Don't read my lips! Body language trumps the face for conveying
intense emotions Posted January 15, 2013; 11:25 a.m. Be it
triumph or crushing defeat, exhilaration or agony, body language
more accurately conveys intense emotions, according to recent
research that challenges the predominance of facial expressions
as an indicator of how a person feels. Princeton University
researchers report in the journal Science that facial
expressions can be ambiguous and subjective when viewed
independently. The researchers asked study participants to
determine from photographs if people were experiencing feelings
such as loss, victory or pain from facial expressions or body
language alone, or from both. In some cases, a facial expression
associated with one emotion was paired with a body experiencing
the opposite emotion. In four separate experiments, participants
more accurately guessed the pictured emotion based on body
language — alone or combined with facial expressions — than on
facial context alone. Senior researcher