Emotional Bodies Research Articles

Anger fosters action. Fast responses in a motor task involving approach movements toward angry faces and bodies.

Efficiently responding to others’ emotions, especially threatening expressions such as anger and fear, can have great survival value. Previous research has shown that humans have a bias toward threatening stimuli. Most of these studies focused on facial expressions, yet emotions are expressed by the whole body, and not just by the face. Body language contains a direct action component, and activates action preparation areas in the brain more than facial expressions. Hence, biases toward threat may be larger following threatening bodily expressions as compared to facial expressions. The current study investigated reaction times of movements directed toward emotional bodies and faces. For this purpose, a new task was developed where participants were standing in front of a computer screen on which angry, fearful, and neutral faces and bodies were presented which they had to touch as quickly as possible. Results show that participants responded faster to angry than to neutral stimuli, regardless of the source (face or body). No significant difference was observed between fearful and neutral stimuli, demonstrating that the threat bias was not related to the negativity of the stimulus, but likely to the directness of the threat in relation to the observer. Whereas fearful stimuli might signal an environmental threat that requires further exploration before action, angry expressions signal a direct threat to the observer, asking for immediate action. This study provides a novel and implicit method to directly test the speed of actions toward emotions from the whole body.

Seeing fearful body language rapidly freezes the observer's motor cortex

Fearful body language is a salient signal alerting the observer to the presence of a potential threat in the surrounding environment. Although detecting potential threats may trigger an immediate reduction of motor output in animals (i.e., freezing behavior), it is unclear at what point in time similar reductions occur in the human motor cortex and whether they originate from excitatory or inhibitory processes. Using single-pulse and paired-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), here we tested the hypothesis that the observer's motor cortex implements extremely fast suppression of motor readiness when seeing emotional bodies – and fearful body expressions in particular. Participants observed pictures of body postures and categorized them as happy, fearful or neutral while receiving TMS over the right or left motor cortex at 100–125msec after picture onset. In three different sessions, we assessed corticospinal excitability, short intracortical inhibition (SICI) and intracortical facilitation (ICF). Independently of the stimulated hemisphere and the time of the stimulation, watching fearful bodies suppressed ICF relative to happy and neutral body expressions. Moreover, happy expressions reduced ICF relative to neutral actions. No changes in corticospinal excitability or SICI were found during the task. These findings show extremely rapid bilateral modulation of the motor cortices when seeing emotional bodies, with stronger suppression of motor readiness when seeing fearful bodies. Our results provide neurophysiological support for the evolutionary notions that emotion perception is inherently linked to action systems and that fear-related cues induce an urgent mobilization of motor reactions.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation reveals two functionally distinct stages of motor cortex involvement during perception of emotional body language.

Studies indicate that perceiving emotional body language recruits fronto-parietal regions involved in action execution. However, the nature of such motor activation is unclear. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) we provide correlational and causative evidence of two distinct stages of motor cortex engagement during emotion perception. Participants observed pictures of body expressions and categorized them as happy, fearful or neutral while receiving TMS over the left or right motor cortex at 150 and 300 ms after picture onset. In the early phase (150 ms), we observed a reduction of excitability for happy and fearful emotional bodies that was specific to the right hemisphere and correlated with participants’ disposition to feel personal distress. This ‘orienting’ inhibitory response to emotional bodies was also paralleled by a general drop in categorization accuracy when stimulating the right but not the left motor cortex. Conversely, at 300 ms, greater excitability for negative, positive and neutral movements was found in both hemispheres. This later motor facilitation marginally correlated with participants’ tendency to assume the psychological perspectives of others and reflected simulation of the movement implied in the neutral and emotional body expressions. These findings highlight the motor system’s involvement during perception of emotional bodies. They suggest that fast orienting reactions to emotional cues—reflecting neural processing necessary for visual perception—occur before motor features of the observed emotional expression are simulated in the motor system and that distinct empathic dispositions influence these two neural motor phenomena. Implications for theories of embodied simulation are discussed.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00429-014-0825-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Common network for the processing of dynamic emotional bodies contains information to discriminate individual basic emotions

Common network for the processing of dynamic emotional bodies contains information to discriminate individual basic emotions

‘It's called Girl Scouts, not, like, Woman Scouts’: emotional labour and girls' bodies

A key part of the American Girl Scouts organization is their iconic annual cookie sale, which is promoted as providing girls with invaluable business and leadership skills. We argue that it also trains girls in the gendered practice of emotional labour. By learning how to suppress or express certain feelings in public spaces in order to net more profit, girls are socialized to not only regulate their emotions, but also their bodies. This becomes complicated as girls become teens, as they receive mixed messages regarding their bodies. No longer considered to be ‘cute girls’, teens' bodies occupy a space between adolescence and adulthood, which often creates tension in public space. We explore this tension and teens' responses.

BESST (Bochum Emotional Stimulus Set)—A pilot validation study of a stimulus set containing emotional bodies and faces from frontal and averted views

This article introduces the freely available Bochum Emotional Stimulus Set (BESST), which contains pictures of bodies and faces depicting either a neutral expression or one of the six basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise), presented from two different perspectives (0° frontal view vs. camera averted by 45° to the left). The set comprises 565 frontal view and 564 averted view pictures of real-life bodies with masked facial expressions and 560 frontal and 560 averted view faces which were synthetically created using the FaceGen 3.5 Modeller. All stimuli were validated in terms of categorization accuracy and the perceived naturalness of the expression. Additionally, each facial stimulus was morphed into three age versions (20/40/60 years). The results show high recognition of the intended facial expressions, even under speeded forced-choice conditions, as corresponds to common experimental settings. The average naturalness ratings for the stimuli range between medium and high.

Emotional Geographies of Method Acting in Asian American Theater

Method acting, in both theory and practice, is a technique that actively creates emotionally embodied performances. Yet the theory of method acting views emotions as experiences generated by an individual, independent of his or her social or geographical context. This article offers a spatialized rereading of method acting, highlighting the relational spatialities involved in the bodily performance of emotion, thereby developing literatures in theater on space, emotion, and meaning. A focus on Asian American theater enables an examination of the racial politics of this acting technique and its emotional performances. By drawing on four months of ethnographic research working as an assistant stage manager on an Asian American theater production, my analysis demonstrates how relational spaces of emotion enabled fluid performances of racial identity. The performance of emotion was marked by an ambivalent tension between seeing emotional experience as universal and also being marked by racial difference. Examining the theatrical practice of method acting therefore opens up geographical discussions surrounding race and emotion beyond a critique of universality or a focus on difference by attempting to reconcile these contradictory perspectives of emotions in performance. Dramatic forms of theater can be considered sites through which to demonstrate the complexity of creating, experiencing, expressing, and reading emotional bodies.

Impaired integration of emotional faces and affective body context in a rare case of developmental visual agnosia

In the current study we examined the recognition of facial expressions embedded in emotionally expressive bodies in case LG, an individual with a rare form of developmental visual agnosia (DVA) who suffers from severe prosopagnosia. Neuropsychological testing demonstrated that LG’s agnosia is characterized by profoundly impaired visual integration. Unlike individuals with typical developmental prosopagnosia who display specific difficulties with face identity (but typically not expression) recognition, LG was also impaired at recognizing isolated facial expressions. By contrast, he successfully recognized the expressions portrayed by faceless emotional bodies handling affective paraphernalia. When presented with contextualized faces in emotional bodies his ability to detect the emotion expressed by a face did not improve even if it was embedded in an emotionally-congruent body context. Furthermore, in contrast to controls, LG displayed an abnormal pattern of contextual influence from emotionally-incongruent bodies. The results are interpreted in the context of a general integration deficit in DVA, suggesting that impaired integration may extend from the level of the face to the level of the full person.

Emotional modulation of body-selective visual areas

Emotionally expressive faces have been shown to modulate activation in visual cortex, including face-selective regions in ventral temporal lobe. Here, we tested whether emotionally expressive bodies similarly modulate activation in body-selective regions. We show that dynamic displays of bodies with various emotional expressions vs neutral bodies, produce significant activation in two distinct body-selective visual areas, the extrastriate body area and the fusiform body area. Multi-voxel pattern analysis showed that the strength of this emotional modulation was related, on a voxel-by-voxel basis, to the degree of body selectivity, while there was no relation with the degree of selectivity for faces. Across subjects, amygdala responses to emotional bodies positively correlated with the modulation of body-selective areas. Together, these results suggest that emotional cues from body movements produce topographically selective influences on category-specific populations of neurons in visual cortex, and these increases may implicate discrete modulatory projections from the amygdala.