Perception of Emotions in the Hand Movement Quality of Finnish Sign Language

This study investigated whether people can decode emotion (happiness, neutrality, and anger) communicated via hand movements in Finnish sign language when these emotions are expressed in semantically neutral sentences. Twenty volunteer participants without any knowledge of sign language took part in the experiment. The results indicated that the subjects were able to reliably decode anger and neutrality from the quality of hand movements. For happy hand expressions, the responses of happiness and neutrality were confused. Thus, the study showed that emotion-related information can be encoded in the quality of hand movements during signing and that this information can be decoded without previous experience with this particular mode of communication.