Social Bodies : Preliminary Evidence That Awareness of Embodied Emotions Is Associated With Recognition of Emotions in the Bodily Cues of Others

Abstract

We experience and express emotions via our bodies, and we are also able to infer the emotional states of others by observing their movements and postures. The ability to extract affective bodily cues in social contexts may be achieved via internal simulation, which is closely associated with experience and awareness of emotions in one’s own body. Here, we hypothesized that reports of one’s own bodily experiences of emotions would be associated with the ability to infer other people’s emotions from their bodily signals. Healthy individuals (n = 106) participated in two tasks. An emotional gait perception task was used to test the ability to extract emotional cues from other people’s body movements. Subjective bodily experience of emotions was visualized with a computerized mapping tool, which required participants to localize sensations on the body corresponding to specific emotions. Participants reported specific locations of body sensations for different emotions. Emotional gait perception accuracy was positively associated with participants’ reported intensity for bodily experiences of happiness and anger and with their tendency to report body mapping patterns similar to prototypes established in a much larger sample. Results suggest that awareness of emotions in one’s own body is related to our ability to perceive emotions in others. Implications for future work on the role of embodiment in social cognition and psychiatric disorders are discussed.