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Christopher Norvilus
Dr. Hoehl
COM 380- Nonverbal Communication
5 March 2017
Brief Reading #4- Hand Movements

Hand movements are an incredibly important part of nonverbal communication. Actions

can indeed speak louder than words when choosing to move a certain way either when speaking

or not. This article details all of the important aspects of hand movements in terms of vocabulary,

behaviors, and other valuable information. It allows the reader to better understand hand

movements following the reading of the article and how to best adapt that information into his or

her own nonverbal communication.

In the introduction to the article, the authors make sure to note that they are conducting

studies with the same materials on facial expression, posture, eye contact, and leg movement as

part of their comprehensive approach (48). Their goal in examining hand movement along with

those other topics is to provide the most important findings and a theoretical breakthrough in

the study of nonverbal communication (48). The authors go on to detail the three of the five

classes of nonverbal behavior: emblems, illustrators, and adaptors.

Emblems are described as being those nonverbal acts which have a direct verbal

translation (49). An extension of the concept of an emblem includes whether it can be replaced

by a word or twowithout substantially modifying the conversation (49). It is important to note

that while people are aware of the use of an emblem, there can be emblematic slips (49). This

happens when the sender apparently does not deliberately choose to make the emblem and may
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be unaware that he has done so (49). A brief history of emblems is then presented in which

various cultural differences are taken into account.

Illustrators are described as those acts which are intimately related on a moment-to-

moment basis with speech, phrasing, content, voice contour, loudness, etc. (49). They are

normally able to nonverbally communicate what is being said verbally but they may contradict

the verbalization or be used as a substitute for a word (49). It is important to note that illustrators

are like emblems because they are used with awareness and intentionality (50). However, it is

also vital to note that their main difference is in the fact that illustrators do not occur without

conversation, while emblems may typically occur when the communicants cannot or choose not

to converse (50). Any changes in the frequency of an illustrator can depend upon mood and any

problems present in verbal communication (50). There are eight types of illustrators noted in the

article: batons, ideographs, deictic movements, spatial movements, rhythmic movements,

kinetographs, pictographs, and emblematic movements (50-51). Most importantly, illustrators

are socially learned, presumably many of them early in life during language acquisition (51).

This gives people the opportunity to pay attention to their nonverbal behavior and how it is a

direct result of their early life and how that interrelates with their current nonverbal tendencies.

Adaptors are extremely different from emblems and illustrators because they occur often

with high frequency and in their most complete form when the person is alone (51). Adaptors

are said to increase with psychological comfort or anxiety while some people show a decrease

in self adaptors when discomforted or anxious instead freezing movement in muscularly tense

immobility (51).

The lines of argumentation within the article could have been stronger. It felt like more of

a report than an example of any type of research study. It would have been nice to see the
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emblems, illustrators, and adaptors directly applied in a research study that gathered further

information as to how those directly relate to nonverbal behavior in a given situation. I do not see

any bias in the article because of its report-like structure. In terms of areas for improvement or

future research, I would suggest the researchers designing a study around testing how emblems,

adaptors, and illustrators vary and impact the nonverbal communication of a given situation.