Pain Gestures: The Orchestration of Speech and Body Gestures

Abstract

This article is about the use and function of gestures in pain communication. More specifically how we can communicate an internal bodily experience like pain with the help of gestures. This is of great importance both in everyday situations and in medical consultations of various types. Our focus in this article is on the issues of the gesture as a communicative resource, how verbal and nonverbal communicative resources are related to each other and in what way gestures contribute to the structure of different types of pain. Thirty-seven patients have been interviewed about their pain experiences and the main result is that several communicative modalities are interwoven in the pain accounts. Three different functions of gestures were identified: the pointing, iconic and symbolic functions. The clinical relevance of this approach to gestures in pain communication is to take note of the intricate interplay of different communicative resources used in the pain description, and to emphasize both verbal and nonverbal interaction in the clinical conversation as a resource in the care situation.