Removing Hand Information Specifically Impairs Emotion Recognition for Fearful and Angry Body Stimuli

Ross, Paddy, and Tessa Flack. 2019. “Removing Hand Information Specifically Impairs Emotion Recognition for Fearful and Angry Body Stimuli.” PsyArXiv. January 18. doi:10.31234/osf.io/wbkgd

Abstract: Emotion perception research has largely been dominated by work on facial expressions, but emotion is also strongly conveyed from the body.  Research exploring emotion recognition from the body tends to refer to ‘the body’ as a whole entity.  However, the body is made up of different components (hands, arms, trunk etc.), all of which could be differentially contributing to emotion recognition.  We know that the hands can convey action, and in particular are important for social communication through gestures, but we currently do not know to what extent the hands influence emotion recognition from ‘the body’.  Here, 93 adults viewed static emotional body stimuli with either the hands, arms, or both components removed and completed a forced-choice emotion recognition task.  Removing the hands significantly reduced recognition accuracy for fear and anger, but made no significant difference to the recognition of happiness and sadness. Removing the arms had no effect on emotion recognition accuracy compared to the full-body stimuli.  These results demonstrate the key role played by the hands in the recognition of threat-based emotions conveying action information.