Bodily expression of emotion

Abstract

The question whether body movements and body postures are indicative of speci®c emotions is a matter of debate. While some studies have found evidence for speci®c body movements accompanying speci®c emotions, others indicate that movement behavior (aside from facial expression) may be only indicative of the quantity (intensity) of emotion, but not of its quality. The study reported here is an attempt to demonstrate that body movements and postures to some degree are speci®c for certain emotions. A sample of 224 video takes, in which actors and actresses portrayed the emotions of elated joy, happiness, sadness, despair, fear, terror, cold anger, hot anger, disgust, contempt, shame, guilt, pride, and boredom via a scenario approach, was analyzed using coding schemata for the analysis of body movements and postures. Results indicate that some emotion-speci®c movement and posture characteristics seem to exist, but that for body movements dierences between emotions can be partly explained by the dimension of activation. While encoder (actor) dierences are rather pronounced with respect to speci®c movement and posture habits, these dierences are largely independent from the emotion-speci®c dierences found. The results are discussed with respect to emotionspeci®c discrete expression models in contrast to dimensional models of emotion encoding. #

Toward a Minimal Representation of Affective Gestures

“…In particular, the 4D scheme proposed in the system for characterizing expressive behavior confirmed that dynamic aspects of motion features are complementary to postural and gesture shape-related information. These results also corroborate the recent view that bodily expressions of emotion constitute a relevant source of nonverbal emotion information [55], [71], [27], [74], [2].…”

A study of human performance in recognizing expressive hand movements

“…The angry emotion is recognized correctly regardless of the structure used to display the emotion. This result is consistent with previous work [11], [36], [37], reporting angry to be the most reliably identified emotion. Misrecognition of the happy expressive movements as angry was observed in the Frond_Happy animations.…”

Decoding spatiotemporal features of emotional body language in social interactions

“…For example, happy interactions are characterized by higher velocity profiles than affection and sadness, but not higher than anger. These findings are broadly consistent with those reported in the existing literature 2 , 3 , 19 , 20 , 22 . Affectional and sad interactions show a high degree of similarity regarding their intrapersonal kinematic and postural parameters.…”