Hand and Facial Gestures in Conversational Interaction Page 1 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy ). Subscriber: Oxford University Press - Master Gratis Access; date: 05 August 2014 Subject: Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Online Publication Date: Mar 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199838639.013.008 Hand and Facial Gestures in Conversational Interaction Janet Bavelas, Jennifer Gerwing, and Sara Healing The Oxford Handbook of Language and Social Psychology (Forthcoming) Edited by Thomas M. Holtgraves Oxford Handbooks Online Abstract and Keywords Conversational hand and facial gestures are an integral part of language use in face-to-face dialogue. Extensive research shows that conversational hand gestures are tightly synchronized with words to demonstrate anything that can be represented (directly or metaphorically) as size, shape, position, or action and that they are highly sensitive to the immediate communicative context. Although research on conversational (nonemotional) facial gestures is much more limited, they, too, are precisely timed with words and context to demonstrate anything that can be represented by a facial configuration—whether in the past, present, or future and even hypothetical or metaphorical. Both hand and facial gestures can also function as collateral communication (meta-communication). This chapter includes theoretical, methodological, and technical requirements for studying these gestures in conversational interaction. Keywords: Conversational hand gestures, conversational facial gestures, language use, dialogue, conversational interaction, collateral communication In face-to-face dialogue, interlocutors spontaneously combine words, prosody, hand gestures, and facial gestures to produce rapidly changing integrated messages (Bavelas & Chovil, 2000, 2006). This chapter presents a framework for studying these integrated messages as social communication and then an overview of what experimental research is discovering about how the visible elements of communication contribute to language use in conversational interaction. Looking Closely at Conversational Hand and Facial Gestures To appreciate the dynamic, fleeting quality of conversational hand and facial gestures, it is helpful to see (rather than to read descriptions of) as many examples as possible. This chapter uses sequential frame shots from our research videos, a format that may help the reader imagine how these actions actually looked (and may lead to noticing them more often in everyday life). In his advice on how to get the most out of examples presented in print form, McNeill (1985, p. 352) urged readers to act out the examples in order to experience the single coordinated action of motor–speech synchrony that the examples are intended to show. Figure 1. presents three frames in a 6.75-second video excerpt (from Bavelas, Gerwing, & Healing, 2014). The speaker’s task was to watch several scenes from the animated movie Shrek 2 and then retell them to an addressee. She had just finished describing an attack on Shrek by the cat character (Puss in Boots). In frame 1, she began to describe the next scene, in which Shrek picked up the defeated cat by the back of the neck, lifted him close to his face, and the cat started begging for his life. By frame 2, she had raised her hand up in front of her own face, pinching her first two fingers and thumb as if lifting and then suspending the cat, presenting an image of Shrek holding the cat in front of his face. This hand gesture demonstrated information that was either left ambiguous in her words (e.g., the shape of Shrek’s hand) or was missing from her words (e.g., that Shrek