Members in the Media
From: The Huffington Post

The Fascinating Science Behind ‘Talking’ With Your Hands

The Huffington Post:

If someone has ever made fun of you for making elaborate hand gestures while talking — or you’ve seen footage of yourself speaking, only to be horrified by your flailing forearms — don’t be too concerned.

According to psychologists, those gestures probably are helping you express your thoughts more effectively.

“Hand gestures are really a powerful aspect of communication, from both the speaker’s and the listener’s end,” Dr. Carol Kinsey Goman, body language expert and author of The Nonverbal Advantage: Secrets and Science of Body Language at Work and The Silent Language of Leaders, told The Huffington Post. 

“Gesture-speech mismatches” occur when we convey something with our hands that doesn’t seem to match up with what we’re saying. Depending on your age, this may be a sign that you’re learning, according to University of Chicago psychologist Dr. Susan Golden-Meadow.

“Children who produce gesture-speech mismatches on a task may have information relevant to solving the task literally at their fingertips and could, as a result, be on the cusp of learning how to solve that task,” she wrote in a 2006 paper published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Read the whole story: The Huffington Post

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