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The relationship between handedness and valence: A gesture study.
Esra Nur Çatak1, Alper Açık2, Tilbe Göksun1
1Department of Psychology, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006)
|January 23, 2018
Summary
This study found that while people look towards specific body sides based on emotional content, handedness primarily influences gesture production, not comprehension. Hand preference impacts how gestures are made, but not how emotions are perceived through them.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Linguistics
Background:
- Hand preference is linked to emotional processing and gesture production.
- Previous research suggests body-side emotional associations and dominant-hand use in positive co-speech gestures.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the influence of handedness on the comprehension and production of emotional co-speech gestures.
- To examine if body-specific mental representations extend to conversational gesture use.
Main Methods:
- Participants viewed faceless videos with positive and negative emotional content, monitored by an eye tracker.
- Participants retold the stories after each video to assess gesture production.
- Analysis focused on looking preferences, gesture types (representational vs. beat), and hand dominance.
Main Results:
- No significant difference in looking preferences based on handedness (right- vs. left-handed).
- Participants looked longer towards the right for positive content and towards the left for negative content, indicating emotional valence effects.
- Handedness influenced gesture production: dominant hands were used for beat gestures, while left-handers used both hands equally for representational gestures.
Conclusions:
- Emotional valence affects visual attention during gesture comprehension, but not in a hand-preference-dependent manner.
- Handedness plays a role in the production of specific gesture types, particularly beat gestures.
- The findings suggest that body-specific emotional representations may not consistently transfer to the production of gestures in conversation.
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