2026/05/04 by Matthew R. Longo, Robert Mackenzie · 1 voice
Neuroscience · Psychology · #Face Recognition and Perception #Emotion and Mood Recognition #Aesthetic Perception and Analysis
paper · pdf · doi:10.1037/xhp0001429
Facial expression and body posture provide rich information about other people's emotional states.Visual information about body posture rapidly and automatically influences perception of facial emotion.Even images of isolated hands carry rich information about emotion, but it is unknown whether this local information is automatically integrated with perception of facial emotion.We created composite stimuli in which facial emotional expressions (anger or fear) were superimposed onto bodies expressing either the same or a different emotion.We manipulated whether the full-body context was shown, or only the hands.Participants judged the emotion of the face, ignoring the bodily context.Consistent with previous findings, whole-body context exerted clear influence on the accuracy and speed judgments of facial emotion judgments.Critically, similar effects were found for faces presented in the context of isolated hands.This demonstrates that emotion from hands is automatically integrated with facial emotion. Public Significance StatementWe can recognize the emotions of other people using information from both their facial expressions and their body postures.Recent research has shown that cues from the face and the body are automatically integrated, even if people are trying to focus on only one cue.We show that this automatic integration also occurs between faces and isolated hand postures.