Investigating Verbal Utterances and Nonverbal Gestures When People Deliberate About Impressions

Are there patterns of speech and co-speech gestures when people are talking about warmth and competence of social groups? We are interested in whether our participants would make similar gestures while they are elaborating on certain social impression dimensions: warmth and competence; and whether their speech also creates certain patterns. Based on various examples described under a controlled observational paradigm, we suggest that: Speech-wise although participants were able to answer the questions within the correct dimension mostly, they tended to mention contents of the other dimension as well. We also suggest that when the participants mentioned negative competence of social groups, a compensation using positive warmth can appear (but not the opposite way). Gesture-wise, we suggest that the participants tended to use vertical movements, or positing gestures in a vertical dimension for competence; and gestures that can create sphere or round space for warmth. Overall, our findings indicate that there might be patterns of both speech and co-speech gestures while people are discussing social impressions of warmth and competence.