title: I see how you feel: Recipients obtain additional information from speakers' gestures about pain.
abstract: Despite the need for effective pain communication, pain is difficult to verbalise. Co-speech gestures frequently add information about pain that is not contained in the accompanying speech. We explored whether recipients can obtain additional information from gestures about the pain that is being described.
  
  
  
  Participants (n=135) viewed clips of pain descriptions under one of four conditions: 1) Speech Only; 2) Speech and Gesture; 3) Speech, Gesture and Face; and 4) Speech, Gesture and Face plus Instruction (short presentation explaining the pain information that gestures can depict). Participants provided free-text descriptions of the pain that had been described. Responses were scored for the amount of information obtained from the original clips.
  
  
  
  Participants in the Instruction condition obtained the most information, while those in the Speech Only condition obtained the least (all comparisons p<0.001).
  
  
  
  Gestures produced during pain descriptions provide additional information about pain that recipients are able to pick up without detriment to their uptake of spoken information.
  
  
  
  Healthcare professionals may benefit from instruction in gestures to enhance uptake of information about patients' pain experiences.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK; Menzies Centre for Health Policy, School of Public Health, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia; The Australian Prevention Partnership Centre, Sax Institute, Sydney, Australia. Electronic address: samantha.rowbotham@sydney.edu.au.
authors.forename: Samantha J
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Rowbotham
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands. Electronic address: Judith.Holler@mpi.nl.
authors.forename: Judith
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Holler
authors.affiliation: School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK. Electronic address: alison.wearden@manchester.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Alison
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Wearden
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK. Electronic address: D.M.Lloyd@leeds.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Donna M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Lloyd
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003142:Communication; D032882:Comprehension; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D005868:Gestures; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009633:Nonverbal Communication; D010146:Pain / Q000523:psychology*; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations; D013060:Speech; D014741:Video Recording; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Co-speech gesture; Nonverbal communication; Pain communication