The many faces of the emotional body

The perception of emotional signals is at the core of the study of the social brain. In this chapter, we discuss research in the field of affective and social neuroscience that specifically uses bodily expressions. Starting with the initial studies mapping the neural substrate of perception of simple bodily expressions, several steps have been taken to grasp the full extent of genuine interactions, from the use of multiple emotional cues, to dynamic social interactions, and recently the use of virtual reality. With increasing complexity of the emotional signals used in neuroscientific research, we can approximate the natural richness of the social and emotional reality.

[1]  J. Cutting,et al.  Recognizing the sex of a walker from a dynamic point-light display , 1977 .

[2]  Jean-Luc Anton,et al.  Recruitment of Both the Mirror and the Mentalizing Networks When Observing Social Interactions Depicted by Point-Lights: A Neuroimaging Study , 2011, PloS one.

[3]  Tobias Brosch,et al.  Faces in Context: A Review and Systematization of Contextual Influences on Affective Face Processing , 2012, Front. Psychology.

[4]  Marco Tamietto,et al.  Attention and awareness each influence amygdala activity for dynamic bodily expressions—a short review , 2012, Front. Integr. Neurosci..

[5]  Winfried Ilg,et al.  Spatiotemporal Tuning of the Facilitation of Biological Motion Perception by Concurrent Motor Execution , 2011, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[6]  D. S. Boomer,et al.  FACIAL AND BODILY EXPRESSION: A STUDY OF RECEPTIVITY OF EMOTIONAL CUES. , 1965, Psychiatry.

[7]  Mark C. Coulson,et al.  Attentional biases using the body in the crowd task: Are angry body postures detected more rapidly? , 2011, Cognition & emotion.

[8]  P. Downing,et al.  The neural basis of visual body perception , 2007, Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

[9]  K. Vogeley,et al.  Toward a second-person neuroscience 1 , 2013, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[10]  Istvan Molnar-Szakacs,et al.  Watching social interactions produces dorsomedial prefrontal and medial parietal BOLD fMRI signal increases compared to a resting baseline , 2004, NeuroImage.

[11]  Swann Pichon,et al.  Threat prompts defensive brain responses independently of attentional control. , 2012, Cerebral cortex.

[12]  S. Baron-Cohen,et al.  Another advanced test of theory of mind: evidence from very high functioning adults with autism or asperger syndrome. , 1997, Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines.

[13]  C. Darwin.  The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals , .

[14]  N. Hadjikhani,et al.  Fear fosters flight: a mechanism for fear contagion when perceiving emotion expressed by a whole body. , 2004, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[15]  K. Roelofs,et al.  Perception of Face and Body Expressions Using Electromyography, Pupillometry and Gaze Measures , 2013, Front. Psychology.

[16]  T. Flash,et al.  Expression of emotion in the kinematics of locomotion , 2012, Experimental Brain Research.

[17]  S. Lea,et al.  Perception of Emotion from Dynamic Point-Light Displays Represented in Dance , 1996, Perception.

[18]  Shlomo Bentin,et al.  The automaticity of emotional face-context integration. , 2011, Emotion.

[19]  N. Kanwisher,et al.  A Cortical Area Selective for Visual Processing of the Human Body , 2001, Science.

[20]  D. Lloyd,et al.  ‘Eavesdropping’ on social interactions biases threat perception in visuospatial pathways , 2008, Neuropsychologia.

[21]  H. Meeren,et al.  Beyond the face: exploring rapid influences of context on face processing. , 2006, Progress in brain research.

[22]  J. Cutting,et al.  Recognizing friends by their walk: Gait perception without familiarity cues , 1977 .

[23]  A. Roepstorff,et al.  The two-brain approach: how can mutually interacting brains teach us something about social interaction? , 2012, Front. Hum. Neurosci..

[24]  B. de Gelder,et al.  UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) When a smile becomes a fist : the perception of facial and bodily expressions of emotion in violent offenders , 2017 .

[25]  Beatrice de Gelder,et al.  Context influences early perceptual analysis of faces--an electrophysiological study. , 2006, Cerebral cortex.

[26]  G. Johansson.  Visual perception of biological motion and a model for its analysis , 1973 .

[27]  M. Slater,et al.  Illusory ownership of a virtual child body causes overestimation of object sizes and implicit attitude changes , 2013, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[28]  Martin Buss,et al.  Comparison of people's responses to real and virtual handshakes within a virtual environment , 2011, Brain Research Bulletin.

[29]  M. Slater,et al.  Bystander Responses to a Violent Incident in an Immersive Virtual Environment , 2013, PloS one.

[30]  P. Ekman.  Differential communication of affect by head and body cues. , 1965, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[31]  Béatrice de Gelder,et al.  Tease or threat? Judging social interactions from bodily expressions , 2010, NeuroImage.

[32]  B. Gelder,et al.  Emotional information in body and background hampers recognition memory for faces , 2012, Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.

[33]  A. Young,et al.  Emotion Perception from Dynamic and Static Body Expressions in Point-Light and Full-Light Displays , 2004, Perception.

[34]  J. Panksepp.  Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions , 1998 .

[35]  R. Blake,et al.  Brain Areas Active during Visual Perception of Biological Motion , 2002, Neuron.

[36]  Silvan S. Tomkins,et al.  Exploring Affect: The Selected Writings of Silvan S Tomkins , 1995 .

[37]  M. Tamietto,et al.  Neural bases of the non-conscious perception of emotional signals , 2010, Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

[38]  R. Goebel,et al.  The Constructive Nature of Affective Vision: Seeing Fearful Scenes Activates Extrastriate Body Area , 2012, PloS one.

[39]  T. J. Clarke,et al.  The Perception of Emotion from Body Movement in Point-Light Displays of Interpersonal Dialogue , 2005, Perception.

[40]  Sung-Bae Cho,et al.  Estimating the efficiency of recognizing gender and affect from biological motion , 2002, Vision Research.

[41]  Xueni Pan,et al.  Socially Anxious and Confident Men Interact with a Forward Virtual Woman: An Experimental Study , 2012, PloS one.

[42]  Marco Tamietto,et al.  Standing up for the body. Recent progress in uncovering the networks involved in the perception of bodies and bodily expressions , 2010, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.

[43]  Rachel McDonnell,et al.  Perceiving emotion in crowds: the role of dynamic body postures on the perception of emotion in crowded scenes , 2010, Experimental Brain Research.

[44]  Swann Pichon,et al.  Two different faces of threat. Comparing the neural systems for recognizing fear and anger in dynamic body expressions , 2009, NeuroImage.

[45]  H. Bekkering,et al.  Joint action: bodies and minds moving together , 2006, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[46]  P. Lang.  International Affective Picture System (IAPS) : Technical Manual and Affective Ratings , 1995 .

[47]  J. Grèzes,et al.  Emotional modulation of visual and motor areas by dynamic body expressions of anger , 2008, Social neuroscience.

[48]  H. Meeren,et al.  Rapid perceptual integration of facial expression and emotional body language. , 2005, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[49]  B. de Gelder,et al.  Body expressions influence recognition of emotions in the face and voice. , 2007, Emotion.

[50]  Rainer Goebel,et al.  Subcortical Connections to Human Amygdala and Changes following Destruction of the Visual Cortex , 2012, Current Biology.

[51]  B. de Gelder,et al.  Similar facial electromyographic responses to faces, voices, and body expressions , 2007, Neuroreport.

[52]  Tabitha C. Peck,et al.  Putting yourself in the skin of a black avatar reduces implicit racial bias , 2013, Consciousness and Cognition.

[53]  N. Hadjikhani,et al.  Seeing Fearful Body Expressions Activates the Fusiform Cortex and Amygdala , 2003, Current Biology.

[54]  Swann Pichon,et al.  Perceiving fear in dynamic body expressions , 2007, NeuroImage.

[55]  Lars Omlor,et al.  Lateral asymmetry of bodily emotion expression , 2008, Current Biology.

[56]  P. Ekman,et al.  Head and body cues in the judgment of emotion: a reformulation. , 1967, Perceptual and motor skills.

[57]  B. de Gelder,et al.  Social context influences recognition of bodily expressions , 2010, Experimental Brain Research.

[58]  B. Gelder.  in affective neuroscience Why bodies? Twelve reasons for including bodily expressions , 2009 .

[59]  Mel Slater,et al.  Beaming into the Rat World: Enabling Real-Time Interaction between Rat and Human Each at Their Own Scale , 2012, PloS one.

[60]  Y. Trope,et al.  Body Cues, Not Facial Expressions, Discriminate Between Intense Positive and Negative Emotions , 2012, Science.

[61]  Beatrice de Gelder,et al.  The Bodily Expressive Action Stimulus Test (BEAST). Construction and validation of a stimulus basis for measuring perception of whole body expression of emotions , 2011 .

[62]  Maital Neta,et al.  Corrugator muscle responses are associated with individual differences in positivity-negativity bias. , 2009, Emotion.

[63]  Mathieu Vandenbulcke,et al.  Affective scenes influence fear perception of individual body expressions , 2014, Human brain mapping.

[64]  B. Gelder.  Towards the neurobiology of emotional body language , 2006, Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

[65]  Ran R. Hassin,et al.  Angry, Disgusted, or Afraid? , 2008, Psychological science.