Your Hands Show Your Anxiety

Have you noticed and speculated why some people are more likely to rub their hands, touch their hair, or manipulate their adornments while speaking?

Self-touch—also called "self-adaptors" and "body-focused movements"—refers to rubbing, scratching, or grooming one's body or adornments without an obvious connection to the meaning of the speech or the ongoing task. Traditionally, self-touch was thought to relieve sensory stimulation such as itchy skin, or readjusting adornments to satisfy personal needs. However, researchers have long known it relates to negative affect, particularly anxiety.

For example, a study showed that people self-touched more after listening to and discussing texts about leeches than canaries, with the assumption that leeches would induce a higher level of anxiety than canaries. In addition, people self-touch more when doing a stressful test. But studies are very incomplete. For example, they did not measure people's actual anxiety levels or included only one gender in the study. Furthermore, we needed research on the phenomenon in more naturalistic conversations.

Therefore, we videotaped people's hand movements during face-to-face conversations about daily topics and then measured their momentary anxiety level induced by the conversations (such as "I feel frightened") and their general and stable trait anxiety level (for example "I worry too much over something that really doesn't matter").

In addition to anxiety, we also examined neuroticism and agreeableness to see if they are connected to self-touch during conversations. Neuroticism is a personality trait that predisposes individuals to experience negative affect such as anxiety, depression, worry, and fear. Given that neuroticism is closely associated with anxiety and the observation that people high in neuroticism appear to have difficulty in monitoring emotion and interpret ordinary situations as threatening, it is not surprising that self-touch has been observed to associate with neuroticism. We asked, what matters more in predicting self-touching—anxiety in particular or the more general trait of neuroticism?

Agreeableness is a personality trait associated with sympathy, warmth, consideration, and cooperation during social interaction. As self-touch has been found to relate to negative impressions, people with lower agreeableness may perform more self-touch during conversations as they are less likely to care about interpersonal relationships or maintain harmony with others. Yet, previous studies only examined the relationship between self-touch and agreeableness in people with skin diseases that are accompanied by intense itchiness. Hence, we examined whether the same phenomenon happens more generally.

Accordingly, we recruited 127 ordinary English speakers to have a conversation under fairly standardized conditions. They watched two 1-2 minute cartoon clips and described them to the experimenter, and they were presented with social dilemma stories and described their solutions—for example, what to say to a character who found it hard to allocate her time to her old friends and her new friend who did not get along with her old friends. After completing the tasks, the participants reported on their anxiety and personality.

The Key Finding: Anxiety in the Moment

In fact, momentary anxiety rather than general anxiety, neuroticism, or agreeableness was the main contributor to self-touch during these face-to-face conversations. This finding strongly suggests that in daily life, people who experience a higher level of momentary anxiety also perform more self-touch.

Nonetheless, it is important to note that the findings only demonstrate an association between momentary anxiety and self-touch during conversations. We don't know that anxiety actually causes the touching. And, the "why" of this association is still a question. Does self-touching reduce anxiety?

For Further Reading

Pang, H. T., Canarslan, F., & Chu, M. (2022). Individual differences in conversational self-touch frequency correlate with state anxiety. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 46, 299–319. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-022-00402-9

Heaven, L., McBrayer, D., & Prince, B. (2002). Role of sex in externally motivated self-touching gestures. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 95(1), 289–294. https://doi.org/10.2466/pms.2002.95.1.289

Mohiyeddini, C., Bauer, S., & Semple, S. (2015). Neuroticism and stress: The role of displacement behaviour. Anxiety, Stress, and Coping, 28(4), 391–407. https://doi.org/10.1080/10615806.2014.1000878

Schut, C., Muhl, S., Reinisch, K., Claßen, A., Jäger, R., Gieler, U., & Kupfer, J. (2015). Agreeableness and self-consciousness as predictors of induced scratching and itch in patients with psoriasis. International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 22(6), 726–734. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12529-015-9471-5

Mingyuan Chu is a Lecturer at the School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen. He is interested in understanding the role of nonverbal behaviors in communication and problem-solving.

Hio Tong Pang is a graduate of the University of Aberdeen and studying an MSc at the University of Edinburgh. She is interested in the fields of interpersonal interaction and emotional regulation.