Nonverbal Communication: Gestures

People who can connect with anyone are often quick-witted, resourceful, and tactful. They understand what others need and know how to find compromise. Skillful nonverbal behavior is a key part of social competence. Some people are more sensitive to nonverbal signals and can better identify their meaning, while others are more skilled at expressing their own feelings and attitudes nonverbally. Social competence, which includes these abilities, plays an extremely important role in everyday life.

Social Intelligence

Social intelligence, which underlies social competence, is considered a basic intellectual ability, distinct from other cognitive skills. Closely related is the concept of emotional intelligence, which describes a person’s ability to assess emotional messages, regulate their own emotions, and use them wisely to manage thoughts and actions.

To truly understand others, you need to pay attention to their characteristics, including appearance and nonverbal behavior. Sometimes, the information we get from observing someone is valuable in itself, regardless of any benefit we might gain. Occasionally, we make instant judgments based on what we notice; other times, understanding comes later.

However, communication skills go beyond just nonverbal messages. A verifier must understand the literal and metaphorical meaning of verbal messages, as well as the nuances “between the lines,” and integrate both verbal and nonverbal signals. It’s also important to understand social contexts and roles: what is acceptable or unacceptable in a given situation, how people in certain roles should behave, and the consequences of violating others’ expectations.

Understanding nonverbal skills can offer new perspectives on established concepts. Empathy, rapport, mirroring, and leading, along with processes like social comparison and impression management, can be viewed in terms of controlling the accuracy of sending or receiving nonverbal signals during social interaction.

Our ability to send and receive nonverbal signals develops through daily life. We unconsciously learn nonverbal behavior by imitating others, adjusting our actions based on feedback, and responding to guidance and advice from those around us.

Nonverbal skills improve with varied experience in decoding feelings and signals. Feedback, such as discussing when judgments about nonverbal behavior are correct or not, is one of the most effective ways to enhance these skills.

People who understand nonverbal signals and have strong nonverbal communication skills are harder to manipulate than those who lack these abilities. If someone knowledgeable about nonverbal behavior is suspected of using their knowledge “against” others, attempts are often made to expose or counteract them. Naturally, every verifier has an ethical responsibility not to use their knowledge to harm others.

Since verifiers spend a lot of time observing others-either passively (just watching) or actively (watching and interacting)-they inevitably develop strong skills in decoding nonverbal messages.

Undoubtedly, nonverbal signals are a crucial element of our communication efforts. Sometimes, they become the most important part of the messages we send. Understanding and effectively using nonverbal behavior is vital for success in almost all social interactions.

Test Your Ability to Understand Nonverbal Behavior

Two Types of Gestures in Lie Detection

In lie detection, it’s important to consider two types of gestures:

• Communicative gestures – gestures that accompany speech (illustrators, regulators) or serve as speech themselves (emblems).
• Non-communicative gestures – gestures that don’t participate in communication between people but play a special role in a person’s “communication” with themselves. For example, adapter gestures help a person find calm in stressful situations.

Let’s take a closer look at these.

Communicative Gestures

Emblem Gestures

An emblem is a communicative gesture that doesn’t accompany speech but essentially serves as speech itself because it has a very specific meaning. When someone shows an emblem gesture, it’s always done consciously and intentionally. Emblems and emblematic signs are a kind of proto-language. Our ancestors, who didn’t know or use language as we do today, communicated with emblems.

The meaning of emblem gestures is unambiguously understood by all members of a given culture or subculture. Emblems can convey almost any message, including factual information, commands, expressions of personal attitude, and feelings.

Facial expressions and eye movements that accompany emblem gestures expand the possible meanings associated with hand movements. There’s always a chance that the meaning associated with a gesture, in the absence of speech, will change if speech accompanies it-even if the accompanying speech seems unnecessary. Context broadens the meaning. Sometimes, context doesn’t strongly affect the meaning of a gesture but only slightly changes how it’s performed.

Two Types of Emblem Gestures

1. Iconic (arise in human culture by copying real objects and actions with them);
2. Symbolic (do not directly reflect the appearance of the depicted object or action, so they are only understood by those “in the know”).

Since emblem gestures are a proto-language, passed down through generations and reinforced by cultural traditions, they may surface in cases of internal conflict.

In body language, one informative sign of deception is the emblematic slip, which occurs when a person doesn’t believe what they’re saying-when the body contradicts the words. An emblematic slip can be a reliable sign of lying.

Criteria for Emblematic Slips

• The slip usually appears outside its usual position. Emblems are shown intentionally to convey a message, but an emblematic slip bursts out involuntarily and appears outside its normal context.
• The slip may be partial, not fully formed.
• The slip may be excessively “broken” or awkward. Since liars often display bodily asymmetry when lying, attempts to consciously control and suppress emotions can make the emblematic slip reflect this asymmetry.

During an interview, a verifier may notice emblematic slips in the interviewee, but they may not always appear. Although emblematic slips are a fairly reliable sign of lying, a verifier cannot rely solely on them, as they may not occur during the interview at all. It’s also important to know the set of emblem gestures from different nations and cultures, especially when conducting checks in neighboring countries.

Illustrator Gestures

Another type of gesture is the illustrator gesture-gestures that accompany speech. Interpreting illustrator gestures requires even more caution than interpreting emblems or adapters.

Types of Illustrator Gestures

• Precise grasp of an object
• Forceful grasp of empty space
• Forceful grasp of an object
• Striking empty space
• Jabbing gestures
• Pointing finger
• Intention to touch
• Extending hands (palms up, palms toward self, palms down, palms forward)
• Joined hands
• Head-body gestures
• Illustrations with feet

Ways to Illustrate Speech

• Emphasizing a word or phrase
• Tracing the flow of thought in the air with a hand, as if conducting speech
• Drawing in the air or mimicking actions that repeat or reinforce what’s being said

When Illustrator Gestures Are Used

• Trying to explain something difficult to put into words
• Unable to find the right word or phrase
• Connecting speech
• Emotional excitement

Functions of Illustrator Gestures

• Repetition – sometimes people simply repeat what they say verbally with gestures
• Supplementation – gestures add or clarify what is said. When words and gestures complement each other and don’t contradict, the message is decoded more accurately by the listener
• Recall – sometimes nonverbal signals help us remember a verbal message
• Substitution – sometimes nonverbal signals can replace verbal ones
• Emphasis or attenuation – nonverbal messages can soften or highlight certain words (markers)

The intensity of illustrator gestures depends on a person’s character (some people naturally gesture less), as well as their culture and background. That’s why one of the verifier’s tasks during the baseline phase is to determine the normal intensity of illustrators for the individual. This is usually observed during casual conversation.

Verifiers need to consider a person’s nervous system and baseline behavior, as some people increase the number of illustrator gestures when lying, while others decrease them. This trend depends on the interviewee’s psychological type and their chosen deception strategy.

Regulator Gestures

Regulator gestures are interactive gestures that help regulate dialogue.

Types of Regulator Gestures

• Gestures for passing information
• Gestures referring to the interlocutor’s statement
• Gestures regulating turn-taking
• Gestures requesting a reaction from the interlocutor

Non-Communicative Gestures

Adapter Gestures – Stress Gestures

The most informative sign of stress is non-communicative gestures, known as adapter gestures or self-soothing gestures. People use them unconsciously to regain composure in stressful situations. The appearance of adapter gestures is a sure sign that a person is trying to control themselves and the situation. In this case, the verifier should ask: “Why did the interviewee start to control themselves?” Remember, these gestures are largely unconscious.

Self-adapter gestures usually involve touching oneself or one’s body. By observing the level of self-adapter gestures, you can gauge a person’s stress level. The more self-adapter gestures, the higher the stress. When someone covers their face with their hands, depending on the context, it can indicate shame, embarrassment, or grief.

Types of Self-Adapter Gestures

• Touching the head
• Touching the body
• Legs

Manipulator Gestures

Adapter gestures also include manipulator gestures, which serve the same function as self-adapter gestures but involve manipulating objects. When someone is lying, there’s a shift from the right to the left hemisphere of the brain, and manipulator gestures often appear during this period. This shift causes a pause in the person’s actions. Thus, manipulator gestures serve both as adaptation and substitution. Each person has their own favorite manipulations unique to them.

The duration of manipulations can range from a few moments to several minutes.

Manipulator Gestures Are Used by Liars in Two Cases

• To mask the point of orientational freezing (an uncontrolled pause before answering)
• To come up with the “right” answer to a question

Understanding why manipulator gestures occur, a verifier should recheck a truthful answer that included a manipulator gesture by asking the question again in a different way after some time.

In lie detection, there’s no need to determine the exact meaning of each adapter gesture if the verifier focuses on the structure of verbal statements. Since adapter gestures signal stress levels, during an interview, the verifier can gauge how close they are to the needed information.

Self-Cleaning Gestures

People try to control themselves in the presence of an observer or group because it’s considered inappropriate to perform self-cleaning gestures in front of others. People use these gestures when they believe no one is watching, or they may do them unconsciously if they feel unobserved. Typically, people clean themselves when alone, fully immersed in themselves, focused, and, most importantly, feeling safe.

For lie detection, the reason for self-cleaning gestures can be quite informative. During an interview-especially a group interview-the presence of self-cleaning gestures in a person’s nonverbal behavior indicates a lack of fear, a lack of interest in the investigated event, and is an additional marker of non-involvement. Self-cleaning gestures indicate deception when the interviewee claims to be emotionally distressed but simultaneously performs self-cleaning actions.

Another informative sign of possible deception is the absence of any gesturing throughout the interview. Some liars, trying not to give themselves away, attempt to control all body movements and facial expressions. This makes them appear stiff, with speech becoming brief, logical, and emotionally flat. A verifier immediately recognizes this as a sign of deception. Often, liars don’t realize that trying to suppress everything is itself proof of hiding information.

Therefore, due to the ambiguous nature of gestures, interpreting them requires extreme caution. Liars are revealed by emblematic slips, an increase in adapter gestures, discordance in illustrators, and an increase in illustrator gestures among people with a fast, mobile nervous system.

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