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Key points
- Being able to only view someone’s hands provides greater emotional recognition accuracy than being able to see only arms, torso, or head.
- The hands are effective at communicating human emotion.
- There is significant cortical tissue of the brain that is devoted to our hands.
- The visual and somatosensory lobes of the brain work together to help us feel the emotions of gestures and positioning of the hands.
As we move about our socio-cultural world, we share space with other humans. We sometimes must rely on non-verbal communication to understand each other, including what emotions are being felt.
Research on emotions shown in the body has analyzed components such as facial expressions, bodily expressions, and subtle facial cues (Folz, Fiacchino, Nikolić, et al., 2022). More recently, researchers have studied the mechanisms involved in emotional recognition by comparing emotion recognition via full body perception to emotion recognition based on perceiving isolated body parts, such as the hands.
Researching the Hands
A study of babies in the first two years of their lives showed that babies increasingly pay attention to the hands of others as they age (Fausey, Jayaraman, & Smith, 2016). In other unrelated research, when people couldn’t see someone’s hands, they had a reduced capacity to accurately identify angry and fearful postures (Ross & Flack, 2020). Blythe, Garrido & Longo (2022) predicted that only being able to view someone’s hands would provide greater emotional recognition accuracy than only being able to see someone’s head, arms, or torso.
Researchers studied participants from the UK with an average age of 35. The participants were presented with front-facing images of actors. The actors in the pictures portrayed the six basic emotions of surprise, joy, anger, fear, disgust, and sadness. Because the focus was on the hands, the actors’ faces, eyes, and mouths were concealed by a mask in the photos. The photos of full body images were cropped to show just certain body parts. To compare the accuracy of recognition of emotions across body parts, the women saw pictures of just the torso, just the head, and just the arms compared to viewing just the hands.
Culture and Society
Culture is instilled in our bodies and in our minds. Blythe, Garrido, and Longo (2022) found that the accuracy of emotion recognition was found to be higher for focusing on the hands alone than for focusing solely on other isolated body parts, even though the participants still gained a more accurate perception of emotions when they viewed a full body. Their accurate emotional recognition when viewing the full body, though, was of reduced capacity relative to other prior research. Sociocultural changes in the world should be considered. Much has changed in the world over the last 5 to 10 years, which could have implications for current-day humans’ ability to read bodily indicators of emotion now relative to 10 years ago.
The hands are effective at communicating human emotion. This has brain and evolutionary significance, too, because humans haven’t always used verbal speech but instead conveyed emotions with sounds, movement, and gestures. Now and in the past, it seems that our hands are used to complement and extend speech communication.
Human Connection
Unconsciously, all humans desire to connect (Watson, 2022). The positioned or moving hands of another may help us feel a connection to what it is the person is feeling or what they are about to do. We may be unconsciously directed to look to the hands of others for information about any of the six basic emotions. Perceptions of others’ hands and perception of others’ full bodies play an important role in the accurate recognition of emotions. Yet the hands can also convey this information independently.
Long ago, researchers discovered there is significant cortical tissue of the brain that is devoted to our hands, more so than to the other body parts examined in the study. The visual sensory area of our brain is very close to the sensory touch area of the brain. Blyth, Garrido, and Longo suggest that visually perceiving (visual cortex) the hands of others likely relates to somatosensory neurons in the brain that help us process what others are communicating emotionally. If humans aim to advance from being half-connected in the contemporary world and become more fully connected to the feelings of others, current research has revealed that emotional recognition may be aided by focusing on the hands.
References
Blythe, E., Garrido, L., & Longo, M. R. (2022). Emotion is perceived accurately from isolated body parts, especially hands. Cognition, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105260
Fausey, C. M., Jayaraman, S., & Smith, L. B. (2016). From faces to hands: Changing visual input in the first two years. Cognition, 152 , 101-107, 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.03.005
Folz, J., Fiacchino, D., Nikolić, M. et al. (2022). Reading your emotions in my physiology? Reliable emotion interpretations in absence of a robust physiological resonance. Affective Science 3, 480–497. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-021-00083-5
Ross, P. & Flack, T. (2020). Removing hand form information specifically impairs emotion recognition for fearful and angry body stimuli. Perception, 49 (1), 98-112, 10.1177/0301006619893229
Watson, M. D. (2022). Half-Connecting Theory: Developing African psychology theory in a “radical beginnings” direction. Journal of Black Psychology, 48(6), 683–725. https://doi.org/10.1177/00957984221080964
