Monika Boruta-Żywiczyńska, MA,

is a PhD Candidate doing her research at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland, at an Interdisciplinary PhD School Academia Copernicana. In her research, she looks at sign emergence in children’s iconic gestures. She is also interested in nonverbal communication and sign language research, and, as a member of Center for Language Evolution Studies at her home University, she seeks the link between pantomime and language emergence and evolution.

Gestures in patients' presentation of medically unexplained symptoms (MUS)

Agnieszka Sowińska, PhD, Monika Boruta-Żywiczyńska, MA

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to explore speech-accompanying gesture use in presentation of medically unexplained symptoms (MUS). The data are 19 video-filmed semistructured interviews with patients presenting MUS. Four patterns of gestural behaviors were established in symptom presentation: (1) lack of gestures; (2) few gestures; (3) few gestures accompanying symptom descriptions, relative to other unrelated gestures; (4) consistent use of gestures. Although the patients highly varied in their gesture use, the number of gestures corresponding to symptom descriptions was less than half the number of all annotated gestures. The findings encourage medical professionals to attend to the information in gesture use in order to obtain a better understanding of the patient’s experience of MUS

Gesture John Benjamins Publishing Journal

ISSN 1568-1475 | E-ISSN 1569-9773, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/gest

Gesture publishes articles reporting original research, as well as survey and review articles, on all aspects of gesture. The journal aims to stimulate and facilitate scholarly communication between the different disciplines within which work on gesture is conducted. For this reason papers written in the spirit of cooperation between disciplines are especially encouraged. Gesture provides a platform where contributions to this topic may be found from such disciplines as linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, biology, communication studies, neurology, ethology, theatre studies, literature and the visual arts, cognitive psychology and computer engineering.

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