The Slapping movement as an embodied practice of dislike

Abstract

Abstract This paper introduces the Slapping movement as an embodied practice of dislike or meta-commentary recurring in conflictive situations between German children aged four to six (Hotze, 2019). Children move this way primarily in stopping a co-participant’s action and protesting against the action to be stopped. The Slapping movements documented showed different manners of execution. Some forms appeared to be very expressive, others were more schematic. Inspired by a phenomenological approach to gestures our analysis shows that the movement qualities show different degrees of communicative effort and affective intensity which respond to the inter-affective dynamics unfolding between the participants of a situation. This means that the affective intensities unfolding in an interaction not only give rise to the Slapping movement, but they also influence how the hands are moved. In more detail, we observed that the higher the affective intensities become the larger and more vigorous the Slapping movements are.