Verbal And Nonverbal Communication Literature Review

Humans are social beings, who interact with each other through verbal and nonverbal communication. During the major part of interactions, people use nonverbal communication instead of speech (Hargie, 2011). Non-verbal communication usually refers to gestures or facial expressions, i.e. body language, used to communicate (Hargie, 2011).

Gestures are “symbols that exhibit meaning in their own right” (Mcneill, 1992, p. 105). They are usually seen as a way of “mind reading” someone’s feelings that is, people use gestures which accompany speech to understand if a person is telling the truth or not (Mcneill, 1992, p. 109). This is why people see nonverbal communication as more truthful than verbal one (Hargie, 2011).

In neuropsychology, the literature

In particular, Hanna-Pladdy et al. (2001) compared subjects’ performance in the production of pantomimes and intransitive gestures. Their results showed pantomimes are more impaired in both hemisphere brain damage patients, whereas intransitive gestures are impaired only in left hemisphere brain damage patients. By contrast, Buxbaum, Kyle, Grossman and Coslett (2007) studied corticobasal diagnosed patients and post-acute left hemisphere cerebral vascular accident patients performance in imitation tasks. They showed pantomimes are more impaired when there is a left hemisphere lesion, while intransitive gestures are more impaired bilaterally. More recently, Flores-Medina, Chávez-Oliveros, Medina, Rodríguez-Agudelo and Solís-Vivanco (2014) found that in brain damage patients, after unilateral ischemic stroke, intransitive gestures are more impaired in patients with left hemisphere lesions, and pantomimes are more impaired

Regarding this topic, two different authors (Lotze et al., 2006; Villarreal et al., 2008) described a similar common network for all gestures, as well as peculiarities to the activation of pantomimes and intransitive gestures. Lotze et al. (2006) aimed to compare brain activation of isolated hand movements, body-referred hand movements and intransitive gestures during their observation. Their results suggested a common network including the bilateral occipital-temporal junction, fusiform gyrus, right ventral pre-motor cortex, pars opercularis of inferior frontal gyrus and frontal eye fields. Specifically, expressive gestures showed a greater activation on left ventrolateral pre-frontal cortex (vlPFc) than body referred movements (Lotze et al.,