The Influence Of Facial Expressions And Body Gestures On Peak Emotion Perception

Emotion perception refers to the process to use the information gathered from facial expressions,voice and body gestures to judge the emotional statement.Previous studies have got the consent that facial expressions were the dominant modality of emotion information,and people could evaluate others feelings by observing facial expressions.However,more and more research found that the body played a determinant role in emotion judgment when combined with facial expressions.It became more salient when confronting with the peak emotions.Although most previous studies demonstrated the importance of bodily gestures,they failed to explain the underlying mechanisms about how body influence the whole valence ratings.The present studies aimed to investigate the way bodies impact valence perception of whole person by recording and calculating the eye movement data.Further,we took the emotional arousal dimension into consideration to find the arousal sources of arousal information in face-body compounds.Experiment 1 adopted emotion recognition task,and found that isolated mid-intense facial expressions and body gestures were diagnostic for emotional valence,so did peak body gestures.However,peak facial expressions were ambiguous and could not be correctly distinguished.Experiment 2 used the same emotion recognition task to found that both peak and mid isolated faces and bodies were able to convey arousal information.Experiment 3 used composite face-body task to find the reliable valence information sources.Results revealed that for mid-intense images,the valence ratings of whole person were corresponding to the faces,meanwhile,the gaze patterns were modulated by facial expressions systematically.For peak emotions,the bodies were responsible for valence evaluation results,and the scan paths changed with bodies at the same time.Experiment 4 used composite face-body task to find the reliable arousal information sources.Results found that faces were the main part to provide arousal information regardless of mid-intense or peak emotions.