Holistic person processing: Faces with bodies tell the whole story.

Abstract

Faces and bodies are typically encountered simultaneously, yet little research has explored the visual processing of the full person. Specifically, it is unknown whether the face and body are perceived as distinct components or as an integrated, gestalt-like unit. To examine this question, we investigated whether emotional face-body composites are processed in a holistic-like manner by using a variant of the composite face task, a measure of holistic processing. Participants judged facial expressions combined with emotionally congruent or incongruent bodies that have been shown to influence the recognition of emotion from the face. Critically, the faces were either aligned with the body in a natural position or misaligned in a manner that breaks the ecological person form. Converging data from 3 experiments confirm that breaking the person form reduces the facilitating influence of congruent body context as well as the impeding influence of incongruent body context on the recognition of emotion from the face. These results show that faces and bodies are processed as a single unit and support the notion of a composite person effect analogous to the classic effect described for faces.

Typical integration of emotion cues from bodies and faces in Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…The same facial expression can vary in appearance when presented with different bodily expressions; for example, a facial expression may be classified as angry when presented in the context of a body expressing anger, but disgusted when presented in the context of a body expressing disgust (Aviezer et al, 2008;Aviezer, Trope, & Todorov, 2012b). These findings imply that the attribution of affective states involves the integration of emotion cues from across the face and body.…”

Internal consistency predicts attractiveness in biological motion walkers

“…Additionally, it was found that emotion recognition from face-body composites is based on holistic processing (Aviezer, Trope, & Todorov, 2012). To our knowledge, only Abbas and Duchaine (2008) examined the role of holistic processing in judgments of facial attractiveness.…”

Emotional conflict in facial expression processing during scene viewing: An ERP study

“…Recently some studies attempted to investigate the influence of context on facial expression processing. These studies demonstrated that visual scenes (Lee et al, 2012;Righart and de Gelder, 2006, 2008a, 2008b, body expressions (Aviezer et al, 2008(Aviezer et al, , 2011(Aviezer et al, , 2012a(Aviezer et al, , 2012bMeeren et al, 2005), emotional words and verbal description (Carroll and Russell, 1996;Kim et al, 2004;Schwarz et al, 2013), emotional voices ( and Müller et al, 2011;Pourtois et al, 2000) affect emotional recognition from facial expressions. Scenes which faces are embedded in provided typical visual context.…”