[Assessment of gestures and their psychiatric relevance]

Analyzing and investigating non-verbal behavior and gestures has been receiving much attention since the last century. Thanks to the pioneer work of Ekman and Friesen we have a number of descriptive-analytic, categorizing and semantic content related scales and scoring systems. Generation of gestures, the integrative system with speech and the inter-cultural differences are in the focus of interest. Furthermore, analysis of the gestural changes caused by lesions of distinct neurological areas point toward to formation of new diagnostic approaches. The more widespread application of computerized methods resulted in an increasing number of experiments which study gesture generation, reproduction in mechanical and virtual reality. Increasing efforts are directed towards the understanding of human and computerized recognition of human gestures. In this review we describe the results emphasizing the relations of those results with psychiatric and neuropsychiatric disorders, specifically schizophrenia and affective spectrum.