Influence Of Emotional Body Language On Early Processing Of Facial Expressions

Body and face are important clues for individual's emotional expression and recognition.Researchers have generally named emotional information expressed through the body,coordinated motions as well as meaningful behaviors as emotional body language.Body postures not only convey useful information for understanding the emotions and intentions of others,but also influence the discrimination of facial expressions.Although previous research has already partly revealed the neural mechanisms underlying the rapid perceptual integration of facial and bodily expressions,the exact role of body language herein remains unclear.Another open question is whether individuals use body language at the early detection stage(P1)and at the stage of configural processing(N170)when the task requires participants to recognize facial expressions from emotionally congruent or incongruent face-body compound stimuli.Experiment 1 investigated event-related potentials(ERPs)when categorizing isolated positive and negative facial and bodily expressions.In Experiment 2,the faces and bodies were combined,creating emotionally congruentand incongruent face-body compounds(i.e.,a positive facial expression on top of a negative body posture).The results of Experiment 1 showed that body expressions elicited greater P1 but smaller N170 amplitudes compared to facial expressions,indicating that the brain allocates less cognitive resources to processing body expressions.Experiment 2 demonstrated that irrespective of the congruent or incongruent facial expression,positive body expressions yielded larger N170 amplitudes than negative ones.The current results support an early integration in processing of facial and bodily affective information.The results also indicate that emotion-and action-related information conveyed by body language strongly influences perception of facial expressions during the later structural encoding processing stage.