Your hand gestures can help make you more charismatic

　　手势如何让你在演讲时更富有魅力

　　Next time you watch a TED talk or a political speech, take a moment to look closely at the speaker’s hand movements. Is the motion slow or energetic? Is it subtle or expansive? And how are the hands mostly moving – vertically or horizontally?

　　下次观看TED演讲或者政治演说的时候，请留神关注一下演讲者双手的动作。手势是缓慢还是饶有力道?幅度是小还是大?双手移动的大体方向怎样——竖直还是水平?

　　It is well known that non-verbal cues can have more of an influence on the way that a message is received than the actual words spoken. As BBC Capital recently explored, a deeper voice increases perceptions of authority, for instance – and this even appears to influence a CEO’s earnings and how long they stay with a company.

　　众所周知，非语言性线索对于信息接收所产生的影响力常常超出了语言本身。比如说，英国广播公司资本栏目(BBC Capital)最近研究发现，更为低沉的嗓音能够增加讲者的权 威感，这甚至会影响首 席执行官的收入和他们为公司效力的时间。

　　Now a series of recent studies from Markus Koppensteiner at the University of Vienna has examined the way that people talk with their hands – with remarkable results. Even when all other factors have been taken into account, your hand gestures signal important elements of your personality like extraversion and dominance. They can even change people’s perceptions of your physical height – making you appear a few inches taller or shorter.

　　维也纳大学(University of Vienna)的科彭斯泰纳(Markus Koppensteiner)最近做了一系列的研究，他研究了人们说话时的手势，得出了不错的结果。即使把其他所有因素都考虑进去，人的手势还是能够体现出演讲者性格中的重要元素，例如性格开朗外向，富有主导力等。这些甚至可以影响你在人们眼中的身高，让你比实际身高高几英寸或矮几英寸。

　　Koppensteiner’s findings would seem to recall the famous research on “power poses” – the strategy, for instance, of standing, like Superwoman, with your hands on your hips and your feet planted wide apart. These small gestures of confidence are thought to feedback into the brain, leading people to feel more assertive before public speaking.

　　科彭斯泰纳的发现似乎可以让人们回想起对于“强人姿势”的研究，比如采用女强人的站姿策略，即双手放于臀上，双脚分开站稳。人们认为，这些充满自信的小姿势可以反馈到大脑，让讲者在演讲开始之前就可以信心倍增。

　　In the words of the Harvard University professor, Amy Cuddy, who conducted many of these studies, “you fake it until you make it”.

　　哈佛大学教授艾米‧卡迪做了很多这类研究，用她的话来说，“你其实是在假装很强，一直装下去直到把事情做成”。

　　Cuddy’s research had come under criticism, with some serious doubts over the reliability of the finding, but recent research shows that power poses do have a robust effect on people’s self-perceptions.

　　艾米‧卡迪的研究招致了一些批评，一些人严重怀疑结果的可信性，不过最近的研究表明，强人姿势的确对人们的自我认知有着显著的影响。

　　There are some important differences with the new research, however. Power poses are primarily designed to be performed in private to increase confidence before a meeting – and they are largely static positions rather than fluid movements.

　　然而新研究有一些重要的不同之处。强人姿势主要用于会议之前的私下演练以增强自信，而且主要是静态姿势，而不是连贯动作。

　　Koppensteiner’s research, in contrast, examines the motion of the speakers’ hands as they talk and the ways that this influences others’ perceptions. In a typical study, he would take real videos of politicians’ speeches, and then transformed them into animated stick figures so that confounding factors – like their facial expressions – would no longer be visible. You can see one example in the video below:

　　相比之下，科彭斯泰纳的研究探讨的则是讲者说话时双手的移动以及手势如何影响他人对于自己的看法。在一项典型的研究中他用到了政客演说的实况录像，然后将其转化为动画的棍子小人，这样一来，干扰性因素(如面部表情)就不见了。

　　Participants were then asked to rate the silent, animated movies for specific personality traits.

　　参加者然后根据无声的动画录像来评定具体的人格特征。

　　Although some traits, such as conscientiousness, appeared to be hard to discern from the hand gestures, others were clearly visible. Extraversion, for instance, appeared to be linked more to hand movements overall, punctuated with only brief periods of stillness.

　　尽管似乎很难从手势中辨别出责任心等特征，其他特征则很容易识别。比如，性格外向常常与整体的手势有更紧密的联系，外向的人在讲话时双手不动的时间很短。

　　Perceptions of authority, meanwhile, appeared to come from the scale of vertical movements – whether your hand sweeps from the level of the lectern, say, to shoulder height. People who regularly make these kinds of expansive gestures tend to be rated as being less agreeable, but more dominant. “It is a very consistent result, across many papers of mine,” Koppensteiner says.

　　权 感常常由双手竖直移动的幅度所产生。比如说，演讲者的手是否从讲台的高度挥到肩膀的高度。常常做出这类大幅度手势的人往往不太平易近人，但是富有主导力。科彭斯泰纳說，“研究结果一直是这样，我很多篇论文都有写到。”

　　In one particularly striking article from 2015, Koppensteiner found that these personality ratings, based solely on the silent animations of stick men, could predict the amount of applause the politicians actually received in the real-life speeches that the animations had been drawn from.

　　2015年的一篇文章尤其让人惊讶，科彭斯泰纳发现，这些仅仅基于棍子小人的无声动画所做出的性格评定，却能够预测政客在实际演讲(这些动画即是由实际演讲提取而来)中获得的掌声数量。

　　There was a catch, however, since those rating also predicted whether the politicians were heckled – suggesting that the gestures of dominance can be perceived as positive or negative depending on the context. Perhaps, in the wrong circumstances, gestures of dominance can also be seen as arrogant, aggressive, or overbearing.

　　不过这里也藏着一个陷阱。既然这些评定同样预测了政客是否会受到诘难，这暗示了“富有主导力”的手势可以给人正面或者负面的观感，而这取决于当时的情境。也许在不合适的情境下，“富有主导力”的手势会给人一种傲慢、有攻击性或者盛气凌人的感觉。

　　Tall stories

　　“身高”那些事儿

　　Besides altering the perceptions dominance, the expansive vertical hand movements also altered estimates of the speaker’s physical height. “People were mostly impressed by the real height of the stick figures, but if they moved their arms up and down vigorously, and with lots of expansive arm movements, you seem to be judged as being taller,” he says.

　　除了可以改变“富有主导力”这类观感之外，双手大幅度的竖直移动同样改变了听众对于讲者实际身高的估计。他说，“人们大多对棍子小人的实际身高印象深刻，但是如果这些小人活力十足地上下挥舞手臂，手臂动作幅度很大，那么别人会认为你变高了。”

　　The exact psychological mechanism is not clear. Since previous research had shown that taller people are naturally considered to be better leaders, it’s possible that the movements create a kind of visual illusion to increase your perceived height, and this then contributes to perceptions of greater dominance. But it could also work in the opposite direction: the increased dominance leads to the altered perceptions of height.

　　准确的心理学机制尚不清楚。之前的研究表明，人们很自然地认为长得更高的人可以成为更好的领导，那么这些手势可能会制造一种视觉上的假象，增加自己在别人眼中的身高，接下来又会让别人觉得自己更有主导力 。不过反过来也成立 ：主导力增加会导致自己在其他人眼中的身高发生改变。

　　“We know that if people are in high-status positions, they are seen as being taller,” Koppensteiner says. As he points out, people often overestimate Tom Cruise’s height, and although that could be due to clever camera work, it could also come from the way he projects his confidence.

　　“我们知道，位高权重的人看上去会更高，” 科彭斯泰纳说。他指出，人们常常高估汤姆•克鲁斯 (Tom Cruise)的身高，尽管这可能是由于巧妙的摄影技术，不过这同样可能来自于他所展现的自信。

　　Koppensteiner’s results would seem to support the conclusions of less formal studies. The author and body language trainer Vanessa Van Edwards, for instance, has analysed hundreds of TED talks to understand why some talks go viral while others sink with very little interest – even when they deal with broadly similar topics conveying equally enticing messages. She found that the most successful videos contained almost twice as many hand gestures (465 compared to 272). And in line with Koppensteiner’s research, the number of expansive gestures also predicted viewers’ ratings of the speakers’ charisma and competence.

　　科彭斯泰纳的研究结果似乎支持了那些不那么正式的研究所得出的结论。以维尼莎‧爱德华兹(Vanessa Van Edwards)为例，她是一名作家兼肢体语言教练 ，她分析了数百场TED演讲，想弄明白为什么有的演讲传播甚广，而有的却枯燥乏味石沉大海，即使演讲的主题大体相近，传达的信息同样引人入胜。她发现，最成功的的视频中演讲者的手势数量几乎是其他视频的两倍(465对272)。与科彭斯泰纳的研究一致的是，从幅度大的手势的数量同样能预测到听众对于讲者魅力和才能的评定。

　　It’s worth emphasising that Koppensteiner hasn’t yet tested whether people can mimic these expansive gestures to change the ways they are perceived. Even so, he suspects that many people are putting on something of a deliberate performance, although that may be easier for some personality types than others. “You can produce certain behaviours and certain outcomes and impressions in people, but there may limits,” he says.

　　值得一提的是，科彭斯泰纳尚未研究出人们是否能够通过模仿这些大幅度的手势来改变他人的观感。即便如此，他认为很多人都在有意这样做，尽管这对具有某些性格的人来说可能更为容易。他说，“你可以做出某些行为，达到某些效果，并让人们对你产生相应的印象，但这也有其局限性。”

　　Given that public speaking is consistently rated our biggest phobia, any small tip to improve the experience could offer a small confidence boost that will surely be welcomed by many people. Let your hands do the talking, and you might just find that the words take care of themselves.

　　人们一直认为公开演讲是最令大家恐惧的事情，因此任何可以改善演讲体验的小贴士都能够增强人的一点自信，这必 然会受到大众的欢迎。让你的双手来演讲吧，你会发现，这些肢体"文字"其实可以"独当一面"。