As visual media spread to all domains of public and scientific life, nonverbal behavior is taking its place as an important form of communication alongside the written and spoken word. An objective and reliable method of analysis for hand movement behavior and gesture is therefore currently required in various scientific disciplines, including psychology, medicine, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and computer science. However, no adequate common methodological standards have been developed thus far. Many behavioral gesture-coding systems lack objectivity and reliability, and automated methods that register specific movement parameters often fail to show validity with regard to psychological and social functions. To address these deficits, we have combined two methods, an elaborated behavioral coding system and an annotation tool for video and audio data. The NEUROGES-ELAN system is an effective and userfriendly research tool for the analysis of hand movement behavior, including gesture, self-touch, shifts, and actions. Since its first publication in 2009 in Behavior Research Methods, the tool has been used in interdisciplinary research projects to analyze a total of 467 individuals from different cultures, including subjects with mental disease and brain damage. Partly on the basis of new insights from these studies, the system has been revised methodologically and conceptually. The article presents the revised version of the system, including a detailed study of reliability. The improved reproducibility of the revised version makes NEUROGES-ELAN a suitable system for basic empirical research into the relation between hand movement behavior and gesture and cognitive, emotional, and interactive processes and for the development of automated movement behavior recognition methods.Keywords Nonverbal behavior . Gesture . Annotation . Coding system . Analysis tool . ReliabilityThe NEUROGES-ELAN System is an analysis tool for nonverbal behavior focusing on body movement and gesture. Apart from behavior analysis per se, it is suited for basic research on cognitive, emotional, and interactive processes via analyzing nonverbal behavior. Since it enables the investigation of processes that are not verbalized, its specific potential lies in the exploration of implicit cognitive, emotional, and interactive processes that may be conducted beyond awareness. The fields of application include psychology, neuropsychology, medicine, evolutionary anthropology, linguistics, and related areas. Furthermore, because NEUROGES-ELAN offers the option to analyze gestures independently of speech, it is suited for linguistic research testing basic paradigms in the relation between speech and gesture. As a highly operationalized analysis tool, it has also been used for developing automatic movement recognition methods. Clinical fields of application are doctor-patient interaction, psychodiagnostics, and consultation/therapy process and outcome control.NEUROGES-ELAN combines the behavioral analysis system NEUROGES with the annot...