Emotion matters

Abstract Recent theories and neural models of co-speech gesture have extensively considered its cognitive role in language comprehension but have ignored the emotional function. We investigated the integration of speech and co-speech gestures in memory for verbal information with different emotional connotations (either positive, negative, or neutral). In a surprise cued-recall task, gesture boosted memory for speech with all three emotional valences. Interestingly, gesture was more likely to become integrated into memory of neutrally and positively valenced speech than negatively valenced speech. The results suggest that gesture-speech integration is modulated by emotional valence of speech, which has implications for the emotional function of gesture in language comprehension.