Emotion expression in body action and posture.

Abstract

Emotion communication research strongly focuses on the face and voice as expressive modalities, leaving the rest of the body relatively understudied. Contrary to the early assumption that body movement only indicates emotional intensity, recent studies have shown that body movement and posture also conveys emotion specific information. However, a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms is hampered by a lack of production studies informed by a theoretical framework. In this research we adopted the Body Action and Posture (BAP) coding system to examine the types and patterns of body movement that are employed by 10 professional actors to portray a set of 12 emotions. We investigated to what extent these expression patterns support explicit or implicit predictions from basic emotion theory, bidimensional theory, and componential appraisal theory. The overall results showed partial support for the different theoretical approaches. They revealed that several patterns of body movement systematically occur in portrayals of specific emotions, allowing emotion differentiation. Although a few emotions were prototypically expressed by one particular pattern, most emotions were variably expressed by multiple patterns, many of which can be explained as reflecting functional components of emotion such as modes of appraisal and action readiness. It is concluded that further work in this largely underdeveloped area should be guided by an appropriate theoretical framework to allow a more systematic design of experiments and clear hypothesis testing.

Robust anger: Recognition of deteriorated dynamic bodily emotion expressions

“…First, they are considered basic emotions (despair being a highly aroused member of the emotion family of sadness), and therefore, evolutionary salient emotions that are likely to be recognised from limited information. Second, in the GEMEP corpus these emotions were all defined as higharousal emotions and as confirmed empirically they contained an equal amount of dynamics (Dael, Goudbeek, & Scherer, 2013;Dael et al, 2012). The duration of the used video clips ranged from 1320 to 1760 ms.…”

“…Expression recognition experiments typically focus either on the face (Ekman, 1982), the body (Atkinson et al, 2004) or on a specific body part, such as an expressive knocking hand (Pollick et al, 2001). However, analyses of expressions show that each body part has a specific contribution to the expression of a particular emotion (Dael, Mortillaro, & Scherer, 2012;de Meijer, 1989;Scherer & Ellgring, 2007;Wallbott, 1998). For instance, head movement plays a significantly larger role in the expression of sadness than arm movements do, whereas the reverse is true for the expression of anger (Wallbott, 1998).…”

O reconhecimento de expressões faciais e prosódia emocional: investigação preliminar em uma amostra brasileira jovem

“…Compreender a emoção do outro está associado a questões de relevância e competência social, como interação e empatia, e sofre influência de diferentes fatores, como regras culturais (Ekman, 2003), intimidade com o outro (Ma-Kellams & Blascovitch, 2012), contexto ambiental e emocional (Marian & Shimamura, 2012) e até posturas corporais (Dael, Mortillaro, & Scherer, 2012). Défi cits no processamento emocional são identifi cados como um mecanismo central para difi culdades comportamentais e de interação social, já que os indivíduos acometidos de tais défi cits tendem a interpretar equivocadamente as "deixas emocionais" que normalmente ajudam a guiar seus comportamentos, incluindo difi culdades no reconhecimento de expressões faciais e prosódia (Bucks & Radford, 2004).…”

Our own action kinematics predict the perceived affective states of others.

“…These similarities allow recognition of affective states in others from a range of cultures (e.g., Sauter, Eisner, Ekman, & Scott, 2010). Various cues provide information about our affective states, such as facial expressions (Bassili, 1979;Ekman & Friesen, 1975), vocalisations (Scherer, 1995), and importantly, the way that we move (Dael, Mortillaro, & Scherer, 2012). For example, anger is associated with fast movement (Ada, Suda, & Ishii, 2003;Montepare, Goldstein, & Clausen, 1987;) and sadness with low velocity (Michalak et al, 2009;Pollick, Paterson, Bruderlin, & Sanford, 2001; some [Ada et al, 2003], but not all [Barliya, Omlor, Giese, Berthoz, & Flash, 2013] studies also find that happiness is associated with high velocity).…”