Nonverbal Behavior in Professional Tennis: A Kinesic, Gesture and Action Video Analysis of Hands, Arms and Shoulders after Winning and Losing

Introduction: Competitive tennis constitutes a sport that is characterized by losing or winning, i.e. situations that are highly emotional. Previous research revealed that emotions are nonverbally expressed, particularly by hand gestures. However, between-point gestural behavior in tennis and its relation to emotional states of winning and losing has not been investigated yet. In line with the valence hypothesis, we therefore investigated in the present study the hypothesis that unpleasant emotional states like losing trigger a left-hand use, whereas pleasant emotional states like winning trigger a right-hand use. Methods: Nonverbal hand movement behavior of 15 male, professional, right-handed tennis players were videotaped during 1st league matches and analyzed with the NEUROpsychologicalGEStureEducationalLANguage (NEUROGES-ELAN) coding system. Results: Regarding hand laterality, point losers performed significantly more movement with the left hand and point winners performed significantly more movement with the right hand. The factor Outcome revealed that tennis players who lost a point displayed significantly more irregular on body hand movement, emotion/attitude (clap/beat), emphasis (palm-out) and motion quality presentation (manner) gestures. In contrast, point winners displayed significantly more repetitive in space and phasic on separate object hand movements, emotion/attitude (rise) gestures, and object-oriented actions. Discussion: In line with the valence hypothesis, the findings show that losing a point triggers a left-hand use, whereas winning a point triggers a right-hand use in the tennis players. We therefore assume that losing is associated with unpleasant emotional states and that winning is associated with pleasant emotional states. Certain hand movements, gestures, and actions are further associated with either losing or winning. Because no suitable coding system exists for the analysis of nonverbal behavior (NVB) and gestures in sports, we suggest using the NEUROGES system for future research.