Journal of Nonverbal Behavior最新文献

Verbal irony is a rhetorical device that is not only verbal but also paraverbal. In the present study, we explored the paraverbal expression of verbal irony which has been largely underinvestigated, especially facial expressions. Given the role played by facial expressions in the detection of emotions, we hypothesized that speakers can communicate irony by facial expression alone. We asked 104 speakers to pronounce the same utterance, sometimes ironically, sometimes not. Naive judges were able to detect which speakers were ironic with increasing accuracy across the following three conditions: prosody only, facial expressions only, and both prosody and facial expressions. We then undertook a systematic description of the utterances, to identify which paraverbal cues induced the highest ironicalness ratings among the judges. Slow speech rate, then expressive movements of the mouth, then eyebrow flashes were the three most influential cues. Overall, facial cues explained more variance than vocal cues. Our results did not support the existence of a single, specific set of paraverbal ironic cues. They did, however, show that speakers routinely produce paraverbal cues, and that these cues, especially facial ones, allow their irony to be detected. The implications for models of irony comprehension are discussed.

The role of face and context in emotion perception was investigated by manipulating features relevant to the stimuli and to the observer. A nested-stimulus design was used, with subjects nested under stimulus item (an encoder’s facial expression or a written emotion-eliciting scenario presented alone or in an incongruent pair) and type of task instruction (judgment of encoder’s expressed or felt emotion). Subjects, using one type of task instruction, completed a decoding task in which they viewed a facial expression, a written scenario, or a facial expression paired with an emotion-incongruent scenario. Type of task instruction was intended to alter subjects’ perception by directing attention to favor face information (judgment of expressed emotion) or context information (judgment of felt emotion). Then subjects selected the predominant emotion and indicated the intensity of various emotions they perceived the encoder to be expressing or feeling. Judgments were examined for target emotion match to face and/or context using a by-stimulus analysis. The results suggest that when an encoder’s facial expression is discordant with the emotion-eliciting event, subjects will favor facial information when judging what the encoder is expressing, whereas they will favor context information when judging what the encoder is feeling. When face or context was seen alone, type of task instruction did not influence subjects’ judgments. This research provides a more detailed understanding of the role of face and context by exploring how features associated with the observer-encoder interaction influence emotion perception.

For many people, emotions are frequently expressed in the context of communication with their God. The practice of prayer is clearly embodied and affords the study of full body expressions of emotions in a relevant context. Surprisingly uncharacterized in empirical scientific research, we document full body postures representing prayers in different emotional registers (i.e., prayer, worship, praise, thanksgiving, repentance, confession, anger toward God) and compare them to postures representing specific emotions varying on two basic affective dimensions (valence and dominance), and to specific relevant emotions (gratitude for thanksgiving, guilt for confession and repentance). US community participants with knowledge of Christianity (n = 93) were asked to show how they would express these feelings in the full body by positioning a small mannequin. Postures were analyzed to derive objective measurements of the body’s vertical, horizontal, and total space, and subjective perceptions of the same dimensions from a separate sample. An observational coding system was also developed to code for components of the body, such as head and arm positions. Results show distinct differences between postures representing the overarching categories of prayer versus worship. Further, postures representing praise and to a lesser extent those of thanksgiving were found to be expansive and oriented upward, slightly smaller than postures of positive valence but bigger than dominance. Postures representing repentance and confession were found to be constrictive and oriented downward, even smaller than postures of negative valence and similar to submission. These results add to our limited knowledge of postural expressions of emotions and particularly that of positive emotions. Implications for the psychology of religion are also discussed.