Sign Language Research Lab, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
Department of Psychology, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
PLoS One. 2018 Aug 15;13(8):e0201970. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0201970. eCollection 2018.
Emotions are signaled by complex arrays of face and body actions. The main point of contention in contemporary treatments is whether these arrays are discrete, holistic constellations reflecting emotion categories, or whether they are compositional-comprised of smaller components, each of which contributes some aspect of emotion to the complex whole. We address this question by investigating spontaneous face and body displays of athletes and place it in the wider context of human communicative signals and, in particular, of language. A defining property of human language is compositionality-the ability to combine and recombine a relatively small number of elements to create a vast number of complex meaningful expressions, and to interpret them. We ask whether this property of language can be discerned in a more ancient communicative system: intense emotional displays. In an experiment, participants interpreted a range of emotions and their strengths in pictures of athletes who had just won or lost a competition. By matching participants' judgements with minutely coded features of face and body, we find evidence for compositionality. The distribution of participants' responses indicates that most of the athletes' face and body features contribute to displays of dominance or submission. More particular emotional components related, for example, to positive valence (e.g. happy) or goal obstruction (e.g. frustrated), were also found to significantly correlate with certain face and body features. We propose that the combination of features linked to broader components (i.e, dominant or submissive) and to more particular emotions (e.g, happy or frustrated) reflects more complex emotional states. In sum, we find that the corporeal expression of intense, unfiltered emotion has compositional properties, potentially providing an ancient scaffolding upon which, millions of years later, the abstract and constrained compositional system of human language could build.
情绪是通过面部和身体动作的复杂组合来传递的。当代治疗方法的主要争议点是这些组合是离散的、整体的星座，反映了情绪类别，还是由较小的组成部分组成，每个组成部分都为复杂的整体贡献了某种情感。我们通过研究运动员的自发面部和身体表现来解决这个问题，并将其置于人类交流信号的更广泛背景下，特别是语言。人类语言的一个定义属性是组合性——能够组合和重新组合相对较少的元素，从而创造出大量复杂的有意义的表达，并对其进行解释。我们想知道这种语言的属性是否可以在一个更古老的交流系统中被察觉：强烈的情感表达。在一项实验中，参与者通过对刚刚赢得或输掉比赛的运动员的照片来解释一系列情绪及其强度。通过将参与者的判断与面部和身体的细微编码特征相匹配，我们发现了组合性的证据。参与者反应的分布表明，运动员的面部和身体特征大多有助于表现出支配或服从。还发现，与积极（例如快乐）或目标受阻（例如沮丧）等特定情绪相关的更特定的情绪成分与某些面部和身体特征显著相关。我们提出，与更广泛的成分（即支配或服从）和更特定的情绪（如快乐或沮丧）相关的特征组合反映了更复杂的情绪状态。总之，我们发现强烈的、未经过滤的情绪的身体表达具有组合性质，这可能为人类语言抽象和受限的组合系统提供了一个古老的基础。
