Abstract
Research into the expression and perception of emotions has mostly focused on facial expressions. Recently, body postures have become increasingly important in research, but knowledge on muscle activity during the perception or expression of emotion is lacking. The current study continues the development of a Body Action Coding System (BACS), which was initiated in a previous study, and described the involvement of muscles in the neck, shoulders and arms during expression of fear and anger. The current study expands the BACS by assessing the activity patterns of three additional muscles. Surface electromyography of muscles in the neck (upper trapezius descendens), forearms (extensor carpi ulnaris), lower back (erector spinae longissimus) and calves (peroneus longus) were measured during active expression and passive viewing of fearful and angry body expressions. The muscles in the forearm were strongly active for anger expression and to a lesser extent for fear expression. In contrast, muscles in the calves were recruited slightly more for fearful expressions. It was also found that muscles automatically responded to the perception of emotion, without any overt movement. The observer's forearms responded to the perception of fear, while the muscles used for leaning backwards were activated when faced with an angry adversary. Lastly, the calf responded immediately when a fearful person was seen, but responded slower to anger. There is increasing interest in developing systems that are able to create or recognize emotional body language for the development of avatars, robots, and online environments. To that end, multiple coding systems have been developed that can either interpret or create bodily expressions based on static postures, motion capture data or videos. However, the BACS is the first coding system based on muscle activity.
Highlights
Faces, bodies, and voices are the major sources of social and emotional information
Some of this resulted in the creation of the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) which extensively describes which muscles are recruited for emotional expressions (Ekman and Friesen, 1978)
All models of time courses of electromyography recordings (EMG) activity in the active anger condition for the muscles on the right benefited from the inclusion of random intercepts, even though the parameters themselves were not always significant
Summary
Bodies, and voices are the major sources of social and emotional information. There is a vast amount of research on how humans perceive and express facial expressions. The perception of an angry or fearful person activates a network in the brain that facilitates the perception and execution of action, such as the (pre)motor areas and the cerebellum (Grezes et al, 2007; Pichon et al, 2008, 2009, 2012) This corroborates the idea that in daily life, expressing emotion with the body is an automatic, reflex-like behavior that is often triggered as soon as a response is required to something in the environment (Frijda, 2010). These results inspired the question of whether automatic and covert muscle responses to emotion are limited to the face, or whether
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