I see how you feel: Recipients obtain additional information from speakers’ gestures about pain

Abstract

Objective: Despite the need for effective pain communication, pain is difficult to verbalise. Cospeech gestures frequently add information about pain that is not contained in the accompanying speech. We explored whether recipients can obtain additional information from gestures about the pain that is being described.Methods: Participants (n = 135) viewed clips of pain descriptions under one of four conditions: 1) Speech Only; 2) Speech and Gesture; 3) Speech, Gesture and Face; and 4) Speech, Gesture and Face plus Instruction (short presentation explaining the pain information that gestures can depict). Participants provided free-text descriptions of the pain that had been described.Responses were scored for the amount of information obtained from the original clips. Conclusions: Gestures produced during pain descriptions provide additional information about pain that recipients are able to pick up without detriment to their uptake of spoken information.Practice implications: Healthcare professionals may benefit from instruction in gestures to enhance uptake of information about patients' pain experiences.

Body-oriented gestures as a practitioner's window into interpreted communication

“…Even when both modalities conveyed similar information, gestures still contribute unique information missing from the accompanying speech (Rowbotham, Holler, Lloyd, & Wearden, 2014). In line with Hotstetter's (2011) metaanalysis, non-redundant gestures about pain do benefit communication: When observing clips of pain descriptions, recipients who viewed video obtained significantly more information than those who listened only to the audio (Rowbotham, Holler, Wearden, & Lloyd, 2016). The ability to glean information from gesture can be improved: Participants who had watched a 5 min 28 sec instructional video about gesture-speech integration noted significantly more information from the clips of pain descriptions than those who had not (ibid).…”

“…Modified (or absent) gestures can signal a need for clarification, providing an opportunity to topicalize intersubjectivity and the interpretation process itself, allowing for repair there and then. Rowbotham et al (2016) showed that lay participants gleaned more information from gesture after watching a 5 min 28 sec instructional video, suggesting that meta-linguistic awareness of gesture could be a training opportunity for health care professionals. We propose that such awareness (of their own and others' gesture use) could contribute to using visible action as a window into the otherwise opaque process of interpretation (also see Li, Said, O'Neil, Ancarno, & Niksic, 2016 for a project teaching medical students linguistic analytic methods in clinical communication education).…”

Age-related differences in multimodal recipient design: younger, but not older adults, adapt speech and co-speech gestures to common ground

“…There is a close semantic and temporal alignment between representational co-speech gestures and the speech they accompany (Kendon, 2004;McNeill, 1992;see Özyürek, 2017, for a recent review). However, rather than being fully redundant, gestures often depict information that semantically adds to and complements what is being said (Holler & Beattie, 2003a, 2003bRowbotham, Holler, Wearden, & Lloyd, 2016). Moreover, like spoken utterances, co-speech gesture use is sensitive to social context variables.…”