Personality in your hands: How extraversion traits influence preference for pointing in Chinese people

ABSTRACT

The cognitive science literature reports significant cultural variation in pointing gesture repertoires. It is unknown, however, if individual differences in personality traits can influence pointing preferences within a single culture. Here, we sought to examine how extraversion is associated with people’s manual and non-manual pointing preferences. In a referential communication task, speakers were required to describe locations and objects on a complex display for addressees. The results showed that participants with high extraversion used more manual pointing than those with low extraversion. However, the two groups showed no difference in the mean number of non-manual pointing. It may be that compared with less extraverted speakers, highly extraverted speakers have more energy that can be devoted into interpersonal communication. These findings provide the first step to understanding that personality traits can act as an important moderator in pointing preferences and, more broadly, about the nature and emergence of human communication.

KEYWORDS:

• Pointing
• linguistic diversity
• gesture
• personality
• extraversion

Acknowledgements

I thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback and I thank Professor Jean Mulder for her editorial work on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, HL, upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 ELAN is a multimodal annotation tool developed by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Language Archive, Nijmegen, the Netherlands; see http://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/.

2 According to previous research (Li & Cao, 2019), the vast majority of pointing gestures used by Chinese speakers are those produced with an index finger extending from the fist. Following this convention, we used marked and unmarked shape to indicate different types of pointing gestures.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heng Li

Heng Li is a cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics professor at Sichuan International Studies University. His work seeks to explore cultural and individual differences in cognitive processing. His multidisciplinary interests bring him to address this question from various interrelated perspectives: lab experiments, signed languages, spontaneous gestures and field research.