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When someone mentions gestures we seem to think we know what they are referring to.  For example, when a person gives the “okay” sign they expect everyone to know what that means and most people do.

However, many of us do not realize how much meaning we extract from our world through gestures and that not all gestures mean the same thing to all cultures.

One thing is for sure, new research has noted that even if some  gestures mean different  things in different cultures, the importance of communicating with gestures begins at an early age.

Researchers from the University of Chicago examined how much gesturing (especially at an early age) helps children in language and cognitive development throughout life.

PsychCentral notes that the researchers found that although language learning varies according to family income and education levels, not all of the impacts are the same.

The study, published in the online edition of the American Psychologist determined that early gesturing — the spontaneous gestures children produce to communicate before and as they are learning to use words — can be used to identify which children with brain injury are likely to go on to develop spoken vocabularies within the typical range, and which children are likely to continue to experience language delay.

The researchers were careful to include children from all different backgrounds and mental capacities, including those from advantaged and disadvantaged families, and those who had suffered brain injury.  Although parents from advantaged backgrounds spoke more with their children, there was no difference between advantaged and disadvantaged families in the quality of the word-learning experiences parents gave their children.

The findings included evidence-based ideas to developing tools and diagnostic tests to enhance language and cognitive development in toddlers and children.  “We believe that our findings have implications for prediction and diagnosis of later language deficits and for intervention that may improve language skills,” said lead author Susan Goldin-Meadow, Ph.D.

Four hypotheses on language and cognitive development were created from this research:

1. Charting early gesture has the potential to serve as a diagnostic tool to identify children at risk for language delay
2. Encouraging children to gesture at very early ages has the potential to increase the size of their spoken vocabularies at school entry
3. Encouraging caregivers to use more diversified vocabulary and complex syntax has the potential to facilitate children’s acquisition of vocabulary and complex syntax
4. Encouraging caregivers to increase their use of words for number, for the spatial properties of objects, and for abstract relations like similarity has the potential for improving children’s understanding of number and spatial thinking, and their ability to make sophisticated comparisons.

So what does this mean for the speech and cognitive development of toddlers with and without brain injury?  Well, that encouraging children to gesture at an early age and using a diversified vocabulary can help toddlers in their speech and cognitive development.

Susan Levine, Ph.D., a specialist on early mathematics development  commented, “We found that the amount and type of input children with brain injury receive from their parents or caregivers plays an even bigger role in syntactic and narrative development (but not vocabulary development) than it does in children without injury.”

If  you would like to learn more about the different types of gestures that exist and how you can use them to better read people when interacting with them look at:
Humintell’s most recent webinar recording “The World of Gestures“  presented this past June 7, 2014 by non-verbal and gesture expert Dr. David Matsumoto.

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According to a recent study from Marshall School of Business and USC faculty, an indifferent leadership attitude at work is not as effective as some bosses think.

It’s important to have control over your emotions in a professional setting. For the most part, we can all agree that temper tantrums hardly call for respect and admiration, but trying to control your emotions as a whole is also not very effective in receiving cooperation and understanding in the work place.

Peter Carnevale, professor of management and organization at USC’s Marshall School of Business suggests, “[one] should be careful about managing his or her emotions because the person across the table is making inferences based on facial expressions. For example, a smile at the wrong time can discourage cooperation.”

Medical Xpress reports on the study entitled “Reading People’s Minds from Emotion Expressions in Interdependent Decision Making,” which was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The study illustrates the intricate role emotion plays in business interactions such as what you show on your face is as important as what you say in a negotiation and what you do with your negotiation offers.

Researchers paired individuals with computer-generated images of an opposing negotiator in five related experiments. Each featured a two-person task in which the payoffs for each player depended on the simultaneous choice of both players. If both players invested (i.e.cooperated) both earned money. If neither player invested, neither earned money. And, if one player invested and the other player did not, the non-investor outperformed the investor by taking advantage of the investment without putting in any effort or money. This task represents a classic problem in interdependence and economic decision-making.

In one experiment, the image of the other player either smiled, expressing pleasure after cooperation, or frowned, signaling regret after exploitation. In other cases, it expressed pleasure after exploitation and regret after cooperation.

“If you come to an agreement in a negotiation and you are really happy, it may not be a good idea to show how happy you are because it might lead the other person to think that you did better than they did,“ said Carnevale. “But in other circumstances, showing strong emotion may be the ticket to success.“

The study’s findings were that people cooperated significantly more with a computer counterpart that smiled when cooperating and expressing sorrow after exploiting the participant. In other words, the study results indicate that context can determine the meaning ascribed to a counterpart’s emotional expression and subsequent reactions.