Abstract
Emotions are expressed by the face, the voice and the whole body. Research on the face and the voice has not only demonstrated that emotions are perceived categorically, but that this perception can be manipulated. The purpose of this study was to investigate, via two separate experiments using adaptation and multisensory techniques, whether the perception of body emotion expressions also shows categorical effects and plasticity. We used an approach developed for studies investigating both face and voice emotion perception and created novel morphed affective body stimuli, which varied in small incremental steps between emotions. Participants were instructed to perform an emotion categorisation of these morphed bodies after adaptation to bodies conveying different expressions (Experiment 1), or while simultaneously hearing affective voices (Experiment 2). We show that not only is body expression perceived categorically, but that both adaptation to affective body expressions and concurrent presentation of vocal affective information can shift the categorical boundary between body expressions, specifically for the angry body expressions. Overall, our findings provide significant new insights into emotional body categorisation, which may prove important in gaining a deeper understanding of body expression perception in everyday social situations.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bediou, B., Brunelin, J., d’Amato, T., Fecteau, S., Saoud, M., Hénaff, M., & Krolak-Salmon, P. (2012). A comparison of facial emotion processing in neurological and psychiatric conditions. Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 98.
Belin, P., & Zatorre, R. J. (2003). Adaptation to speaker’s voice in right anterior temporal lobe. Neuroreport, 14, 2105–2109.
Bestelmeyer, P. E. G., Rouger, J., DeBruine, L. M., & Belin, P. (2010). Auditory adaptation in vocal affect perception. Cognition, 117, 217–223.
Collignon, O., Girard, S., Gosselin, F., Roy, S., Saint-Amour, D., Lassonde, M., & Lepore, F. (2008). Audio-visual integration of emotion expression. Brain Research, 25, 126–135.
de Gelder, B. (2006). Towards the neurobiology of emotional body language. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 7, 242–249.
de Gelder, B. (2009). Why bodies? Twelve reasons for including bodily expressions in affective neuroscience. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364, 3475–3484.
de Gelder, B., de Borst, A. W., & Watson, R. (2014). The perception of emotion in body expressions. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1335.
de Gelder, B., & van den Stock, J. (2011). The bodily expressive action stimulus test (BEAST). Construction and validation of a stimulus basis for measuring perception of whole body expression of emotions. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 181.
de Gelder, B., & Vroomen, J. (2000). The perception of emotions by ear and by eye. Cognition and Emotion, 14, 289–311.
de Gelder, B., Vroomen, J., de Jong, S. J., Masthoff, E. D., Trompenaars, F. J., & Hodiamont, P. (2005). Multisensory integration of emotional faces and voices in schizophrenics. Schziphrenia Research, 72, 195–203.
Ethofer, T., Anders, S., Erb, M., Droll, C., Royen, L., Saur, R., Reiterer, S., Grodd, W., & Wildgruber, D. (2006). Impact of voice on emotional judgment of faces: An event-related fMRI study. Human Brain Mapping, 27, 707–714.
Fox, C. J., & Barton, J. J. S. (2007). What is adapted in face adaptation? The neural representation of expression in the human visual system. Brain Research, 1127, 80–89.
Grill-Spector, K., Kushnir, T., Edelman, S., Avidan, G., Itzchak, Y., & Malach, R. (1999). Differential processing of objects under various viewing conditions in the human lateral occipital complex. Neuron, 24, 187–203.
Jessen, J., & Kotz, S. (2015). Affect differentially modulates brain activation in uni- and multisensory body-voice perception. Neuropsychologia, 66, 134–143.
Jessen, S., & Kotz, S. A. (2011). The temporal dynamics of processing emotions from vocal, facial, and bodily expressions. Neuroimage, 58, 665–674.
Jessen, S., Obleser, J., & Kotz, S. A. (2012). How bodies and voices interact in early emotion perception. PLoS One, 7, e36070.
Kret, M. E., Roelofs, K., Stekelenburg, J., & de Gelder, B. (2013). Emotional signals from faces, bodies and scenes influence observers’ face expressions, fixations and pupil-size. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7, 810. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00810.
Kret, M. E., Stekelenburg, J. J., Roelofs, K., & de Gelder, B. (2013). Perception of face and body expressions using electromyography, pupillometry and gaze measures. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 28. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00028.
Laukka (2005). Categorical perception of vocal expressions. Emotion, 5, 277–295.
Leopold, D. A., O’Toole, A. J., Vetter, T., & Blanz, V. (2001). Prototype-referenced shape encoding revealed by high-level after effects. Nature Neuroscience, 4, 89–94.
Meeren, H. K. M., van Heijnsbergen, C., & de Gelder, B. (2005). Rapid perceptual integration of facial expression and emotional body language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 102, 16518–16523.
Palumbo, R., D’Ascenzo, S., & Tommasi, L. (2015). Cross-category adaptation: Exposure to faces produces gender aftereffects in body perception. Psychological Research Psychologische Forschung, 79, 380–388.
Peelen, M. V., & Downing, P. E. (2005). Selectivity for the human body in the fusiform gyrus. Journal of neurophysiology, 93, 603–608.
Peelen, M. V., & Downing, P. E. (2007). The neural basis of visual body perception. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8, 636–648.
Poljak, E., Poljak, E., & Wagemans, J. (2012). Reduced accuracy and sensitivity in the perception of emotional facial expressions in individuals with high autism spectrum traits. Autism, 17, 668–680.
Pourtois, G., de Gelder, B., Vroomen, J., Rossion, B., & Crommelinck, M. (2000). The time-course of intermodal binding between seeing and hearing affective information. Neuroreport, 11, 1329–1333.
Pye, A., & Bestelmeyer, P. (2015). Evidence for a supra-modal representation of emotion from cross-modal adaptation. Cognition, 134, 245–251.
Rhodes, G., Jeffery, L., Watson, T. L., Clifford, C. W. G., & Nakayama, K. (2003). Fitting the mind to the world: Face adaptation and attractiveness aftereffects. Psychological Science, 14, 558–566.
Schweinberger, S. R., Casper, C., Hauthal, N., Kaufmann, J. M., Kawahara, H., Kloth, N., et al. (2008). Auditory adaptation in voice perception. Current Biology, 18, 684–688.
Skuk, V. G., & Schweinberger, S. R. (2013). Adaptation aftereffects in vocal emotion perception elicited by expressive faces and voices. PLoS One, 8, e81691.
Stienen, B. M. C., Tanaka, A., & de Gelder, B. (2011). Emotional voice and emotional body postures influence each other independently of visual awareness. PLoS ONE, 6, e25517.
Van den Stock, J., Grèzes, J., & de Gelder, B. (2008). Human and animal sounds influence recognition of body language. Brain Research, 1242, 185–190.
Vroomen, J., Driver, J., & de Gelder, B. (2001). Is cross-modal integration of emotional expressions independent of attentional resources? Cognitive. Affective and Behavioural Neurosciences, 1, 382–387.
Watson, R., Latinus, M., Noguchi, T., Garrod, O., Crabbe, F., & Belin, P. (2014). Crossmodal adaptation in right posterior superior temporal sulcus during face-voice emotional integration. Journal of Neuroscience, 34, 6813–6821.
Webster, M. A., Kaping, D., Mizokami, Y., & Duhamel, P. (2004). Adaptation to natural facial categories. Nature, 428, 557–561.
Webster, M. A., & MacLin, O. H. (1999). Figural aftereffects in the perception of faces. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 6, 647–653.
Webster, M. A., & MacLeod, D. I. A. (2011). Visual adaptation and face perception. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 366, 1702–1725.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the European Research Council. The funding of the European Research Council was under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC grant agreement number 295673. We would also like to thank Dr. Julien Rouger for his helpful comments on this manuscript.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Ethics statement
All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Watson, R., de Gelder, B. The representation and plasticity of body emotion expression. Psychological Research 84, 1400–1406 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-018-1133-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-018-1133-1