Body Expression Research Articles

Blocking facial mimicry affects recognition of facial and body expressions.

Facial mimicry is commonly defined as the tendency to imitate—at a sub-threshold level—facial expressions of other individuals. Numerous studies support a role of facial mimicry in recognizing others’ emotions. However, the underlying functional mechanism is unclear. A prominent hypothesis considers facial mimicry as based on an action-perception loop, leading to the prediction that facial mimicry should be observed only when processing others’ facial expressions. Nevertheless, previous studies have also detected facial mimicry during observation of emotional bodily expressions. An emergent alternative hypothesis is that facial mimicry overtly reflects the simulation of an “emotion”, rather than the reproduction of a specific observed motor pattern. In the present study, we tested whether blocking mimicry (“Bite”) on the lower face disrupted recognition of happy expressions conveyed by either facial or body expressions. In Experiment 1, we tested participants’ ability to identify happy, fearful and neutral expressions in the Bite condition and in two control conditions. In Experiment 2, to ensure that such a manipulation selectively affects emotion recognition, we tested participants’ ability to recognize emotional expressions, as well as the actors’ gender, under the Bite condition and a control condition. Finally, we investigated the relationship between dispositional empathy and emotion recognition under the condition of blocked mimicry. Our findings demonstrated that blocking mimicry on the lower face hindered recognition of happy facial and body expressions, while the recognition of neutral and fearful expressions was not affected by the mimicry manipulation. The mimicry manipulation did not affect the gender discrimination task. Furthermore, the impairment of happy expression recognition correlated with empathic traits. These results support the role of facial mimicry in emotion recognition and suggest that facial mimicry reflects a global sensorimotor simulation of others’ emotions rather than a muscle-specific reproduction of an observed motor expression.

Consumption, Violence, and Bodily Expression in Contemporary Japanese Art

Consumption, Violence, and Bodily Expression in Contemporary Japanese Art

"It is a different world in here": collective identification and shared experiential knowledge between psychiatric inpatients.

This paper explores the social relations between inpatients in psychiatric wards. Combining Barker's (2002) concept of 'collective illness identity' with Nelson's (1993) concept of 'epistemological communities', I draw attention to the inpatients' collective identification and experiential knowledge. Through the analysis, three aspects of the inpatients' relationships are unfolded. First, how the inpatients, through bodily expressions and narrative accounts, construct a collective illness identity based on shared experiences of symptoms and suffering. Second, the ways in which the inpatients use their shared experiential knowledge to support one another and challenge the mental health professionals. Third, how the inpatients' reflections on the long-term potential of their relationships reveal a number of concerns related to their continuation. Centrally, the paper points to the potential and challenges that arise from the inpatients' relations to one another and their embeddedness in a specific time and space. Empirically, the paper draws on five months of participant observation conducted in two psychiatric wards in Denmark and interviews with 14 psychiatric patients.

A moment within the psychoanalytic psychotherapy of an adult female patient – The meanings of nonverbal and bodily expressions

ABSTRACT This case study adresses the multiple meanings of a moment of strong non-verbal and bodily expression within a course of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. One therapy session was video-recorded in the private practice of the therapist-researcher. In selecting important moments for qualitative analysis, two criteria were used: 1) the moment included intense nonverbal or bodily expression 2) the moment was experienced by the therapist as intensely affecting, both in meanings and in bodily experiences. The automatic silence detection (ASD) algorithm was used to detect and locate changes in sound energy in the session audio. The moment selected for this study involved unexpected laughter. To capture the multiple layers of the psychotherapeutic interactions, the moment was analyzed using a micro-analytic approach, applying the Sandwich model of Harrison, which takes into consideration both the verbal and nonverbal interaction. Animated complementary bodily expressions were observed, mostly in congruence with the words. It appeared that the moment marked a rift in communication and at the same time the possibility to open up new insights into intergenerational traumas. The paper discusses the benefits of the research in the work of the therapist.

Your Face and Moves Seem Happier When I Smile.

In this experiment, we replicated the effect of muscle engagement on perception such that the recognition of another's facial expressions was biased by the observer's facial muscular activity (Blaesi & Wilson, 2010). We extended this replication to show that such a modulatory effect is also observed for the recognition of dynamic bodily expressions. Via a multilab and within-subjects approach, we investigated the emotion recognition of point-light biological walkers, along with that of morphed face stimuli, while subjects were or were not holding a pen in their teeth. Under the "pen-in-the-teeth" condition, participants tended to lower their threshold of perception of happy expressions in facial stimuli compared to the "no-pen" condition, thus replicating the experiment by Blaesi and Wilson (2010). A similar effect was found for the biological motion stimuli such that participants lowered their threshold to perceive happy walkers in the pen-in-the-teeth condition compared to the no-pen condition. This pattern of results was also found in a second experiment in which the no-pen condition was replaced by a situation in which participants held a pen in their lips ("pen-in-lips" condition). These results suggested that facial muscular activity alters the recognition of not only facial expressions but also bodily expressions.

Автоматическое распознавание вовлеченности в образовании: критический обзор исследований

This paper reviews the key research of the automatic engagement detection in education. Automatic engagement detection is necessary in enhancing educational process, there is a lack of out-of-the-box technical solutions. Engagement can be detected while tracing learning-centered affects: interest, confusion, frustration, delight, anger, boredom, and their facial and bodily expressions. Most of the researchers reveal these emotions on video using Facial Action Coding System (FACS). But there doesn’t exist a set of ready-made criteria to detect engagement and many scientists use additional techniques like self-reports, audio-data, physiological indicators and others. In this paper we present a review of most recent researches in the field of automatic affect and engagement detection and present our theoretical model of engagement in educational process based on the learning-centered affects’s detection. Engagement is understood as an affective and cognitive state, accompanying learning process. While reaching optimal engagement students experience various affects, where highly positive and negative feelings mean that a student is close to be engaged in the learning process.

Od ikonizacije tela do nalikovanja Hristu - tragovima procesa decentralizacije ikoničkog poretka u periodu kasne antike

Representing humans in visual arts is one of the oldest, most accessible, and theoretically thoroughly studied modes of semiotic interchange. Only lately, though, attention of researchers has been drawn to the fact that the relation of likeness between the image and the person (or event) represented by the same image is not a one directional cognitive formula, and that people often tend to identify their behaviour and their bodies with (their own) images. In other words, together with the basic semiotic proposition implying that the (mimetic/artistic) images are supposed to represent the bodies, it is possible to notice the representational processes through which bodies are becoming images of those very images. The ways this alternative representational mode has been used in Late Antiquity, together with the ways this kind of semiotic interchange influenced the bodily expressions of piety in those periods resulting in gradual erasure of the cognitive borderlines between bodily and iconic modalities of presence are the topics of this research.

Transformation of gender characteristics women teachers in the process of professional activities

The teaching profession is one of the oldest professions on earth. The role of the teacher was performed only by smart and talented people, who from time immemorial were only men. The teacher at all times had an important task, which was to educate a worthy younger generation and transfer the accumulated experience to it. Currently, there is a feminization of education, that is, the role of a teacher is performed mainly by women, mainly feminine. The very same pedagogical activity “requires” from a specialist such qualities as dedication, energy and the ability to lead, which are traditionally male. Under the influence of professional requirements, the personality of the employee changes, which entails his deformation, which also leads to a decrease in the efficiency of labor activity and disturbances in everyday life. Many authors are of the opinion that the whole personality is characterized not by masculinity or femininity, but by androgyny. It is understood as the unification of the female emotional-expressive style and the male instrumental style of activity, freedom of bodily expressions and preferences from the rigid dictate of gender roles. Such a personality is considered to be more adaptive. In the course of our research, we found that feminine teachers prevail among modern women educators. In the group with more than 26 years of teaching experience there are more of them than in the other two groups, while in the group with 16 to 25 years of experience they are the least. Masculinity is observed only in the group with experience from 0 to 15 years, and then in a small amount. The number of androgynous female teachers is predominant in all three groups.

Multiple responsivity: strata of bodily expression

Multiple responsivity: strata of bodily expression

Dimensione corporea emozionale nell'atto comunicativo : come le emozioni contribuiscono al messaggio

The intent of this paper is to analyze the contribution of emotions, as an act of nonverbal communication, to sensemaking. Actually, the focus of our analysis is not on the psychology of emotions but rather on the semantics and pragmatics of facial expressions, which encode emotions and/or the state of mind, and how facial expressions communicate meaningfully. To study this empirically, an advertisement of the Swiss bank CLER, whose message is completely based on nonverbal communication, was presented to 20 students of the Faculty of Communication Sciences of Università della Svizzera italiana (USI). The qualitative analysis of the acquired data shows how the bodily expressions of emotions, called affect displays (Ekman & Friesen 1969), transport directly, effectively and efficiently a meaning.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: An Alternative Paradigm

Trauma focussed treatments for PTSD, have limited efficacy and utility. The purpose of this paper is to review a) the theoretical base of TFT’s, in particular the evidence that a flawed traumatic memory lies at the heart of the development of PTSD b) the evidence that a focus on the traumatic memory is a necessary part of the evidence based treatment of PTSD and c) to distil an alternative model of PTSD. The author reviews existing trauma focussed treatments to determine a) what may be the active ingredients for change and b) treatment acceptability. He suggests that it is not proven that the qualities of the traumatic memory are pivotal in the development and maintenance of PTSD. Psychogenic amnesia is not found to be significantly associated with outcome, compared to the bodily expressions of exaggerated startle response and hypervigilance. There appears no added value in re-living the traumatic event per se, rather the latter may prevent treatment compliance. The author suggests an alternative conceptualisation of PTSD, that does not appeal to a notion of arrested information processing but suggests instead that PTSD arises from a state of terrified surprise, (which is a combination of an exaggerated startle response and hypervigilance) which the person explains in terms of a hostile environment.

Samskipti án orða. Tengsl óyrtrar hegðunar yfirmanns og tilfinningalegrar líðan starfsfólks

Líðan starfsfólks getur haft rekstrarleg áhrif á fyrirtæki og því er mikilvægt fyrir stjórnendur að leggja áherslu á að starfsfólki líði vel. Yfirmenn geta aukið líkur á því með því að leggja áherslu á að eiga í góðum samskiptum við það. Markmið rannsóknarinnar var að kanna tengsl á milli upplifunar af óyrtum samskiptum yfirmanns og tilfinningalegri líðan starfsfólks. Einblínt var á þrjár gerðir tilfinningalegrar líðan sem eru mikilvægar þegar kemur að líðan starfsfólks í vinnu; tilfinningalegan stuðning, tilfinningalega vinnu og tilfinningalegt gildi. Í gegnum rafrænt hentugleikaúrtak fengust svör frá 802 einstaklingum á vinnumarkaði. Niðurstöðurnar sýndu að upplifun á óyrtum samskiptum yfirmanna hefur jákvæð tengsl við tilfinningalegan stuðning sem felst m.a. í því að yfirmenn séu aðgengilegir og hlusti á starfsfólk. Upplifun á jákvæðum óyrtum samskiptum yfirmanna reyndist jafnframt draga úr skynjun starfsfólks á tilfinningalegri vinnu en slík vinna getur verið óæskileg og haft neikvæð áhrif á starfsfólk. Að auki sýndu niðurstöðurnar að skynjun starfsfólks á tilfinningalegu gildi er jákvæðara ef það upplifir jákvæð óyrt samskipti frá yfirmanni sínum, en fyrri rannsóknir hafa sýnt að jákvætt tilfinningalegt gildi hefur jákvæð áhrif á starfsánægju og leiðir til jákvæðrar hegðunar inni á vinnistöðum. Miðað við niðurstöður rannsóknarinnar eru það fyrst og fremst óyrt samskipti sem snúa að andlitstjáningu og líkamstjáningu sem skýra tilfinningalega líðan starfsfólks. Yfirmenn ættu því að leggja áherslu á að halda augnsambandi við starfsfólk sitt þegar samskipti eiga sér stað og sýna jákvæð svipbrigði eins og bros. Jafnframt ætti að leggja áherslu á afslappaða en líflega líkamsstöðu, t.d. með því að nota hendurnar þegar talað er. Rannsóknin styrkir fræðilegar undirstöður varðandi samskipti á vinnustað og veitir innsýn í lítið rannsakað viðfangsefni á sviði stjórnunar.

WEIGHT AS AN EXPRESSION OF HUMAN SPIRITUAL STATE (ON THE MATERIAL OF THE NEXT FALLING V. VINNYCHENKO)

The article deals with the reflection of human spiritual state through the body in Vladimir Vynnychenko’s later fiction – his novels "The Solar Machine", "The New Commandment", and "The Leper Colony". In their form, these texts are closer to political treatises being aimed at solving certain social problems. They postulate the explicit correlation between a person’s state of health and the level of his/her morality, "purity" of life, and predisposition to suicide. The research singles out the main indicators of destructive human nature, which have a bodily expression; the relationship between physical and spiritual degradation of the individual; the author's variant of solving the problem of spiritual and physical decay of mankind. It is postulated that in the writer’s fictional world physical degradation leads to a character’s gradual moral decay, reduction of one’s requirements for oneself and others, and rapid adaptation to the living conditions of a destructive society. This research, although revealing the ways somatic vocabulary is used in V. Vynnychenko’s later works, does not exhaust the issue. Further exploration may result in more in-depth studies of corporeality in his writings of different periods, as well as their comparison with the texts of other emigré writers (Vasyl Barka, Ivan Bagryany, and others).

The Distinctive Constitution of Feeling Hurt

Abstract. What is the nature of feeling hurt? This question is answered by systematically reviewing and integrating theories and empirical findings on feeling hurt using Lazarus’ theory of emotion. Following this approach, feeling hurt is constituted by a primary appraisal of an illegitimate devaluation and by a secondary appraisal of low controllability. This appraisal pattern activates an action tendency to withdraw from an interaction. This theory leads to several hypotheses for the appraisal (e.g., that an increase in appraisals of controllability should turn hurt into anger) on facial, bodily, and behavioral expressions as well as on the communicative function of feeling hurt. Furthermore, important conceptual distinctions between a broad and a narrow concept of feeling hurt as well as between feeling hurt as an emotion and a long-term emotional episode of hurt are introduced. Finally, feeling hurt is compared with humiliation, shame, guilt, disappointment, sadness, and anger.

GOOD SUBJECTS, BAD OBJECTS

This article discusses the material culture of the commercial photography studio in nineteenth-century America, examining a succession of objects that made portrait photographs work: technologically, by controlling and shaping bodily movement in order to meet the shifting demands of photographic apparatuses, but also socially, by helping to construct and display bodies in culturally appropriate and putatively revealing ways. It focuses on three varieties of photographic objects, which appeared in studios in roughly chronological order: first, the ubiquitous and much-discussed head rest; second, purpose-built photographic furniture; and third, supplementary accessories intended to produce photogenic states of absorption. Taken together, these materials — and contemporaries’ responses to them — demonstrate how early commercial portrait photographers and their subjects understood photography’s capacity to represent the body and to mediate social identity. They also demonstrate how, through bodily expression aided by industrially produced objects and calibrated to anticipated spectators, contemporaries negotiated and normalized rapid changes in imaging technologies in modernity, and exploited the possibilities that modern visual media offered for the presentation of the self.

Adrienne Herndon's Homeplaces: Shakespeare and Black Resistance in Atlanta, c.1906

This essay examines the political significance of the career of Atlanta-based Shakespearean Adrienne McNeil Herndon in the early twentieth century. It contextualizes Herndon's writing in the activist journal Voice of the Negro and elucidates the radicalism of Herndon's Shakespeare work at Atlanta University and beyond. More broadly, the essay shows how Herndon's performances and pedagogy – especially her focus on elocution work, bodily expressivity, domestic spaces, and visual culture – repeatedly challenged the white supremacist culture of the Jim Crow South, offering black Americans a way to resist racial terrorism and endure racial trauma.

A Rights-Based Approach to Youth Sexting: Challenging Risk, Shame, and the Denial of Rights to Bodily and Sexual Expression Within Youth Digital Sexual Culture

Educational interventions on youth sexting often focus on individual sexters or would-be sexters, and are driven by the aim of encouraging young people to abstain from producing and sharing personal sexual images. This approach has been criticised for failing to engage with the complex sociocultural context to youth sexting. Drawing upon qualitative group and one-to-one interviews with 41 young people aged 14 to 18 living in a county in south-east England, I explore young people’s perceptions and practices surrounding sexting. By taking a grounded theory approach to the research, I reveal how young people’s shaming of digitally mediated sexual self-expression shaped and was shaped by a denial of rights to bodily and sexual autonomy and integrity. This denial of rights underpinned harmful sexting practices, including violations of privacy and consent, victim blaming, and bullying. I conclude that responses to youth sexting should attend to this broader youth cultural context, emphasise the roles and responsibilities of bystanders, and encourage a collectivist digital sexual ethics based upon rights to one’s body and freedom from harm (Albury, New Media and Society 19(5):713–725, 2017; Dobson and Ringrose, Sex Education 16(1):8–21, 2015).

Network Representations of Facial and Bodily Expressions: Evidence From Multivariate Connectivity Pattern Classification.

Emotions can be perceived from both facial and bodily expressions. Our previous study has found the successful decoding of facial expressions based on the functional connectivity (FC) patterns. However, the role of the FC patterns in the recognition of bodily expressions remained unclear, and no neuroimaging studies have adequately addressed the question of whether emotions perceiving from facial and bodily expressions are processed rely upon common or different neural networks. To address this, the present study collected functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from a block design experiment with facial and bodily expression videos as stimuli (three emotions: anger, fear, and joy), and conducted multivariate pattern classification analysis based on the estimated FC patterns. We found that in addition to the facial expressions, bodily expressions could also be successfully decoded based on the large-scale FC patterns. The emotion classification accuracies for the facial expressions were higher than that for the bodily expressions. Further contributive FC analysis showed that emotion-discriminative networks were widely distributed in both hemispheres, containing regions that ranged from primary visual areas to higher-level cognitive areas. Moreover, for a particular emotion, discriminative FCs for facial and bodily expressions were distinct. Together, our findings highlight the key role of the FC patterns in the emotion processing, indicating how large-scale FC patterns reconfigure in processing of facial and bodily expressions, and suggest the distributed neural representation for the emotion recognition. Furthermore, our results also suggest that the human brain employs separate network representations for facial and bodily expressions of the same emotions. This study provides new evidence for the network representations for emotion perception and may further our understanding of the potential mechanisms underlying body language emotion recognition.

Organizational costs of compensating for mind-body dissonance through conspiracies and superstitions

Maintaining physical expressions that contradict one’s internal states creates stress and burnout. Surprisingly, little is known about whether such incongruence affects organizationally relevant cognitive consequences. We propose that mind-body dissonance (MBD), a control-diminishing experience wherein the mind and body undergo contradictory states, increases compensatory illusory pattern perception (IPP) and jeopardizes decisions and trusting behavior. Experiments 1 and 2 found that being induced to display bodily expressions that contradict one’s emotions in a mental-physical coordination or customer service context, increased IPP in the form of conspiratorial and superstitious thinking. Experiment 3 found that MBD reduced trusting behavior through feelings of lacking control and conspiratorial thinking in serial. Finally, examining the mechanism through a moderation design, Experiment 4 found that misattributing feelings of lacking control to an external stimulus eliminated MBD’s effect on a superstition-related managerial decision. We discuss the value of this motivational approach in understanding MBD’s organizational implications.

Gender Affirming Voicework: An Introduction for Music Therapy

Informed by personal experiences, my queer autoethnographic research, and literature from the fields of speech-language pathology, vocal pedagogy, and music therapy, I offer an introduction to gender affirming voicework in music therapy, the training that it might involve, and several questions/issues that need further exploration. As a new holistic method grounded in a queer theoretical framework, I envision this work to be a therapeutic space focused on accessing and embodying affirming gender expressions by working with the intersections of the physical voice, the psychological voice, and the body as these each become relevant to an individual. This work involves the use of singing, vocal improvisation, chanting, toning, movement, imagery, and relaxation experiences to address areas of vocal function and emotion/identity. Stigma and trauma can come with living in this incredibly gendered and binary world. As such, gender affirming voicework emphasizes radically and queerly listening to our own vocal, psychological, and bodily expressions and the ways these fluidly shift from moment to moment. This is in efforts to speak, sing, move, and live in the most affirming and authentic way we can.