title: Personality and body-focused hand movements.
abstract: The longer-term consistency with which subjects display apparently irrelevant self- or object-manipulations was examined by observing the subjects during the performance of two tasks followed by a repetition of these tasks after a 6-mo. interval. Individual subjects could not be characterized as consistently high or low producers of these movements across tasks and performances. Greater ordinal consistency among the subjects' body-focused movement frequencies was observed for the two different tasks conducted on the same day than was observed for the same task after 6 mo. Correlations between measures of anxiety and field-dependence and frequencies of body-focused movement varied significantly, not only with the task, but with repetitions of the same task after 6 mo. These results cast some doubt on explanations of individual differences in performance of body-focused hand movement through appeal to long-term individual differences in information-processing strategies.
authors.affiliation: Communication Studies Department, South Australian College of Advanced Education, Magill.
authors.forename: A N
authors.initials: AN
authors.lastname: Kenner
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D005364:Field Dependence-Independence; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D008297:Male; D009633:Nonverbal Communication; D010553:Personality Development; D011597:Psychomotor Performance