Chapter 8 - Bodily Expressions of Emotion

Summary

Emotions are often expressed or signaled via postures and movements of the whole body or its parts. This chapter surveys the smaller but important corpus of research devoted to investigating the perception of bodily expressed emotions and its neural substrate. It focuses on the visual cues underlying body and bodily emotion perception. The chapter begins with a consideration of what constitutes a bodily expression or signal of emotion, highlighting a difference between actions that directly convey an emotion and actions that do not but are nevertheless performed in an emotional way. It then briefly summarises studies that have demonstrated the ability of human observers to distinguish between and identify a range of emotions from body posture and movement stimuli. The chapter surveys the current state of knowledge about how the brain processes visual information relating to other people's bodies and bodily expressions of emotion.