The perception of emotion in body expressions

Abstract

During communication, we perceive and express emotional information through many different channels, including facial expressions, prosody, body motion, and posture. Although historically the human body has been perceived primarily as a tool for actions, there is now increased understanding that the body is also an important medium for emotional expression. Indeed, research on emotional body language is rapidly emerging as a new field in cognitive and affective neuroscience. This article reviews how whole-body signals are processed and understood, at the behavioral and neural levels, with specific reference to their role in emotional communication. The first part of this review outlines brain regions and spectrotemporal dynamics underlying perception of isolated neutral and affective bodies, the second part details the contextual effects on body emotion recognition, and final part discusses body processing on a subconscious level. More specifically, research has shown that body expressions as compared with neutral bodies draw upon a larger network of regions responsible for action observation and preparation, emotion processing, body processing, and integrative processes. Results from neurotypical populations and masking paradigms suggest that subconscious processing of affective bodies relies on a specific subset of these regions. Moreover, recent evidence has shown that emotional information from the face, voice, and body all interact, with body motion and posture often highlighting and intensifying the emotion expressed in the face and voice.

Congenital facial palsy and emotion processing: The case of Moebius syndrome

“…Moreover, although facial mimicry plays an important role in facial expressions recognition, people may also use other expressive channels to communicate emotions such as gestures, posture, proximity or the voice (eg, prosody, language) and these channels may further support the process of emotion understanding and social interactions …”

Formalizing emotion concepts within a Bayesian model of theory of mind

“…On one hand, observers intuitively infer a common cause (an underlying emotion) of observable face, body and vocal cues. Thus, integrating facial and body configuration, as well as vocal tone, can improve the reliability and specificity of inverse inferences [44,47,48]. Postural information is less ambiguous than facial configuration when perceived at high intensity, from a distance, etc.…”

Monkeys preferentially process body information while viewing affective displays.

“…Increasing evidence from humans indicates that contextual information – especially information about the body – influences how we understand facial behaviors (Hassin et al, 2013). The body also appears to communicate information about an individual’s emotion (de Gelder, 2006; de Gelder, de Borst, & Watson, 2015; Klin, Jones, Schultz, Volkmar, & Cohen, 2002; Kret & de Gelder, 2010; Kret, Stekelenburg, de Gelder, & Roelofs, 2015; Riby & Hancock, 2008; Smilek, Birmingham, Cameron, Bischof, & Kingstone, 2006; de Gelder, de Borst, & Watson, 2015; Kret, Stekelenburg, de Gelder, & Roelofs, 2015; for a reviews Hassin et al, 2013; Enea & Iancu, 2015; Hassin et al, 2013). Given the strong evolutionary claims made about homologies of emotion-related facial behaviors (Ekman, 1972; Keltner & Ekman, 2000; Shariff & Tracy, 2011) and the importance of bodies for communicating social information (Holland, Wolf, Looser, & Cuddy, 2016) in the absence of comparative data, evaluating how nonhuman primates process information about bodies during affective displays is critically important for establishing strong evolutionary theory.…”