The role of hand gestures in emotion communication: Do type and size of gestures matter?

We communicate emotions in a multimodal way. However, non-verbal emotion communication is a relatively understudied area of research. Although prior research showed the importance of bodily cues in emotion communication, a more comprehensive understanding of hand gestures' role is still needed. In three experiments, we investigated gesture characteristics (e.g., type, size in space) that might be related to individuals' processing of emotional content. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to rate the emotional intensity of emotional narratives from videoclips either with iconic or beat gestures. Results indicated that participants in the iconic gesture condition rated the emotional intensity higher than participants in the beat gesture condition. In Experiment 2, size of gestures and its interaction with gesture type were investigated in a within-subjects design. Participants again rated the emotional intensity of emotional narratives from videoclips. There was a main effect of gesture size, but; no main effect of gesture type, or gesture size and type interaction were found. Experiment 3 was conducted to check whether findings of Experiment 2 were due to viewing gestures in all videoclips. We compared the gesture and no gesture (i.e., speech only) conditions and showed that there was not a difference between them on emotional ratings. More importantly, we replicated the findings of Experiment 2. Overall, these findings indicate the importance of examining gesture's role in emotional contexts and that different gesture characteristics such as size of gestures should be considered in nonverbal communication.