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I tend to look away when I'm nervous. Practice maintaining eye contact for 3-5 seconds before looking away

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VIDEO LINK- How to hold eye contact to build confidence for job interview

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maintaining eye contact during job interview

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The importance of eye contact in a job interview.

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The saying "the eyes are the window to the soul" is quite popular. According to the hiring experts, the interviewer can tell whether you are telling the truth or lying by eye contact. Therefore, it is not wrong to say that people can be jud…

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using hand gestures to enhance communication

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Types of Hand Gestures in Nonverbal Communication

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the role of hand gestures in effective communication

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Communication and Memory Lab, Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN, United States

When people talk, they gesture. Gesture is a fundamental component of language that contributes meaningful and unique information to a spoken message and reflects the speaker's underlying knowledge and experiences. Theoretical perspectives of speech and gesture propose that they share a common conceptual origin and have a tightly integrated relationship, overlapping in time, meaning, and function to enrich the communicative context. We review a robust literature from the field of psychology documenting the benefits of gesture for communication for both speakers and listeners, as well as its important cognitive functions for organizing spoken language, and facilitating problem-solving, learning, and memory. Despite this evidence, gesture has been relatively understudied in populations with neurogenic communication disorders. While few studies have examined the rehabilitative potential of gesture in these populations, others have ignored gesture entirely or even discouraged its use. We review the literature characterizing gesture production and its role in intervention for people with aphasia, as well as describe the much sparser literature on gesture in cognitive communication disorders including right hemisphere damage, traumatic brain injury, and Alzheimer's disease. The neuroanatomical and behavioral profiles of these patient populations provide a unique opportunity to test theories of the relationship of speech and gesture and advance our understanding of their neural correlates. This review highlights several gaps in the field of communication disorders which may serve as a bridge for applying the psychological literature of gesture to the study of language disorders. Such future work would benefit from considering theoretical perspectives of gesture and using more rigorous and quantitative empirical methods in its approaches. We discuss implications for leveraging gesture to explore its untapped potential in understanding and rehabilitating neurogenic communication disorders.

Introduction

When people talk, they move their hands. Spontaneous hand movements produced in rhythm with speech are called co-speech gestures and naturally accompany all spoken language. People from all known cultures and linguistic backgrounds gesture ( Feyereisen and de Lannoy, 1991), and gesture is fundamental to communication. Indeed, babies gesture before they produce their first words ( Bates, 1976). Congenitally blind speakers who have never seen gesture even gesture to blind listeners ( Iverson and Goldin-Meadow, 1997, 1998). Our hands help us talk, think, and remember, sometimes revealing unique knowledge that cannot yet be verbalized ( Goldin-Meadow et al., 1993). Everybody gestures, but despite its ubiquity, gesture is often seen as secondary to spoken language, receiving less attention in language research. Gesture is often reduced to a subcategory of non-verbal communication. However, non-verbal does not mean non-language, and theoretical approaches of gesture suggest that speech and gesture arise from the same representational system ( McNeill, 1992). In this view, rich conceptual representations contain both imagistic and symbolic information that give rise to gesture and speech, respectively. Both these modalities have communicative functions and originate from the same communicative intention ( de Ruiter, 2000).

Gesture serves a variety of functions and overlaps with speech in both time and meaning. However, gesture differs from speech in notable ways. Gesture conveys information holistically, spatially, and often simultaneously in a single event whereas speech is made up of discrete units that unfold incrementally and sequentially over time to create a cumulative meaning ( McNeill, 1992). Throughout this review, we highlight findings that demonstrate that speech and gesture, though integrally related, each have their own unique advantages and affordances; for example, gesture is particularly well-suited for communicating visuo-spatial information which is often omitted from speech entirely. Thus, language research is strengthened by considering both speech and gesture together. The data demonstrate that when taken together, speech and gesture provide a rich communicative context that reflects the cognitive processes that underlie language production, manifesting thought into communication. The study of language has a long history; however, despite proposals that spoken language and gesture either co-evolved ( Kendon, 2017) or even that language might have emerged from an earlier gestural communication system ( Corballis, 2010, 2012), much of linguistic and psycholinguistic theory has privileged spoken language over multimodal communication. The formal study of gesture in communication is a more recent discipline, gaining traction with the seminal work of McNeill (1992) and since accumulating a robust literature, described below, that details the role of co-speech gesture in a variety of functions in healthy adults for both communication and cognition. However, following the course of linguistics and psycholinguistics, researchers studying language disorders have focused primarily on spoken language, and consequently, we know very little about gesture in these disorders.

Here we provide an interdisciplinary narrative review of the communicative benefits of gesture for both speakers and listeners and its interactions with cognition. Gesture does not only contribute essential information to a message but also actively facilitates the cognitive formation of messages and supports learning and memory. We provide an overview of co-speech gesture theory and describe behavioral evidence of the functions of gesture for communication and cognition across the lifespan. We then discuss the application of this research for studying patient populations with neurogenic communication disorders and identify several gaps for future research. While this review takes great interest in the neurologic representation of gesture in the brain, and specifically the insights that may be revealed by studying gesture in neurogenic communication disorders, studies using electrophysiological and neuroimaging methods are largely excluded and outside of the scope of this review. Rather, we focus on empirical behavioral studies that examine the benefits of gesture on communication, learning, and memory. Thus, this paper aims to highlight the status of gesture in its role for shaping language, cognition, and communication. In doing so, we raise awareness of the extent to which gesture has been understudied in people with neurogenic communication disorders. We review existing literature on the study of gesture in aphasia, for which language impairments are primary, as well as in populations where language impairments are secondary to cognitive deficits, including right hemisphere damage (RHD), traumatic brain injury (TBI), and Alzheimer's disease (AD). We explore ways in which applying the psychological literature of gesture to neurogenic communication disorders can help us better understand these disorders and leverage gesture for rehabilitation. Such work contributes to our understanding of the neural correlates of gesture to advance theories of co-speech gesture that are psychologically and biologically plausible.

Theoretical Underpinnings of Speech and Gesture

There has been much theoretical interest in describing the relationship between speech and gesture. These theories either posit that speech and gesture arise from a single conceptual system or that they represent two separate, but tightly integrated systems. One of the first and most influential accounts of gesture production is The Growth Point Theory ( McNeill, 1992, 2005, 2013; McNeill and Duncan, 2000). To summarize, the growth point is the conceptual starting point of a sentence. It is the initial unit of thought that combines linguistic and imagistic information together to initiate the dynamic cognitive processes that organize thinking for speech and results in co-speech gesture. This theory proposes that speech and gesture originate from a single system where an utterance contains both a linguistic and visuo-spatial structure that cannot be separated. Both speech and gesture, therefore, reflect characteristics of the underlying idea, and one cannot be fully interpreted without considering the other. Speech and gesture are integrated not only at a speaker's thought conception, but also in perception; listeners integrate information from speech and gesture into a single mental representation. For example, after having watched a storyteller narrate a story, listeners report information from both the storyteller's speech and gesture in their later retelling ( McNeill et al., 1994; Cassell et al., 1999).

Although the majority of speech models do not include gesture, many gesture models are based on Levelt's (1989) model of speech production where spoken language production occurs in three stages: (1) Representations from long-term memory and knowledge of the communicative context feed into a conceptualizer and forms a communicative intention. At this conceptual level, the speaker prepares what they want to communicate and generates a preverbal plan. (2) This information then is passed to a message formulator where the lexicon is accessed and grammatical, phonological, and phonetic components are encoded into a linguistic structure. (3) Finally, the message reaches the articulator level to produce the planned speech. The message is monitored and refined through feedback mechanisms at various levels. Although speech and gesture take very distinct forms of communication, the pathway that produces them may not be all that different. Both arise from a communicative thought, are shaped and planned, and then motorically executed.

The Sketch Model ( de Ruiter, 2000) for gesture and speech production is an expansion of Levelt's classical speech production model and differs from McNeill's Growth Point Theory in that speech and gesture are described as integrated but separate systems. The Sketch Model proposes that gesture and speech follow parallel but separate routes of production, but each originating from one common communicative intention. The conceptualizer includes both a preverbal message for speech and spatiotemporal sketch for gesture that captures aspects of the idea's size, speed, and location. Thus, speech and gesture are planned together before linguistic formulation occurs. These conceptualizations then diverge, taking one of two routes: the speech formulator or the gesture planner, each of which then develops a motor program to produce overt movement via speech and gesture, respectively. This model would predict that impairments at the conceptual level or communicative intention may affect both speech and gesture production while impairments downstream may have differential effects on speech and gesture production, with either modality able to compensate for the other. This is important because it suggests that gesture may be preserved and therefore, retains its communicative and cognitive functions even in the presence of language or speech disorders. This model was recently revised and renamed the Asymmetric Redundancy Sketch Model with modified assumptions that speech is the dominant modality and iconic gestures are mostly redundant with speech content ( de Ruiter, 2017; de Beer et al., 2019).

The Interface Model ( Kita and Özyürek, 2003) is also an extension of Levelt's (1989) speech production model but proposes that in addition to generating a communicative intention and preverbal plan, the conceptualizer also selects modalities of expression. Speech and gesture then are generated from two separate systems: an action generator that activates action schemata for spatial and motor imagery and a message generator which formulates a verbal proposition. Critically, these two systems communicate bi-directionally during the conceptualization and formulation of utterances. Thus, gesture is shaped by how information is organized and packaged for speech production as well as the spatial and motoric properties of the referent. Additionally, the Gesture for Conceptualization Hypothesis ( Kita et al., 2017) proposes that gesture's base in action schemata has functions beyond organizing utterances for speaking and also mediates cognitive processes, through the activation, manipulation, packaging, and exploring of spatio-motoric information, and thus, has self-oriented functions for both speaking and thinking.

Whether speech and gesture form a single or two tightly integrated systems, it is clear that they are tightly coupled in time ( Morrel-Samuels and Krauss, 1992), meaning ( McNeill, 1992), and function ( Wagner et al., 2014) and are integral parts of the language system. A critical question, then, is how this meaning reaches our fingertips. One possibility arises from the embodied-cognition framework which proposes that all language is grounded in sensorimotor experiences ( Zwaan and Madden, 2005; Glenberg and Gallese, 2012). In this view, the gestures we produce reflect sensorimotor experiences and arise from rich memory representations of the world around us. Convergent evidence from behavioral, neuroimaging, and lesion studies support this embodied framework, demonstrating that conceptual representations in the brain are flexible and distributed and dependent on prior perceptual and motor experiences ( Kiefer and Pulvermüller, 2012). Motor representations in the brain interact with language; for example, reading action words related to the face, arm, or leg results in activation of the corresponding area of the motor cortex ( Hauk et al., 2004), and transcortical magnetic stimulation to motor areas of the arm or leg can increase processing speeds for words like "pick" or "kick," respectively ( Pulvermüller et al., 2005). This link between action and language has important implications for gesture which is motoric in nature and, like speech, stems from rich memory representations and experiences. The Gesture as Simulated Action framework ( Hostetter and Alibali, 2008, 2010, 2019) proposes that gestures are automatically generated by the mental activations that occur when people think about motor actions and perceptual states and predicts that speakers gesture at higher rates when they activate visuospatial or motor simulations. Indeed, speakers gesture more when retelling a story after watching an animation compared to only having heard it ( Hostetter and Skirving, 2011). This model also acknowledges that individual and situational differences in gesture production depend on the speaker's gesture threshold which can change based on the speaker's disposition to produce gesture in a particular context. Together, these theories provide compelling support for including gesture in any framework that describes the linguistic system. Next, we consider the broad functions of gesture for communication for both listener and speaker.

Gesture for Communication

Like the study of spoken language, which can be characterized by its parts (e.g., phonemes, morphemes), the study of gesture has also identified different subtypes of gesture ( McNeill, 1992). Broadly, these can be classified as representative or non-representative gestures. Following McNeill's classification system, representative gestures include iconic gestures, which depict the shape, size, action, or position of an object (e.g., the trajectory of a baseball). They also include metaphoric gestures which give concrete form to abstract ideas (e.g., a grabbing motion when talking about gaining a run) and deictic gestures which are used to refer to the location of an object in space (e.g., pointing to home base while recapping a close play). Non-representative gestures are often called beat gestures which are brief, repetitive movements that occur in rhythm with speech but without substantive meaning, serving instead to stress or emphasize certain words (e.g., marking the word "runner" with a wrist flick). Representational gestures are symbolic and can only be interpreted within the context of speech, in contrast to other non-gesture hand movements such as emblems which are conventionalized signs (e.g., an umpire crossing and extending his arms to indicate the runner is "safe") or pantomimes which are imitations of motor actions and can replace speech entirely. Representational gestures are the focus of this paper for the meaningful role they play in spoken language.

Gesture for the Listener

Gesture for the Speaker

One view proposes that in addition to communicating information to the listener, gesture plays an active role in speech production. The Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis ( Krauss, 1998; Krauss et al., 2000) posits that cross-modal priming via gesture increases neural activation and makes words easier to access. Indeed, people gesture more when word retrieval is difficult such as when speaking spontaneously or recalling objects from memory ( Chawla and Krauss, 1994; Krauss, 1998; Morsella and Krauss, 2004). The temporal nature of speech and gesture supports this idea as well in that the onset of gesture usually precedes the word with which it is associated ( Morrel-Samuels and Krauss, 1992). Furthermore, when gesture is prohibited, people are more dysfluent, exhibiting increased pause time, more filler pauses, and slower speech rate ( Graham and Heywood, 1975; Rauscher et al., 1996; Morsella and Krauss, 2004). Krauss et al. (2000) propose that the facilitative effect of gesture happens at the level of the phonological encoder of Levelt's speech model, where a word's phonological form is planned for articulation. This proposed mechanism for cross-modal priming is based on "tip-of-the-tongue" studies that have found that word retrieval difficulties are more often phonological rather than semantic in nature (e.g., Jones and Langford, 1987) and that participants experience word retrieval failures when gesture is restricted ( Frick-Horbury and Guttentag, 1998; although see Beattie and Coughlan, 1999). Understanding the mechanism of this facilitative effect is critical to applying gesture theory to language interventions for people with neurogenic communication disorders, particularly aphasia for which word finding difficulties are hallmark, a point we will return to later. The Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis proposes that to facilitate word retrieval, gestures should be iconic, representing a generalized semantic feature of the target word ( Krauss et al., 2000), for example, gesturing whiskers to retrieve the word "cat." However, it is unclear how producing gestures related to the conceptual features of a word might directly retrieve the phonological word form. The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon occurs when a speaker is unable to access stored information in memory but has a "feeling of knowing" ( Brown, 1991). During retrieval failure, the speaker often has access to incomplete information about the target word such as the first letter, number of syllables, stress pattern, or part of speech and may be able to identify other words that are phonologically or semantically similar ( Brown, 1991). This represents the more abstract lexical representation stage in Levelt's speech model called the "lemma" which may be a more likely beneficiary of cross-modal priming, where semantic information encoded in gesture may boost specification of the lemma and result in spreading activation for retrieval of phonological form. In contrast to the Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis, other studies have found that speakers gesture more during fluent than disfluent speech and that when speech stops, so does gesture ( Mayberry and Jaques, 2000; Graziano and Gullberg, 2018), suggesting that the function of gesture is not compensatory or supportive, but rather it co-produces language together with speech.

There is also evidence to suggest that gesture facilitates the planning and organization of speech. The Information Packaging Hypothesis ( Kita, 2000) proposes that gesture plays a role in language production by helping the speaker package visuospatial information into units that are compatible with speech. Indeed, people gesture more when linguistic and processing demands are challenging ( Melinger and Kita, 2007; Kita and Davies, 2009). For example, when tasked to describe a complex array of dots, people gestured more when they had to organize the dots themselves in their descriptions compared to people whose dot arrays were "pre-packaged" with connected lines ( Hostetter et al., 2007b). Direct evidence for this idea that gesture shapes speech production is demonstrated by manipulating gesture and examining its influence on speech ( Kita et al., 2017). Mol and Kita (2012) had participants describe actions involving both manner (e.g., roll) and path (e.g., down) components. In one condition they asked participants to gesture manner and path simultaneously (e.g., making a downward spiraling motion) while in the other condition participants made a separate, sequential gestures for each component (e.g., a turning motion for "roll" and a downward motion for "down"). When participants simultaneously gestured path and manner, they were more likely to verbally produce the information in a single clause (e.g., "It rolled down the hill") whereas when producing two separate gestures, participants were more likely to produce two clauses (e.g., "It rolled and went down the hill"). Therefore, gestures help to organize spatial information in a way that directly influences how ideas are translated into speech.

In summary, gesture is fundamental to communication, tightly integrated with speech in the formulation and perception of utterances, and often communicates unique information not present in the speech signal, especially about spatial and motoric properties of referents. Thus, speech and gesture each have their own advantages but work together to enrich the language context. Gestures have benefits for both listeners and speakers. Gesture facilitates comprehension, and listeners integrate information from both modalities in their mental representations. Gesture may also facilitate word retrieval and fluency for the speaker and is integrally involved in the process of producing spoken language by helping the speaker package thoughts into units that are compatible with the constraints of speech for a given language system. These same communicative functions of gesture that robustly enrich and facilitate communication in healthy individuals may also extend to people with neurogenic communication disorders as well. Next we review the functions of gesture for cognition.

Gesture for Cognition

Unlike speech, the spontaneous gestures that speakers produce have no standardized form, but rather, are idiosyncratic. Because they are free to take a variety of forms, they uniquely reveal the speaker's thoughts in a way speech cannot. The form of our gestures reflects our knowledge and experiences, and increasingly, gesture has been shown to have self-oriented cognitive functions that extend benefits of gesture beyond speaking into cognition more broadly; the Gesture-for-Conceptualization Hypothesis ( Kita et al., 2017) proposes that gesture facilitates conceptualization by activating, manipulating, packaging, and exploring spatio-motoric information. In other words, gesture helps thinking as well as speaking. Here we explore some of the ways gesture interacts with cognition.

Gesture Reduces Cognitive Load

Spontaneous Gestures Predict Readiness to Learn

Gesture continues to predict cognitive development throughout childhood and serves as a cue for when the child is ready to learn ( Goldin-Meadow et al., 1993). This insight comes from studying young children explaining Piagetian conservation tasks. When explaining these tasks, children gesture frequently. Sometimes, they produce similar explanations in both speech and gesture, but other times, they present an incorrect explanation in speech but convey partial knowledge in gesture ( Goldin-Meadow, 2005; Goldin-Meadow and Alibali, 2013). When speech and gesture express different ideas, they are called gesture-speech mismatches. Those who produce these mismatches were more likely to benefit from instruction ( Church and Goldin-Meadow, 1986). 3rd and 4th graders who produce gesture-speech mismatches when solving mathematical equivalence problems at pretest and learning phases also performed significantly better at post-test than children who did not ( Goldin-Meadow and Singer, 2003). In these cases, children convey knowledge with their hands that they may not be able to fully articulate verbally. These gestures reflect transitional knowledge and may reveal that the child is on the cusp of grasping the concept ( Perry et al., 1988; Pine et al., 2004). When encouraged to gesture while solving math problems, children produce an even wider range of strategies ( Broaders et al., 2007). Similarly, when encouraged to gesture during the Alternative Uses Test, children produced more novel uses for target objects ( Kirk and Lewis, 2017); gesture helped them conceptualize different features and uses for objects, some of which could then be verbalized. Thus, gesture use may facilitate creative problem solving and the exploration of ideas ( Kita et al., 2017).

Gesture Facilitates Memory

In sum, in addition to demonstrating benefits for communication, gesture has been shown to serve a variety of cognitive functions, reducing cognitive load to benefit working memory, facilitating the exploration of ideas through transitional knowledge, increasing access to lexical and mental representations, and leading to lasting benefits in learning and memory. Less is known, however, about the neural mechanisms of gesture or how the benefits of gesture for communication and cognition are instantiated in the brain. Likewise, the functions of gesture have been explored to a much more limited degree in individuals with neurologic disorders of language and communication, or neurogenic communication disorders. Yet, the study of gesture in such populations provides a key opportunity to establish, and test, neurobiological models of co-speech gesture. Next we review the existing literature on gesture in these populations.

Gesture in Neurogenic Communication Disorders

So far, we have reviewed evidence that gesture has robust functions for both communication and cognition. Our hands provide a modality for communicating unique kinds of information, benefiting both listeners and speakers, and they reflect and shape our knowledge and experiences. Despite a rich literature that highlights the benefits of gesture and theorizes a tightly integrated relationship with speech, gesture has received substantially less attention in our efforts to understand and treat neurogenic communication disorders. Here, neurogenic communication disorder is an umbrella term that refers to communication impairments with neurological origin including damage from relatively focal lesions from stroke or diffuse neuropathology from insult or degeneration. The four neurogenic communication disorders reviewed here are aphasia, RHD, TBI, and AD. Of these, aphasia is considered a primary language impairment, often due to focal damage to the canonical language network whereas RHD, TBI, and AD are considered cognitive-communication disorders, where communication deficits are secondary, resulting from primary cognitive deficits (e.g., memory, attention, executive function). Differences among these disordered populations provide key context for testing theories of the relationship between speech and gesture and examining gesture's role in communication and cognition.

Aphasia

Aphasia most often occurs after left hemisphere stroke and is defined as a selective and primary language impairment that can result in word-finding deficits (i.e., anomia), impaired grammatical formulation (i.e., agrammatism), and fluency disruptions. Aphasia can affect both expressive and receptive language, and several aphasia subtypes and classification systems exist. However, while there is large variability in aphasia presentation, aphasia has been defined as a disorder of the linguistic system, leaving other forms of cognition intact (although see Martin and Reilly, 2012; Murray, 2012; Fonseca et al., 2017 for examples where cognitive impairments have been identified). Furthermore, people with aphasia (PwA) generally have intact communication, meaning that they know what they want to say, and their intents are pragmatically appropriate. In this case, when people with aphasia are unable to communicate verbally, they continue attempts, often through other modalities, including writing, drawing, and gesture. These forms of communication are encouraged in therapeutic approaches prioritizing functional communication.

Gesture research in aphasia has largely examined gesture in three ways: characterizing gesture use, inhibiting gesture use to rehabilitate spoken language, and encouraging gesture use to facilitate functional communication. As reviewed above, healthy adults produce rich spontaneous gestures that take a variety of forms and communicate unique information that supplements the speech signal. These gestures depict spatio-motoric properties that are not easily expressed in language. Gesture is a ubiquitous and natural part of communication, and it is worth exploring how gesture is affected by language disorders and whether it can support, or hinder, recovery.

Characterizing Gesture Production

Another explanation for increased gesture use is that, consistent with the Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis ( Krauss, 1998; Krauss et al., 2000), PwA gesture to resolve anomia. Analyzing the frequency of gesture production, Cocks et al. (2013) found that although PwA produced more iconic gestures than control participants, the frequency of iconic gesture did not differ between the two groups when gestures produced during word retrieval difficulties were removed. In conversational samples, PwA produced significantly more gestures during word retrieval difficulty (69%) compared to fluent speech production (31%), and 93.8% of the gestures PwA produced during word retrieval were meaningful (e.g., iconic, pantomime, emblems; Lanyon and Rose, 2009). Although there is evidence that PwA are more successful at word retrieval when producing iconic gestures compared to other gesture types or no gesture ( Akhavan et al., 2018), Lanyon and Rose (2009) found that not all PwA benefited from gesture during lexical retrieval, but those who did had phonological impairments ( Lanyon and Rose, 2009). Another alternative explanation for the increased gesture use by PwA is that it serves a pragmatic function to signal to the listener that they are still searching to maintain their conversational turn ( Beattie and Coughlan, 1999). Indeed, PwA produced more interactive gestures (i.e., gestures that coordinate dialogue such as flipping a hand to "pass" the turn to your interlocutor; Bavelas et al., 1992) than comparison participants both during spontaneous conversation and narrative retellings ( de Beer et al., 2019).

Constraining Gesture

While some aphasia interventions encourage functional communication, others take a strict impairment-based approach in which they discourage forms of communication that may be compensatory in order to rehabilitate the target deficit (i.e., speech). One notable example of this is Constraint-Induced Aphasia Therapy (CIAT; Pulvermüller et al., 2001). In CIAT, communication is constrained to the spoken modality in an attempt to maximize spoken language recovery. CIAT aims to promote cortical reorganization ( Taub et al., 2014) and is based on studies of limb rehabilitation in monkeys which found that constraining use of an unaffected limb forces use of a deafferented limb and improves mobility ( Taub, 1976, 1980). Without intervention, the subjects developed "learned non-use" of the affected arm. This treatment was successfully extended to humans with impaired motor damage and limb use after neurological damage ( Taub et al., 1993; Wolf et al., 2006, 2008) and termed Constraint-Induced Movement Therapy (CIMT). CIMT consists of four key components including (1) an intensive training schedule, (2) training behaviors through shaping, (3) a transfer package designed to generalize results beyond the research setting, and (4) discouraging compensatory behaviors ( Taub et al., 2014). In theoretical extensions of this approach to aphasia, "learned non-use" results from compensatory or avoidance behaviors that include non-speech communication such as gestures and non-verbal sounds or the PwA remaining silent or allowing a caregiver to speak for them ( Pulvermüller et al., 2001; Johnson et al., 2014).

Under the first constraint-induced aphasia protocol, people with chronic aphasia received 3 h of therapy every weekday for 2 weeks in a group-based language card game that resembles "Go Fish" and constrains communication to the verbal modality through the use of a barrier separating communication partners, the difficulty of stimuli used, explicit game rules provided by the therapist, and reinforcement of adherence to constraint rules ( Pulvermüller et al., 2001). This protocol was subsequently modified to include a larger variety of expressive language exercises (e.g., repetition drills, picture description, role playing), increased intensity for verbal targets, and inclusion of a "transfer package" ( Johnson et al., 2014), termed CIAT II. In a pilot of this most recent version of the intervention with four participants with moderate Broca's aphasia, gesture was strongly discouraged, and therapists and caregivers were instructed not to respond to them. Overall, the participants reported improvement in their amount of verbal activity pre- to post-treatment and achieved large effect sizes for improvement in WAB-R aphasia quotients but without statistical significance for the small sample ( Johnson et al., 2014).

Many versions of CIAT have been tested by different research groups with an overall positive impact on expressive communication (see Rose, 2013, for a summary of outcomes of constraint-induced language interventions); however, it is unclear whether the active ingredients of its success are related to gesture suppression or other factors such as the high intensity of treatment, group participation, caregiver training, and transfer package. Indeed, these studies are highly variable in the extent to which they constrain gesture and often not well described ( Pierce et al., 2017). Some studies prohibited gesture use ( Pulvermüller et al., 2001) and even strictly enforced spoken language by asking patients to sit on their hands if necessary ( Maher et al., 2006; Kirmess and Maher, 2010; Martin et al., 2014). Others allowed gesture use as long as it was used to facilitate verbal language output (i.e., for self-cueing; Meinzer et al., 2007a, b; Difrancesco et al., 2012; Wilssens et al., 2015; Ciccone et al., 2016; Nickels and Osborne, 2016). In this view, PwA may use gesture to complement but not replace speech.

Thus, the use of gesture constraint has been interpreted and implemented very differently across CIAT studies, and it is important to consider its implications. While use of a barrier in the language game does not prevent the speaker from using gestures, it may implicitly decrease the amount of gestures they produce as people gesture less when their listener cannot see them ( Alibali et al., 2001; Mol et al., 2011), and it prevents any gestures they do produce from being communicative to the listener. While it is a goal of CIAT for all communicative intentions to be completed verbally, this ignores the robust gesture literature on healthy adults that shows that gesture often naturally supplements speech, with people expressing unique information only in gesture, especially when talking about motor or spatial relations ( Rauscher et al., 1996; Krauss, 1998; Feyereisen and Havard, 1999; Alibali et al., 2001; Hostetter and Alibali, 2007; Hostetter et al., 2007b). These gestures communicate to the listener but also may benefit the speaker in their organization, packaging, and conceptualization of information ( Kita, 2000; Kita et al., 2017), beyond the self-cueing function described above. Furthermore, the act of consciously inhibiting gesture use may increase the cognitive load, especially for those with lower working memory capacity ( Marstaller and Burianová, 2013; Gillespie et al., 2014) with implications for PwA for whom working memory deficits are common ( Martin and Reilly, 2012).

Encouraging Gesture

M-MAT and CIAT take different theoretical approaches to the potential interference or facilitation of gesture and other non-verbal modalities (see Rose, 2013 for a comparison of features of constraint vs. multi-modality interventions). However, functionally these two interventions share many common features that may help drive response to treatment ( Pierce et al., 2017). Both interventions use group-based language games, are highly intensive, and rely on shaping to approximate desired communicative behaviors. However in M-MAT, there are no visual barriers, participants are given paper and pencil, and therapists provide cues and shaping for both verbal and multi-modal responses ( Rose et al., 2019). M-MAT involves a cueing hierarchy where when naming pictures, participants make a verbal attempt first and if incorrect, the participant is next cued to produce an iconic gesture and re-attempt naming. Subsequent steps of the hierarchy involve clinician modeling of gesture, drawing, orthographic cues, and verbal repetitions ( Rose et al., 2013a).

Direct comparisons of these interventions in a two-participant single-case design pilot study found a marginal advantage of M-MAT for the primary outcome measure of confrontation naming ( Attard et al., 2013), but comparable effect sizes were found for both treatments in a group study of 11 PwA ( Rose et al., 2013a). A systematic review of multi-modal and constraint-induced intervention approaches found limited empirical support for the superiority of either, although a meta-analysis of single-case experimental design studies favored multi-modal treatments ( Pierce et al., 2017). The authors called for a more rigorous, direct comparison of these two approaches with explicitly described protocol for use of constraints or the types of multi-modality cueing used. This work is currently being undertaken by Rose and colleagues in a randomized controlled trial of constraint-induced or multi-modal personalized aphasia rehabilitation (COMPARE Trial; 2019). Currently, there is not enough evidence to support the use of gesture constraint, and its use should be cautioned against until more empirical evidence can evaluate any potential negative effects suppressing gesture may have on spoken language recovery in aphasia.

Cognitive-Communication Disorders

Cognitive-communication disorders are those for which domain general deficits in cognition such as attention, memory, problem solving, information processing, or executive function result in communication deficits. Given both the cognitive and communicative functions of gesture, it seems natural to study gesture in the context of cognitive-communication disorders and consider the ways in which gesture might uniquely reveal communication deficits or be leveraged to facilitate communication outcomes of people with brain injury and neurodegenerative diseases. However, cognitive-communication research has focused primarily on spoken language. It is an open question whether people with cognitive-communication disorders use gesture and benefit from gesture in the same way that healthy people do. Here we provide a brief overview of the deficits associated with RHD, TBI, and AD before reviewing the literature on gesture across these disorders.

Right Hemisphere Damage

Traumatic Brain Injury

Alzheimer's Disease

Relative to aphasia, there has been significantly less research on gesture across these cognitive-communication disorders. The research that does exist has focused largely on characterizing gesture production in each population relative to healthy, non-injured comparison participants. In the next sections, we will review how researchers have examined gesture across cognitive-communication disorders by characterizing gesture production as well as work examining its functions in social communication and memory.

Characterizing Gesture Production

Considering gesture's proposed role in lexical retrieval ( Krauss et al., 2000), Kim et al. (2015) investigated the use of gesture by people with TBI who, though typically without aphasia, often demonstrate anomia ( King et al., 2006; Hough, 2008). They analyzed the type and frequency of gestures that people with TBI produced during a confrontation naming task and found that people with TBI produced three times more co-speech gestures and hand movements than healthy comparison participants. Importantly, these hand movements included non-gesture movements that were unrelated to speech such as tapping, touching, and scratching. A significant negative correlation was also found where those with poorer performance on the word retrieval test produced more gestures and hand movements. This study provides an initial exploration of the association between gesture production and word retrieval in TBI but does not provide evidence for whether hand gesture has a facilitative function in resolving anomia.

Studies characterizing spontaneous gesture production in AD are also limited. An initial study found that the gestures of people with AD are more ambiguous and less complex with fewer semantic features, paralleling the use of empty speech in this population ( Glosser et al., 1998). Similarly, Carlomagno et al. (2005) found that although people with AD produced a similar gesture rate to healthy comparison participants, they produced fewer iconic gestures. In contrast, Schiaratura et al. (2015) found that while people with AD had decreased quantity and quality of speech, their gestures were relatively unaffected.

In sum, the bulk of the work on gesture in cognitive-communication disorders has focused on characterizing gesture production in term of quantity and form and across different types of discourse elicitation tasks. While these disorders all have in common deficits in communication and cognition, there is variability as to the specific profiles across disorders and even within individuals who share the same diagnostic label. To better understand the shared and unique patterns of gesture production in individuals with neurogenic communication disorders we need considerably more gesture research and with larger samples sizes to account for known variability across and within disorders. Furthermore, use of experimental designs and protocols to examine gesture's role in thinking, speaking, and remembering from the broader gesture literature in psychology and psycholinguistics would facilitate connection across literatures which is needed to advance understanding of the neural correlates of gesture in communication and cognition.

Gesture and Social Communication

Studies examining listener perception of the gestures of people with TBI suggest that producing gesture may also facilitate social communication in this population. When judges rated a speaker with TBI on measures of pragmatic and communicative competence, "gesture appropriateness" was positively correlated with message effectiveness and ease of understanding, and hand/arm movements positively correlated with overall competence ( Cannizzaro et al., 2011). Similarly, Jones and Turkstra (2011) found that when speakers with TBI narrated their accident stories, listeners perceived them as more charismatic when they gestured and indicated an increased likelihood of wanting to engage with them in a future conversation. These studies highlight gesture as a potential contributor to social communication outcomes in TBI. Given that neurogenic communication disorders more broadly disrupt social communication, research examining gesture's role in social communication outcomes in RHD and AD is also warranted.

Gesture and Memory

Examining a link between gesture and memory in cognitive-communication disorders is important for several reasons: gesture plays a special role in promoting memory and learning; deficits in memory and learning are common across cognitive-communication disorders, and the success of all behavioral therapeutic interventions depends critically on memory and learning. Memory is not a unitary function but rather provides an account of our experiences and knowledge and includes the processes that support our encoding, consolidation, and retrieval of information with both temporary and long-term storage capacities. Memory is often divided into functionally and biologically distinct systems ( Cohen and Squire, 1980; Eichenbaum and Cohen, 2001; Henke, 2010). Two primary systems that support long-term memory are the declarative and procedural memory systems. The declarative memory system, mediated by the hippocampus, supports acquisition of facts and world knowledge (semantic memory), and episodic events (episodic memory). In contrast, procedural memory, an aspect of non-declarative memory mediated by the basal ganglia, supports the acquisition of rules, habits, and skills. Both declarative and non-declarative memory interact closely with language acquisition ( Ullman et al., 1997) and use ( Brown-Schmidt and Duff, 2016; Duff and Brown-Schmidt, 2017). While not traditionally considered a cognitive-communication disorder, the study of a rare population of people with acquired bilateral hippocampal damage and amnesia who have severe declarative memory impairment but intact non-declarative memory has provided unique insights into understanding how memory systems support language use. The hippocampal declarative memory system supports relational binding and representational flexibility ( Cohen and Eichenbaum, 1993) and has been found to underlie a variety of aspects of language use and processing ( Duff and Brown-Schmidt, 2012, 2017). Only recently, there is a growing body of work characterizing the role of hippocampal declarative memory in gesture production. Hippocampal pathology is common to both AD ( Hyman et al., 1984) and TBI ( Bigler et al., 1996). Unlike AD, hippocampal pathology and memory deficits in amnesia are not progressive, but the results of these studies have important implications for cognitive-communication disorders resulting from memory deficits.

To test the role of the declarative memory system in gesture production, Hilverman et al. (2016) looked at spontaneous gesture production in a narrative task by people with focal, non-progressive, bilateral hippocampal damage and severe amnesia. They found that even though people with amnesia and healthy adults produced a similar amount of words in procedural and autobiographical narratives, people with amnesia had reduced gesture rates, producing significantly fewer gestures per word than their demographically healthy comparison participants. Critically, hippocampal amnesia does not produce motoric deficits that would interfere with the physical ability to produce gesture. However, while impoverished memory representations may not always affect the amount of speech produced, it does often impact its content: People with amnesia produce fewer episodic details relating to perceptual, temporal, and spatial information ( Kurczek et al., 2015), and the words they produce are less imageable and concrete when producing narratives than healthy adults ( Hilverman et al., 2017). These findings suggest that the declarative memory system contributes to rich and imageable information conveyed in both speech and gesture and that when impaired, in any population, may result in impoverished speech and gesture.

While these findings suggest that declarative memory impairments lead to impoverished gesture production, other studies demonstrate that the spontaneous gestures people with amnesia produce are communicative and uniquely reveal information about their knowledge and experiences. For example, when healthy people share knowledge (i.e., common ground) with a communication partner, they attenuate both their speech and gesture use in parallel, producing both fewer words and gestures ( Campisi and Özyürek, 2013; Galati and Brennan, 2013; Hoetjes et al., 2015; Hilliard and Cook, 2016; but see Jacobs and Garnham, 2007; Holler and Wilkin, 2009 for two exceptions). There is evidence that multiple memory systems support the acquisition and use of common ground ( Brown-Schmidt and Duff, 2016). When designing communication for a child compared to an adult listener, people with amnesia adapt more in gesture than speech relative to healthy adults; healthy adults increased both the number of words and gestures they produced when demonstrating how to do everyday tasks to a child (e.g., how to change a lightbulb) whereas people with amnesia increased their gesture use for the child above and beyond the changes they made in the number of words produced (Clough et al., in review). People with amnesia also reflect shared knowledge in gesture but somewhat inconsistently in speech; in a collaborative referential barrier game in which the participant accrues incremental common ground with a partner through multiple rounds of a matching game, people with amnesia arrived at concise shared spoken labels with the partners ( Duff et al., 2006); however, they did not consistently use definite references like the healthy adults ( Duff et al., 2011). In gesture, people with amnesia signaled common ground by producing fewer visible gestures above the barrier over the course of the game as shared knowledge and familiarity increased ( Hilverman et al., 2019). This parallels research in healthy adults that shows that when speakers share common ground with a listener, their produce gestures that are lower in the visual field ( Hilliard and Cook, 2016). Thus, despite greatly reduced explicit recall for episodic information, the gestures of people with declarative memory impairments can reflect their knowledge and experiences.

Discussion

Gesture provides a unique window into a speaker's mind and provides a direct link between cognition and communication. However, despite a robust literature on the functions of gesture for thinking, speaking, and remembering in healthy adults, gesture has been relatively underexplored in populations with neurogenic communication disorders. Here we assert that gesture is not just an accessory to the language system, but rather an integral partner in communication. A broader approach to the study of language provides insights into these rich communicative contexts. Here, language is a dynamic process that is locally constructed between communication partners and leverages multiple modalities of information, including gesture. Minimally, we have reviewed literature showing that gesture has essential communicative functions above and beyond speech, and therefore, researchers studying neurogenic communication disorders should work to also characterize the consequences of these disorders on the gestural modality. Indeed, as a field, we know much less about gesture than spoken language in these disorders as well as knowing less about gesture than even other non-verbal aspects of communication such as eye-gaze or facial affect recognition. Much of the research that exists on gesture in these populations has focused on characterizing spontaneous gesture production but often from an atheoretical perspective. Studying gesture in populations with impairments in language and cognition provides a unique opportunity to test hypotheses generated by various theoretical accounts in the gesture literature in healthy adults which suggests that gesture provides cognitive and linguistic benefits. Indeed, despite well-documented deficits in memory and social communication after cognitive-communication disorders, researchers have not explored whether patterns of brain injury or cognitive deficit predict gesture use or if gestures can improve memory and communicative function in these individuals.

Of all the functions of gesture described here, perhaps the most exciting is the potential benefit of gesture on learning and memory and the implications that this might have for clinical practice. The success of all behavioral therapy depends on the ability of the patient to learn and remember the targeted skills. Yet, rather than incorporating gesture into our interventions, some therapy protocols have inhibited it. This seems counterproductive in light of the potent role of gesture in learning and memory. Rather than discouraging gesture production, it may be more useful to consider the synergistic nature of speech and gesture and explore ways to leverage gesture to achieve various intervention goals across disciplines. To date, the bulk of the theoretical and empirical work on co-speech gesture has been from a cognitive or psychological perspective rather than a neural correlates perspective. Thus, while we know a lot about the cognitive and communicative benefits of gesture, we know less about the neural mechanisms that support them. Applying the psychological literature of gesture to neurogenic communication disorders not only has the potential to improve treatment, but also provides an opportunity to generate and advance theories of co-speech gesture that are psychologically and biologically plausible.

While this review identifies several gaps in the neurogenic communication disorder literature, it highlights an exciting opportunity to consider neurogenic communication disorders from a new perspective. Our hands shape and actively alter our own learning and display traces of that learning in conversation, reflecting our prior experiences and depicting knowledge even for things the speaker may not be explicitly aware of or cannot yet communicate in speech. In addition to supporting learning and memory, gesture facilitates the exploration of ideas especially when it comes to visuo-spatial problem solving and complex reasoning. Yet, we know little about how gesture interacts with cognition in clinical populations, and this is critical to fully understand language, cognition, and communication, and its disorders. Thus, gesture deserves more of our attention in the study of neurogenic communication disorders. Future research should systematically assess the impact of cognitive and communication disorders on gesture production in larger group studies as well as empirically testing the functions of gesture for language use and social cognition. Such research would shed light on the untapped potential of gesture in understanding and rehabilitating neurogenic communication disorders.

Author Contributions

SC and MD planned the scope and content of the review. SC wrote the initial version of the manuscript. MD contributed to the final version of the manuscript in writing and editing. Both authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Funding

This work was supported by NIDCD grant R01 DC017926 awarded to MD.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Footnotes

References

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Frontiers | The Role of Gesture in Communication and Cognition: Implications for Understanding and Treating Neurogenic Communication Disorders

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When people talk, they gesture. Gesture is a fundamental component of language that contributes meaningful and unique information to a spoken message and ref...

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Your facial expressions can help determine the outcome of a job interview. I advise my clients of this, telling them to work on developing a sincere smile for the initial greeting, for example. But some are skeptical. So I decided to speak with an expert on this subject. Author Daniel McNeill wrote The Face (Little, Brown, 1998), a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and a nominee for the National Book Award. He confirms that facial expressions can help sway an interview.

Q: How much does facial expression matter in a job interview?

A: It becomes a part of all your answers to questions. It merges with them on a deep subconscious level in the brain.

A key reason is that we tend to trust facial expressions, since most of them are automatic and involuntary. When you feel surprise, for instance, your face simply shows it. You don't even realize your face is changing. That's why, to a large extent, the face is a mirror of the soul.

And trustworthy signals really matter in a job interview.

Q: But it's possible to fake facial expressions?

A: Yes, indeed. And it's not necessarily a bad thing. A good example is the "social smile," that willed smile that basically says, "Good." The fact that it's deliberate doesn't make the message false. A high-five is also deliberate. Actually, these smiles are an essential social lubricant.

Smiles are extremely potent, by the way. They are the expression we recognize from the furthest distance away. We tend to respond to them by smiling ourselves, without even realizing it. And when you smile, you actually feel better. The expression causes the emotion, a very counterintuitive fact.

Q: So making a face can help you get a job?

A: Absolutely. Smiles convey thumbs up. They suggest good will. They suggest you like the person you are talking to, and that you are pleasant to work with.

But there are some obvious caveats. You can't simply keep the smile on your face - unless you are one of those few, good-hearted souls for whom it seems natural. Let your smile come and go. You also have to smile at the right time. Don't discuss serious business issues with a grin on your face. A lot of this is common sense, but people can get so nervous before a job interview that they ignore these things.

Q: Any business people you can think of with great smiles?

A: Martha Stewart has a terrific one.

Q: Who has the best smile in business?

A: Probably someone I've never heard of.

Q: Are there certain kinds of facial expressions for certain kinds of jobs? For instance, is there a blue-collar smile?

A: Smiles are pretty much the same everywhere. Of course, people have different faces, different mouth sizes, so smiles can look physically different. We all know people with huge smiles that show lots of teeth and scientists have found that a big smile makes women seem better looking. Think of Julia Roberts.

Q: Is there a management material smile?

A: Not really. You convey that with other things. A sense of confidence.

Q: Can a facial expression show confidence?

A: The answer is tricky. Scientists have used still photos to do most of this research. And photos haven't yielded any expression of confidence, though there is one for contempt. But photos don't capture the effect of eye movement and we know it's very expressive. I suspect there are a lot of expressions scientists haven't nailed down.

Q: But some people seem more confident from their expression?

A: To me, yes. But there are many possible pitfalls. Our minds may create the sense of confidence by merging a variety of other expressions. We also often assume that other kinds of cues, like vocal tone or body language, come from the face because the face is where we look to see the person's mind.

Q: Are there facial expressions of trustworthiness?

A: No. There's no expression that reliably tells others, "I deserve your trust."

In fact, I doubt it could ever evolve. If it did, the ability to fake it would suddenly become extremely valuable. People with the genes for faking it would out-reproduce rivals over the generations, the skill would spread, and the expression would no longer be reliable.

For trust, we rely on smiles with their implied promise of good will. We also respond well to people with highly expressive faces, people whose emotional landscape we can see in detail. We feel we know them better, since most expressions are automatic, and so they are less likely to deceive us.

Overall, we are surprisingly bad at detecting lies using the face alone. Even people who think they excel at it, like judges and psychologists, do little better than chance. The only people who are really good are prisoners - probably because their physical well-being depends on it - and people with training.

Q: So it is trainable?

A: Yes. Certain subtle cues will give away lies, like micro-expressions. A micro of anger, say, will flash across your face in maybe a tenth of a second and vanish. Most people won't notice it, but the trained will, and they'll know what's going on inside the person they're talking to.

Q: Is there a facial expression that demonstrates competence?

A: If only there were. The best thing you can do is to relax. Your facial expressions will occur naturally and spontaneously. If you're uptight in a job interview, you will seem less competent. It's a little unfair, since you can be nervous for many reasons, but that's the message.

Relaxation is one of the secrets of good acting. That's why actors will regularly do exercises that seem silly to you and me, like shaking their arms and wobbling their faces. But these things help their bodies relax.

It's like walking. If you think consciously about doing it, you get awkward. The body is set up to do this well.

I'm not saying don't think about facial expressions at all. For instance, be sure to smile when you meet the interviewer. If you don't smile much in daily life, try doing it more and getting used to it. If it becomes a habit, it will seem natural. It's a good habit to have.

Q: What's the impact of facial expression in business?

A: A good smile can be a great asset. It can help close a deal, for instance, by its assurance of good will.

And if you are a boss, one useful expression is a small step toward anger. The anger expression is a threat and like other expressions it comes in degrees. And a small dose of it conveys authority. It says: I can make you feel pain and you can't reciprocate. And it's effective. Look at Ronald Reagan. He smiled all the time. He was an actor and did it well. But he could also mobilize that semi-anger expression very well too, as when he talked tough about the Soviet Union.

Q: Can you tell when you won't get the job?

A: Generally, I think not. In some cases you might see displeasure on the interviewer's face, but even here you have to be careful not to confuse this expression with the critical consideration you are receiving as a serious candidate.

And people have a wide variety of interviewing styles and personalities. The interviewer can be extremely relaxed and friendly precisely because she thinks you're not going to get the job. You can't know these things.

You also can't know who you're competing with. The interviewer's face may register complete satisfaction with you, and you may not get the job because another person is marginally better qualified.

Regardless, the fact that they've invited you in for an interview means you've already impressed them. That's the thing to keep in mind. If you come in second in the Kentucky Derby, you've done extremely well. And the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes are still ahead.
If you need an experienced resume writer and career coach to help you advance to the next level, I can help you craft a game plan and a resume to get you to your goal.

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Expert Reveals How Facial Expressions affect Job Interviews

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Your facial expressions can help determine the outcome of a job interview. I advise my clients of this, telling them to work on developing a sincere smile for the initial greeting, for example. But some are skeptical. So I decided to speak with a...

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Smile Genuinely when greeting the interviewer

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Smile Genuinely when greeting the interviewer

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Tone of voice to use during job interview

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How To Speak Clearly And Concisely During An Interview

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active listening skills during job interview

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International Search Consultants - Since 1999, ISC has been a leader within Executive Search.

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It is only natural for a job applicant to want to tell the interviewer all about himself, his accomplishments, and his experiences that make him the perfect candidate. The best part of an interview, however, may be what the candidate does not say - and when he doesn't say it!

If the supervisor or hiring manager follows our advice, she will make the interview a conversation, not an interrogation. A conversation is dialog, a two-way street. That means both parties take turns speaking, and that means interviewees have to be willing to listen as well as talk. The effective listener, and the one who gains an advantage in the job hunt, is not a passive sounding board. He adopts active listening skills that enable him to pick up clues as to the company's culture and what the interviewer wants to know about the candidate. A candidate who is receptive to those clues will tell the interviewer she has found the right person for the job.

Active listening means giving the speaker your full attention and transmitting subtle indications that you are doing so. Make her feel she is the most important person in the world and that what she is saying is the most fascinating information you have heard all week. If you really want the job, it will not take much acting. Concentrate on the interviewer. Offer non-verbal feedback such as a smile, a nod, or a slight lean forward, to show your interest. You will convey that you are earnest, enthusiastic, empathetic, and engaged - all characteristics most organizations cherish in their employees.

More importantly, though, active listening prepares your senses and subconscious mind to receive and process the tone, context, and subtext of what the interviewer says. Here's how a well-placed silence on your part can pay off in an interview:

By allowing you to hear important job requirements. By active listening, you may pick up on the interviewer's suggestion that the successful candidate will have, for instance, superior presentation skills. Later, when the interviewer asks about your public speaking experience, you can pull that ace from your sleeve. Discuss how your speaking ability formed a major part of your knock-'em-dead presentations to company shareholders at your previous job.

By letting you better understand the reason for a question. Most interview questions are straightforward and asked of all applicants. There are a few reasons your interviewer may break from the script. Something you have said may have raised a red flag, and you need to go into damage-control mode to alleviate her concerns. On the other hand, your last answer may have intrigued her, and you need to capitalize on her interest. Only by active listening to the impromptu question will you know which tactic to use.

To help you make the best use of your time. A short pause after answering a direct question, allows you to actively listen to see if the interviewer wants you to expand your answer. Does she look up from her notes expectantly when you stop? Speak on! Does she put down her pen and look at her watch? Next question, please!

Interviewers are fountains of knowledge about their companies' way of conducting business, how they value their employees, their organizational structures, their management styles, and their culture. Active listening skills will help you latch onto the crumbs of information dropped by interviewers. By putting them all together you can shift the focus from what you have done and what you know to how those skills and experiences can benefit the employer.

Ann Zaslow-Rethaber is President of International Search Consultants. Ann has been coaching candidates on interview skills since ISC's inception in 1999. You can reach Ann directly at *protected email*.

In order to have jobs to interview for, feel free to check out our Job Listing page. You can also BUILD YOUR RESUME on our Job Seekers page .

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Active Listening; the Key to Successful Interviewing | International Search Consultants

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It is only natural for a job applicant to want to tell the interviewer all about himself, his accomplishments, and his experiences that make him the perfect candidate. The best part of an interview, however, may be what the candidate does not say - and when he doesn't say it!

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Practice active listening by nodding and summarizing the interviewer's points

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Practice active listening by nodding and summarizing the interviewer's points

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When you get rattled while speaking - whether you're nervous, distracted, or at a loss for what comes next - it's easy to lean on filler words, such as "um," "ah," or "you know." These words can become crutches that diminish our credibility and distract from our message. To eliminate such words from your speech, replace them with pauses. To train yourself to do this, take these three steps. First, identify your crutch words and pair them with an action. Every time you catch yourself saying "like," for example, tap your leg. Once you've become aware of your filler words as they try to escape your lips, begin forcing yourself to be silent. Finally, practice more than you think you should. The optimal ratio of preparation to performance is one hour of practice for every minute of presentation.

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How to Stop Saying "Um," "Ah," and "You Know"

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When you get rattled while speaking - whether you're nervous, distracted, or at a loss for what comes next - it's easy to lean on filler words, such as "um," "ah," or "you know." These words can become crutches that diminish our credibility and distract from our message.

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Strong Words to Use in an Interview - Glassdoor Career Guides

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Learn the importance of using powerful words during a job interview and provide several examples of words you can use in your next interview.

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Top 10 Most Common Job Interview Questions ANSWERED

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Prepare answers to common interview questions using positive language

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Prepare answers to common interview questions using positive language

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Interviews can be high stress, anxiety-driving situations, especially if it's your first interview. A little practice and preparation always pays off. While we can't know exactly what an employer will ask, here are 10 common interview questions along with advice on how to answer them. The questions include:

Could you tell me something about yourself and describe your background in brief?: Interviewers like to hear stories about candidates. Make sure your story has a great beginning, a riveting middle, and an end that makes the interviewer root for you to win the job.

How do you deal with pressure or stressful situations?: Share an instance when you remained calm despite the turmoil. If it's a skill you're developing, acknowledge it and include the steps you're taking to respond better to pressure in the future.

What are your salary expectations?: Before you walk in for your first interview, you should already know what the salary is for the position you're applying to. Check out websites such as Glassdoor, Fishbowl, or Vault.com for salary information. You could also ask people in the field by reaching out to your community on LinkedIn.

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10 Common Job Interview Questions and How to Answer Them

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Interviews can be high stress, anxiety-driving situations, especially if it's your first interview. A little practice and preparation always pays off. While we can't know exactly what an employer will ask, here are 10 common interview questions along with advice on how to answer them.