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How Do We Communicate About Pain? A Systematic Analysis of the Semantic Contribution of Co-speech Gestures in Pain-focused Conversations

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Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to investigate co-speech gesture use during communication about pain. Speakers described a recent pain experience and the data were analyzed using a ‘semantic feature approach’ to determine the distribution of information across gesture and speech. This analysis revealed that a considerable proportion of pain-focused talk was accompanied by gestures, and that these gestures often contained more information about pain than speech itself. Further, some gestures represented information that was hardly represented in speech at all. Overall, these results suggest that gestures are integral to the communication of pain and need to be attended to if recipients are to obtain a fuller understanding of the pain experience and provide help and support to pain sufferers.

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Notes

  1. Inspection of results of non-native English participants revealed that their gesture rate, speaking time, and overall gesture production were similar to and within the range of those of the native English speakers. Further, with the exception of information about cause (for which the exclusion of these participants eliminated differences between gesture only and speech only or speech and gesture together), the findings remained the same without these participants.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Judith Hall, Lorenza Mondada, Mandana Seyfeddinipur, Adam Kendon, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. We would also like to thank the participants for taking part in this study and Rebecca Cleary for her help with data analysis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, Coupland Building 1, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK

    Samantha Rowbotham, Judith Holler, Donna Lloyd & Alison Wearden

  2. Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Wundtlaan 1, 6525 XD, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Judith Holler

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  1. Samantha Rowbotham
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  2. Judith Holler
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Correspondence to Samantha Rowbotham.

Appendices

Appendix 1

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Table 4 Examples of semantic feature coding for gesture and speech
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Appendix 2

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Table 5 Descriptive statistics and results for comparisons between the number of information units represented in gesture and speech, for the individual semantic categories when all speech is considered
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Rowbotham, S., Holler, J., Lloyd, D. et al. How Do We Communicate About Pain? A Systematic Analysis of the Semantic Contribution of Co-speech Gestures in Pain-focused Conversations. J Nonverbal Behav 36, 1–21 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-011-0122-5

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