Gesture- one of the most common way to communicate

Now we know hand gesture helps as to think, speak and learn. We are looking into our society; how people communicate with each other. From the research I did, I am surprised that most of the message we deliver to others is nonverbal. Also, according to Daniel Goleman’s international bestseller, Emotional Intelligence (1995) he claims 90 percent of our emotions are expression nonverbally.

Albert Mehrabian [Nonverbal Communication (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1972)] found in his research that only about 7 percent of the emotional meaning of a message is communicated through explicit verbal channels. About 38 percent is communicated by paralanguage, which is basically the use of the voice. About 55 percent comes through nonverbal, which includes such things as gesture, posture, facial expression, etc. It is behavior other than spoken or written communication that creates or represents meaning.


"Gesturing is a stepping-stone toward symbolic communication," in which the form of the signal bears no relation to its meaning, says Pollick, now at the Washington, D.C.–based Association for Psychological Science. Using a gesture to convey a meaning that varies with context implies a capacity to redefine signals. "There isn't such a strict connection between a gesture and an emotional context as there is with [an ape's] scream," Pollick says.
Pollick, A.S., and F.B.M. de Waal. In press. Ape gestures and language evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Abstract available at http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0702624104