Personality and Body-Focused Hand Movements

Abstract

The longer-term consistency with which subjects display apparently irrelevant self- or object-manipulations was examined by observing the subjects during the performance of two tasks followed by a repetition of these tasks after a 6-mo. interval. Individual subjects could not be characterized as consistently high or low producers of these movements across tasks and performances. Greater ordinal consistency among the subjects' body-focused movement frequencies was observed for the two different tasks conducted on the same day than was observed for the same task after 6 mo. Correlations between measures of anxiety and field-dependence and frequencies of body-focused movement varied significantly, not only with the task, but with repetitions of the same task after 6 mo. These results cast some doubt on explanations of individual differences in performance of body-focused hand movement through appeal to long-term individual differences in information-processing strategies.