The impact of nationality on hand gestures in communication

Research shows that different nationalities seem to use hand gestures differently, supporting the idea that Italians in particular “talk with their hands.”

Maria Graziano and her colleagues Marianne Gullberg from Lund University in Sweden asked 12 people from Sweden and 12 from Italy to describe clips from children’s TV shows, such as Pingu, and examine their gestures.

“Italians gesture more,” Graziano said on a video call, using gestures to emphasize herself, which she attributed to her upbringing in Naples, Italy. In this study, Italians made an average of 22 gestures per 100 words, compared to 11 for Swedes.

But what’s more interesting, says Graziano, is the difference in the functionality of the gestures. Swedes primarily used “representational gestures” to describe events and actions in stories, while Italians also made more “practical gestures” that commented on the story or introduced new information, such as hand movements indicating new characters.

This suggests that the two cultures think differently about how stories are produced, Graziano says. Gestures can reflect what a culture values about the content and purpose of a story.

Barbara Tversky, a researcher at Stanford University in California, mentioned that the exact reason for these results is unclear, but the findings suggest that “cultural practices of understanding and explaining short episodes are driving this behavior.” Tversky suggests further research involving larger populations with a more diverse mix of nationalities.

Graziano is currently researching the gestures used in different types of discourse and the different relationships between speakers to further understand how different cultures use gestures to communicate and tell stories.