could potentially be beneficial in formal interactions. This simply proves further that hand gestures can be beneficial if used appropriately: using them too frequently may cause you to run on when speaking, but not using gestures at all may cause a lack of personal connection in the interaction altogether.

So why is this important to know? It is important to understand how using gestures can affect the way we speak to best understand how to communicate in different situations. For example, if I am about to attend a formal business meeting in which I have a presentation, I may decide to limit my hand gestures to keep my presentation concise and to the point. If I am going to meet a small group of close friends, though, or be a guest speaker for a kindergarten class, I may decide to use hand gestures to be more interactive with what I am saying.

Either way, the effects of using hand gestures while speaking are important to know so that you, as the speaker, will know how to present yourself in varying interpersonal situations. Use gestures wisely, so your listeners will focus on you and not your hands!