Do metaphoric gestures influence how a message is perceived? The effects of metaphoric gesture-speech matches and mismatches on semantic communication and social judgment
-
Geoffrey Beattie,
Geoffrey Beattie is a professor at the University of Manchester 〈geoff.beattie@hotmail.co.uk〉. His research interests include analysis of individual behaviour and action and the relationship between implicit and explicit attitudes. His publications include “Making an action film. Do films such as Al Gore'sAn Inconvenient Truth really make any difference to how we think and feel about climate change?” (2011); “Possible unconscious bias in recruitment and the need to promote equality” (with P. Johnson, 2011); andOur racist heart? Racial and other unconscious biases in everyday life (2012).
and
Laura Sale,
Laura Sale is a research associate at the University of Manchester 〈laura.sale@manchester.ac.uk〉. Her research interests include individual behaviour and action, with a particular focus on gesture-speech mismatches, and the exploration of implicit attitudes in the context of sustainability. Her publications include “Shopping to save the planet? Implicit rather than explicit attitudes predict low carbon footprint consumer choice” (with G. Beattie, 2011) and “An Inconvenient Truth? Can a film really affect psychological mood and our explicit attitudes towards climate change” (with G. Beattie & L. McGuire, 2011).
Abstract
Considerable evidence has demonstrated that people are not only sensitive to the information contained in concrete imagistic gesture, but furthermore, that they combine this gestural information with the accompanying speech in order to understand the full semantic meaning that a speaker conveys in a message. There is, however, very little experimental evidence concerning how people deal with more abstract metaphoric gestures and whether they extract meaning from these gestures and combine this with the information in the accompanying speech. The two studies reported here investigated this issue by comparing and contrasting the effects of metaphoric gesture-speech matches and mismatches on both semantic communication and social judgment. The studies found that individuals do combine the information contained in metaphoric gestures with that contained in speech and that the meaning of the utterance is demonstrably affected by the presence of a gesture-speech mismatch. The second study found that in messages in which there are gesture-speech mismatches, participants seemed to like the speaker less and were less likely to believe what they said. The implications of these studies for a range of domains, including advertising and politics, are discussed.
About the authors
Geoffrey Beattie is a professor at the University of Manchester 〈geoff.beattie@hotmail.co.uk〉. His research interests include analysis of individual behaviour and action and the relationship between implicit and explicit attitudes. His publications include “Making an action film. Do films such as Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth really make any difference to how we think and feel about climate change?” (2011); “Possible unconscious bias in recruitment and the need to promote equality” (with P. Johnson, 2011); and Our racist heart? Racial and other unconscious biases in everyday life (2012).
Laura Sale is a research associate at the University of Manchester 〈laura.sale@manchester.ac.uk〉. Her research interests include individual behaviour and action, with a particular focus on gesture-speech mismatches, and the exploration of implicit attitudes in the context of sustainability. Her publications include “Shopping to save the planet? Implicit rather than explicit attitudes predict low carbon footprint consumer choice” (with G. Beattie, 2011) and “An Inconvenient Truth? Can a film really affect psychological mood and our explicit attitudes towards climate change” (with G. Beattie & L. McGuire, 2011).
©[2012] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Urban morphogenesis
- The mirrored Madonna: Text and symbol in body writing artworks
- Termes d'adresse et liste
- Vision science: An empirical basis for Roentgen semiotics
- Do metaphoric gestures influence how a message is perceived? The effects of metaphoric gesture-speech matches and mismatches on semantic communication and social judgment
- Text semiotics: Between philology and hermeneutics – from the document to the work
- Audiovisual texture in scene transition
- Le chronotope littéraire de l'étranger
- Pointing to show agreement
- Intertextuality, translation, and the semiotics of museum presentation: The case of bilingual texts in Chinese museums
- Codes, heterogeneities, and structures: Visual information and visual art
- The world has changed forever: Semiotic reflections on the experience of sudden change
- Michel Foucault's moral subjectivity and the semiotic modeling of knowledge
- Peirce and the logic of image
- Shaking grounds, unearthing palimpsests: Semiotic anthropology of disaster
- A Romantic quest: Meyerbeer's adaptation of the Faust theme
- See no evil? Only implicit attitudes predict unconscious eye movements towards images of climate change
- Language contextualization in a Hebrew language television interview: Lessons from a semiotic return to context
- Semiotic value in advertisements in Silesian Catholic periodicals from the second half of the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries
- Legal interpretation: Meaning as social construction
- Introduction to the semiotics of belonging
- The branding of a quality liquor as a symbolic effort toward bringing China forward culturally: A comparative study of Wuliangye and Absolut Vodka
- The encyclopedia in Umberto Eco's semiotics
- On semiotics in language education
- Icons of novel thought: A new perspective on Peirce's definition of metaphor (CP 2.277)
- Review of Søren Brier's (2008) Cybersemiotics: Why information is not enough
- Tarasti's existential semiotics: Towards a functional model
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Urban morphogenesis
- The mirrored Madonna: Text and symbol in body writing artworks
- Termes d'adresse et liste
- Vision science: An empirical basis for Roentgen semiotics
- Do metaphoric gestures influence how a message is perceived? The effects of metaphoric gesture-speech matches and mismatches on semantic communication and social judgment
- Text semiotics: Between philology and hermeneutics – from the document to the work
- Audiovisual texture in scene transition
- Le chronotope littéraire de l'étranger
- Pointing to show agreement
- Intertextuality, translation, and the semiotics of museum presentation: The case of bilingual texts in Chinese museums
- Codes, heterogeneities, and structures: Visual information and visual art
- The world has changed forever: Semiotic reflections on the experience of sudden change
- Michel Foucault's moral subjectivity and the semiotic modeling of knowledge
- Peirce and the logic of image
- Shaking grounds, unearthing palimpsests: Semiotic anthropology of disaster
- A Romantic quest: Meyerbeer's adaptation of the Faust theme
- See no evil? Only implicit attitudes predict unconscious eye movements towards images of climate change
- Language contextualization in a Hebrew language television interview: Lessons from a semiotic return to context
- Semiotic value in advertisements in Silesian Catholic periodicals from the second half of the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries
- Legal interpretation: Meaning as social construction
- Introduction to the semiotics of belonging
- The branding of a quality liquor as a symbolic effort toward bringing China forward culturally: A comparative study of Wuliangye and Absolut Vodka
- The encyclopedia in Umberto Eco's semiotics
- On semiotics in language education
- Icons of novel thought: A new perspective on Peirce's definition of metaphor (CP 2.277)
- Review of Søren Brier's (2008) Cybersemiotics: Why information is not enough
- Tarasti's existential semiotics: Towards a functional model
