Emotion und embodiment

Emotion und embodiment (27.2.12/Tsch)

Michalak, J, Troje, NF, Fischer, J, Vollmar, P, Heidenreich, T and Schulte, D (2009). Embodiment of sadness and depression--gait patterns associated with dysphoric mood. Psychosom Med 71, 580-587.
Abstract: To analyze gait patterns associated with sadness and depression. Embodiment theories suggest a reciprocal relationship between bodily expression and the way in which emotions are processed.
Niedenthal, PM (2007). Embodying emotion. Science 316 (Heft 5827), 1002-1005.
Abstract: Recent theories of embodied cognition suggest new ways to look at how we process emotional information. The theories suggest that perceiving and thinking about emotion involve perceptual, somatovisceral, and motoric reexperiencing (collectively referred to as "embodiment") of the relevant emotion in one's self. The embodiment of emotion, when induced in human participants by manipulations of facial expression and posture in the laboratory, causally affects how emotional information is processed. Congruence between the recipient's bodily expression of emotion and the sender's emotional tone of language, for instance, facilitates comprehension of the communication, whereas incongruence can impair comprehension. Taken all together, recent findings provide a scientific account of the familiar contention that "when you're smiling, the whole world smiles with you."

Thompson, E and Varela, FJ (2001). Radical embodiment: neural dynamics and consciousness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 5, 418-425.
Abstract: We propose a new approach to the neuroscience of consciousness, growing out of the 'enactive' viewpoint in cognitive science. This approach aims to map the neural substrates of consciousness at the level of large-scale, emergent and transient dynamical patterns of brain activity (rather than at the level of particular circuits or classes of neurons), and it suggests that the processes crucial for consciousness cut across the brain-body-world divisions, rather than being brain-bound neural events. Whereas standard approaches to the neural correlates of consciousness have assumed a one-way causal-explanatory relationship between internal neural representational systems and the contents of consciousness, our approach allows for theories and hypotheses about the two-way or reciprocal relationship between embodied conscious states and local neuronal activity.

Effron, DA, Niedenthal, PM, Gil, S and Droit-Volet, S (2006). Embodied temporal perception of emotion. Emotion 6, 1-9.
Abstract: The role of embodiment in the perception of the duration of emotional stimuli was investigated with a temporal bisection task. Previous research has shown that individuals overestimate the duration of emotional, compared with neutral, faces (S. Droit-Volet, S. Brunot, & P. M. Niedenthal, 2004). The authors tested a role for embodiment in this effect. Participants estimated the duration of angry, happy, and neutral faces by comparing them to 2 durations learned during a training phase. Experimental participants held a pen in their mouths so as to inhibit imitation of the faces, whereas control participants could imitate freely. Results revealed that participants overestimated the duration of emotional faces relative to the neutral faces only when imitation was possible. Implications for the role of embodiment in emotional perception are discussed.

verschiedene Kapitel in Tschacher & Bergomi (2011) (eds). The implications of embodiment. Exeter: Imprint Academic.