The question of whether gestures and body movements are indicative of the quality of emotions, as well as the quantity (intensity), is a matter of debate. This study represents an attempt to shed some light on the importance of gestures, body movements and posture in communicating four specific emotions: happiness, sadness, shame and anger. It consists of observations of 80 children (40 males and 40 females), 7-10 years old, during a task in which they have to communicate emotions using non-verbal channels.

On a theoretical level, our study arises from the behavioral ecology perspective [1,2], which underlines the communicative function of emotional expression, and from the development of emotional competence theory [3]. On an empirical level, this research is a tentative attempt to overcome some of the methodological limitations of previous studies concerning the non-verbal expression of emotion in adults. Most of these have studied facial expressions alone [4], because body movements were considered only to provide information regarding the intensity of emotions. Moreover, the main approach was the decoding method [5,6,7], applied only to adult subjects [8,9]. To avoid such problems, we decided to use a 'scenario approach' [9,10,11,12] in which subjects are provided with vignettes or short scenarios describing an emotion-eliciting situation. They are instructed to imagine these scenarios and then act as if they were in such a situation.

Our general objective is to check the existence of patterns of body movements and gestures related to the four emotions considered in the present study. This objective has been prompted using the software Theme, a program that allows the temporal dimensions of behavior to be calculated [13]. During the experiment, every child read stories conferring different emotions. Their attempts to communicate these emotions using only non-verbal channels were recorded. All recordings were analysed using a movements and gestures grid, according to behavioral units based on other studies [9,14,15,16].

Our results show that children use a variety of T-patterns to communicate their emotions. Moreover, these T-patterns confirm outcomes obtained with adult subjects. Thus, this work allows us to go beyond paradigms describing the face as the preferential channel for communicating emotions, and promotes the observation of interactions between facial expression and body movements.

References

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Paper presented at Measuring Behavior 2002 , 4^th International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral Research, 27-30 August 2002, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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