Emotional Body Expressions Research Articles

Embodying Emotion

Recent theories of embodied cognition suggest new ways to look at how we process emotional information. The theories suggest that perceiving and thinking about emotion involve perceptual, somatovisceral, and motoric reexperiencing (collectively referred to as "embodiment") of the relevant emotion in one's self. The embodiment of emotion, when induced in human participants by manipulations of facial expression and posture in the laboratory, causally affects how emotional information is processed. Congruence between the recipient's bodily expression of emotion and the sender's emotional tone of language, for instance, facilitates comprehension of the communication, whereas incongruence can impair comprehension. Taken all together, recent findings provide a scientific account of the familiar contention that "when you're smiling, the whole world smiles with you."

Similar facial electromyographic responses to faces, voices, and body expressions

Observing facial expressions automatically prompts imitation, as can be seen with facial electromyography. To investigate whether this reaction is driven by automatic mimicry or by recognition of the emotion displayed we recorded electromyograph responses to presentations of facial expressions, face-voice combinations and bodily expressions, which resulted from happy and fearful stimuli. We observed emotion-specific facial muscle activity (zygomaticus for happiness, corrugator for fear) for all three stimulus categories. This indicates that spontaneous facial expression is more akin to an emotional reaction than to facial mimicry and imitation of the seen face stimulus. We suggest that seeing a facial expression, an emotional body expression or hearing an emotional tone of voice all activate the affect program corresponding to the emotion displayed.

Toward a Biological Theory of Emotional Body Language

Edmund Sapir famously remarked that blowing a candle produces a gesture and a sound that are identical to the gesture and sound made when pronouncing the (German) consonant W. The example illustrates the central claim that what makes a sound a consonant or a candle blowing is not in the sound or in the gesture but represents the contribution of the linguistic and the movement system in which the gesture and the sound of speaking a “W” or of candle blowing do in fact function. Theorists of motor behavior also must confront this issue and ask on what grounds motor behavior can convey meaning. Here we raise this issue by briefly addressing the question whether emotional body expressions belong to our competence for emotional body language. Communication signals used by higher organisms come in many shapes and forms and involve all sensory modalities. Among all these signals actions involving the whole body and expressing emotion (emotional body language, or EBL for short) by their saliency and frequency occupy a privileged position in many species. There is increasing behavioral and neurofunctional evidence for a specialized system of EBL perception in humans, which involves among others subcortical structures including the amygdala and cortical areas consisting mainly of premotor cortex, superior temporal sulcus, and inferior frontal gyrus. With application of neuroscientific methods to this relatively underexplored domain, at least in human emotion research, a major challenge now is to outline what the specific questions are for a biological theory of EBL (de Gelder 2006). Our ability to communicate through EBL traditionally counts as a nonverbal skill and therefore, much as the expression “body language” is entrenched in popular parlance, it is most often assumed that EBL is not really a language in any systematic and serious sense of the term. Yet EBL may share some fundamental properties with language, and exploring what these would have to be may bring into focus what issues a biological theory of EBL is up against. Among the principal characteristics EBL shares with language, we figure the facts that the signal is complex and consists of coarticulated movements of different body parts, that it is perceived automatically, and that acquisition in ontogeny is rapid and effortless. Another salient characteristic is recursiveness. Just as the fluent speaker is capable of an almost limitless number of speech utterances, the presence of a normal ability for perception and production of EBL means that we are capable of an almost limitless number of body movements to express emotions with. On the perception side, the observer represents the visual input provided by observing EBL in a way that ultimately gives him access to the emotional meaning and intention. On the production side, the agent encodes his emotional meaning in a behavioral intention and ultimately into motor output. As is the case in linguistic theory, a critical question is how the perception and production side are linked. Different alternatives for the internal representation of language continue to be vigorously discussed; it is fair to say that many mysteries remain as to the relation between perception and the internal representation on the one hand and the internal representation and production side on the other. While there is agreement that perception and production are two sides of the same coin, it is unclear how each is connected and whether each has its own underlying representation system. Perception and production each take as their input a very different set of signals. The latter maps from linguistic intentions to movements of the articulators, the former from sounds patterns to thoughts. This problem of the so-called dual code has haunted linguists for a very long time. Theories of motor behavior face issues very similar to the ones debated in linguistics; for example, to develop models of how the brain perceives action in movement, how it distinguishes biological movement from motion and noise, whether to capture a particular human action in a single complex model or to make extensive use of semantic knowledge and a

Towards the neurobiology of emotional body language

People's faces show fear in many different circumstances. However, when people are terrified, as well as showing emotion, they run for cover. When we see a bodily expression of emotion, we immediately know what specific action is associated with a particular emotion, leaving little need for interpretation of the signal, as is the case for facial expressions. 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 automatically perceived and understood, and their role in emotional communication and decision-making.

Rapid perceptual integration of facial expression and emotional body language.

In our natural world, a face is usually encountered not as an isolated object but as an integrated part of a whole body. The face and the body both normally contribute in conveying the emotional state of the individual. Here we show that observers judging a facial expression are strongly influenced by emotional body language. Photographs of fearful and angry faces and bodies were used to create face-body compound images, with either matched or mismatched emotional expressions. When face and body convey conflicting emotional information, judgment of facial expression is hampered and becomes biased toward the emotion expressed by the body. Electrical brain activity was recorded from the scalp while subjects attended to the face and judged its emotional expression. An enhancement of the occipital P1 component as early as 115 ms after presentation onset points to the existence of a rapid neural mechanism sensitive to the degree of agreement between simultaneously presented facial and bodily emotional expressions, even when the latter are unattended.

Rational, intelligent organisation: neuroscience and the benefits of feelings

While an understanding of emotion as a social and cultural facet of work and organisations is winning acceptance, the bodily dimension of emotion is less well accepted. This paper presents findings from affective neuroscience which enhance our rich socio-cultural knowledge of emotion in the workplace. In particular, neuro-scientific evidence extends Simon's (1982) 'bounded rationality', enhancing neuro-economics, and challenges the popular but uncritical acceptance of 'emotional intelligence'. The role of bodily expressions of emotion in choice and decision-making and the unfolding knowledge of the neglected 'positive' emotions, are particularly promising contributions from affective neuroscience to organisational theory. I concur with Casey (2000) that a disembodied, post-modern, language-based treatment of emotions at work overlooks an important aspect of lived experience: how the body informs what we say or do next. This paper finds value in reading social science and neuroscience in conjunction, welcoming inter-disciplinarity and the crossing of methodological boundaries.

Bodily expression of emotion

The question whether body movements and body postures are indicative of specific emotions is a matter of debate. While some studies have found evidence for specific body movements accompanying specific 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 specific 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-specific movement and posture characteristics seem to exist, but that for body movements differences between emotions can be partly explained by the dimension of activation. While encoder (actor) differences are rather pronounced with respect to specific movement and posture habits, these differences are largely independent from the emotion-specific differences found. The results are discussed with respect to emotion-specific discrete expression models in contrast to dimensional models of emotion encoding. Copyright © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Emotion recognition in autism: coordinating faces and voices.

Autistic and non-autistic mentally retarded adolescents and young adults were individually matched for age and verbal ability and were given tasks in which they chose photographs of faces for emotionally expressive voices, and photographs of non-emotional things or events to accompany recorded sounds. The results were that relative to control subjects, autistic individuals performed less well on the emotion tasks than on the non-emotion tasks. The findings suggest that autistic individuals have a disability in recognizing bodily expressions of emotion, and that there is a degree of task-specificity to this impairment.