Dataset Information

Beyond Face Value: Evidence for the Universality of Bodily Expressions of Emotion.

ABSTRACT: Research on emotion communication typically focuses on facial expressions, yet scientists dating back to Darwin have noted the importance of the body in conveying emotions. In fact, studies have found that the body is reliably used to express and recognize anger, fear, and sadness, by individuals in several industrialized populations. Here, we provide the first evidence that bodily expressions of these three emotions are reliably recognized by members of an isolated small-scale traditional society: the Mayangna of Nicaragua. Specifically, we found that recognition rates for sadness and anger bodily expressions were high, and recognition rates for a fear bodily expression were lower but still significantly greater than chance. Given that the Mayangna are unlikely to have learned these bodily expressions through cross-cultural transmission, their ability to recognize these displays provides strong evidence for the universality of each expression.

Supplementary information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-021-00052-y.

SUBMITTER: Witkower Z

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9382937 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Beyond Face Value: Evidence for the Universality of Bodily Expressions of Emotion.

Witkower Zachary Z Hill Alexander K AK Koster Jeremy J Tracy Jessica L JL

Affective science 20210903 3

Research on emotion communication typically focuses on facial expressions, yet scientists dating back to Darwin have noted the importance of the body in conveying emotions. In fact, studies have found that the body is reliably used to express and recognize anger, fear, and sadness, by individuals in several industrialized populations. Here, we provide the first evidence that bodily expressions of these three emotions are reliably recognized by members of an isolated small-scale traditional socie ...[more]

PMID: 36059900

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Project description: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.

Dataset Information

Beyond Face Value: Evidence for the Universality of Bodily Expressions of Emotion.

Supplementary information

Publications

Beyond Face Value: Evidence for the Universality of Bodily Expressions of Emotion.

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