Gestures and mimics

GESTURES AND MIMICS

1. Introduction

2. How do we perceive human (e)motion?
3. How are different emotions communicated?
4. The study „Nonverbal Channel Use in Communication of Emotion: How May Depend on Why“
5. Experiment 1 Emotion production
6. Experiment 2 Emotion Identification
7. Summary of the study
8. Literature
1. Introduction
Nonverbal communication is the process of communication through sending and receiving wordless (mostly visual) cues between people. It is sometimes mistakenly referred to as body language (kinesics), but nonverbal communication encompasses much more, such as use of voice (paralanguage), touch (haptics), distance (proxemics), and physical environments/appearance.1
This essay, accompanying a presentation that we held during the seminar „Nonverbal Communication“ at the University of Cologne, deals with the topic of nonverbal communication. Nonverbal communication is the overall term for all forms of (human) communication which function without spoken words.2 Instead, carriers of meanings and messages may consist of gestures, postures, body movements, mimics, eye contact, touch, interpersonal distance, or other nonverbal expressions, e.g. laughing.3
The functions of nonverbal forms of communication may be the expression of emotions, the transmission of attitudes (e.g. a contemptuous facial expression may be used to express antipathy), the presentation of ones personal characteristics, or the complementation of a verbal message.4
In our presentation, we focused on nonverbal communication that is conveyed through body features, or as the title of this essay postulates, gestures, postures, and movements. The first part focused specifically on gestures and how they can reflect, change, or even create language and thoughts, but it will not be presented in this essay. Instead, my personal section of the keynote was about a study by Betsy App, Daniel N. McIntosh and Catherine L. Reed from the University of Denver, entitled „Nonverbal Channel Use in Communication of Emotion: How May Depend on Why“.5 This study investigated the hypothesis that different emotions are most effectively conveyed through specific nonverbal channels of communication, specifically: body, face and touch.
2. How do we perceive human (e)motion?
Humans, being highly social creatures, rely heavily on the ability to perceive what others are doing and to infer from gestures and expressions what others may be intending to do. Perceiving the actions, moods, and intentions of other people is one of the most important social skills we possess. Vision provides a very good source of information in support of these skills.6
Early work suggested that the brain may contain mechanisms specialised for the detection of other humans from motion signals.7 Perception of biological motion depends both on the motions of individual dots and the configuration/orientation of the body as a whole, as well as interactions between these local and global cues. An illustrative example that may be used for the perception of human motion is a PL display of emotion. This is an animation of biological motion, in which the activity of a human is portrayed by the relative motions of a small number of markers positioned on the head and the joints of the body.8 Given this abstract presentation of human movement, one may be able to identify e.g. if the person displayed is a man or a woman, what he or she is doing, or even who exactly the person is (of course this may not always result in a perfectly correct response). The sensitivity of the PL emotion display increases with the number of illuminated dots, and the duration of exposure to the animation.
Observers usually have no trouble identifying what an actor is doing in a given PL display even when the number of possible activities is quite large. Observers also readily perceive the identity and sex of a PL-defined walker, although recognition performance is not always perfect.9
So this information may help to solve the question on how we perceive human (e)motion. Besides gestures and other forms of nonverbal communication, body postures play an important role in perceiving and correctly identifying human motion. Human action visually radiates sociel cues to which we are extremely sensitive.
Recent studies have shown that body postures are more accurately recognised when an emotion is compared with a different or neutral emotion.10 For example, a person feeling angry would portray dominance over the other, and his or her posture displays approach tendencies. When comparing this to a person feeling fearful, he or she would feel weak, submissive and his/her posture would probably display avoidance tendencies, the opposite of an angry person.
Sitting or standing postures may also indicate one’s emotions. A person sitting on a chair who leans forward, with his or her head nodding along with the discussion, implies that he or she is open, relaxed and generally ready to listen. On the other hand, a person who has his or her legs and arms crossed with the foot kicking slightly implies that he or she is feeling impatient and emotionally detached from the discussion.11 In a standing discussion, a person who stands with arms or with feet pointed towards the speaker could suggest that he or she is attentive and interested in the conversation.
3. How are different emotions communicated?
Answering questions about what another is feeling and how one should respond to that emotional state with its correlated actions is a key adaptational problem. Moreover, successfully communicating one’s likely next action is an effective way to avoid risk or expending additional energy, or to elicit supportive behaviors. The importance of such communication precedes the evolution of verbal abilities (Darwin), therefore, it is not surprising that people communicate emotions through several nonverbal channels, including the face, body, and touch.12 The study by App et. al, which was the foundation of our presentation, subsequently demonstrated that people are communicating emotions through several nonverbal chnannels, e.g. face, body, or touch.
[...]
1 Nonverbal Communication Theories: The Encyclopedia of Communication Theory, 2009.
2 M. Knapp, J. A. Hall, 2006: „Nonverbal Communication in Human Interaction“.
3 N. M. Henley, 1977: „Body Politics: Power, sex, and nonverbal communication“.
4 Ebd.
5 B. App, D. N. McIntosh, C. L. Reed, 2011: „Nonverbal Channel Use in Communication of Emotion: How May Depend on Why“. American Psychological Association.
6 B. App, D. N. McIntosh, C. L. Reed, 2011: „Nonverbal Channel Use in Communication of Emotion: How May Depend on Why“.
7 N . Troje , C . Westhoff, 2006: „The Inversion Effect in Biological Motion Perception: Evidence for a "Life Detector“?".
8 R. Blake, M. Shiffrar, 2007: „Perception of Human Motion“.
9 Ebd.
10 Mondloch, Catherine J.; Nelson, Nicole L.; Horner, Matthew; Pavlova, Marina, 2013: „Asymmetries of Influence: Differential Effects of Body Postures on Perceptions of Emotional Facial Expressions“.
11 Ebd.
12 B. App, D. N. McIntosh, C. L. Reed, 2011: „Nonverbal Channel Use in Communication of Emotion: How May Depend on Why“.
Excerpt out of 11 pages
In this paper, I put forth the idea that a process in the production of speech can also be found, on an entirely different scale, in theatrical and film performance. Not simply that actors speak, but the semiotics of language, as a dynamic system, also appear, on their own, in the semiotics of theater. It forms a kind of “triangle” of gesture mimicry: actor → audience, audience → actor, and author → actor. Each leg has its own realization. Many reactions take place and are part of the performance triangle. The actor to audience portion is similar to what gesture coders do – spontaneously mimic the gesture and speech of a subject on video made even decades before. The author to actor leg is more surprising. Carefully written ‘scanable’ prose contains gesture-like imagery. Part of writing is building in gesture, not describing it but placing it as a pattern on which the written text is orchestrated. Actors can recover the author’s built-in gestures. Finally, the audience to actor leg arises when the actor mimics what have been termed ‘phantom’ gestures and bodily attitudes sensed in the audience. The triangle exists in film acting with the actor conjuring an audience of his or her own to complete it, and explains why in fact film actors do this (even endowing the camera with personal properties). The audience is active on its leg of the triangle. The audience is more complex and participatory than just watching. Overall, theatre and film have the same dialectic of semiotic opposites as gesture and language. As actors speak and gesture the performance itself, too, is a process of imagery and codified form, and they are in a dialectic unity. In this sense, in heightened and public form, theatre is a continuation (and not just an exploiter) of language, which perhaps partly explains its appeal and universality.
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Although the sign languages in use today are full human languages, certain of the features they share with gestures have been suggested to provide information about possible origins of human language. These features include sharing common articulators with gestures, and exhibiting substantial iconicity in comparison to spoken languages. If human proto-language was gestural, the question remains of how a highly iconic manual communication system might have been transformed into a primarily vocal communication system in which the links between symbol and referent are for the most part arbitrary. The hypothesis presented here focuses on a class of signs which exhibit: “echo phonology,” a repertoire of mouth actions which are characterized by “echoing” on the mouth certain of the articulatory actions of the hands. The basic features of echo phonology are introduced, and discussed in relation to various types of data. Echo phonology provides naturalistic examples of a possible mechanism accounting for part of the evolution of language, with evidence both of the transfer of manual actions to oral ones and the conversion of units of an iconic manual communication system into a largely arbitrary vocal communication system.

Keywords: sign language, echo phonology, language origins, neuroscience of sign language, mouth gestures
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Introduction
In the past 50 years, the study of how human language evolved (evolutionary linguistics) has again become a prominent feature of linguistic discourse. A complete theory of language evolution is beyond the scope of this paper, including as it must, consideration of brain function and anatomical changes in the vocal tract. We are concerned here with only one part of the process—the previously hypothesized shift from a primarily gestural or vocal-gestural communication system to spoken language (see section Historical Perspectives below) and how such a shift could have provided a mechanism for converting iconic manual symbols into arbitrary vocal symbols. Data from the sign languages of Deaf1 communities will provide an insight into this mechanism.
Since home signing (gesture systems) can appear in the absence of linguistic input (Goldin-Meadow, 2003), sign languages used by Deaf communities have sometimes been regarded as primitive in comparison to spoken languages, and as representing earlier forms of human communication. However, linguistic research over the past 40 years has demonstrated that sign languages are in fact full natural languages with complex grammars (Stokoe, 1960; Klima and Bellugi, 1979; Sutton-Spence and Woll, 1999). The creators and users of all known sign languages are humans with “language-ready brains.” Nevertheless, it is possible that sign share features in common with evolutionary precursors of spoken language.
These features include sharing common articulators with non-linguistic communication (i.e., gestures), and exhibiting substantial iconicity in comparison to spoken languages. This iconicity is present in signs representing abstract concepts as well as in those that represent concrete objects and actions. The form of many signs [examples from British Sign Language (BSL)] depict part or all of a referent or an action associated with a referent, such as eat, paint (holding and using a paintbrush), cat (whiskers), bird (beak). Signs referring to cognitive activities (think, understand, know, learn, etc.) are generally located at the forehead, while signs relating to emotional activities (feel, interested, excited, angry) are located on the chest and abdomen; signs with the index and middle fingers of the hand extended and separated (“V” handshape) relate to concepts of “two-ness”: two, both, two-of-us, walk (legs), look, read (eyes). The pervasiveness of iconicity (even where heavily conventionalized) is striking, in both sign languages and gestures.
If human proto-language was gestural or vocal-gestural, the question remains as to how such a communication system with a high degree of iconicity might link to the development of articulated words in spoken language, in which the links between symbol and referent are, for the most part, seen as arbitrary. Posing the question in this way, and regarding sign languages as “manual” ignores the rich and complex role played by other articulators: body, face, and, in particular, the mouth.
As well as the actions performed by the hands, sign languages also make use of mouth actions of various types. The theory proposed here relates to one subgroup of mouth actions: “echo phonology” (Woll and Sieratzki, 1998; Woll, 2001). These are a set of mouth actions unrelated to spoken language, and which occur obligatorily in a number of sign languages alongside certain manual signs. They are characterized by “echoing” on the mouth certain of the articulatory activities of the hands.
Three data sources are discussed here: narratives in 3 different European sign languages, anecdotal observations of hearing individuals bilingual in BSL and English, and functional imaging studies with deaf signers. These provide evidence of a possible mechanism in the evolution of spoken language by which iconic symbols in a manual communication system could have converted into a vocal communication system with arbitrary links between symbol and referent.