Abstract: Body and face are important clues for individual’s emotional expression and recognition. Researchers have generally named emotional information expressed through the body, coordinated motions as well as meaningful behaviors as emotional body language (EBL). The role of EBL in emotional recognition and the relationship between EBL and facial expressions is regarded as the central concerns of the study. Among its research focuses, “what distinguishes EBL from facial expression processing”, “whether neural bases of facial expression processing and EBL are overlapped with each other or keep separated from one another”, “Whether, compared with facial expression processing, bodily expression processing will select categorized areas in light of specific targets”, and “whether there are any specific psychological processing mechanisms in EBL” constitute key elements which has determined the most important contrast between EBL and facial expression. Exploration on those issues will not only help to complete relevant theories of bodily expression processing, but also prove to offer greater realistic importance and application value to “cognition-emotion-behavior” research. EBL plays both guiding and compensatory roles in complex emotion recognition. EBL is prominent distinguished from facial expressions by perceived motion and behavioral information, and the generation of adaptive behavior. Human brain remains highly sensitive to body-expressed emotions and behavior information, which might be gradually formed and consolidated in the process of human evolution. Responding to individual’s survival needs, it has grown along with human evolution and adaptation to social environments. As researches on EBL neural imaging indicate, the neural bases of facial expression and EBL might adjoin each other or partially overlap. Those bases also serve as the biological foundation for the coordinative effect of the two in the process of emotional recognition. However, their neural bases also remain separate from each other and bodily expression processing involves an even wider neural network. Cerebral regions like extrastriate body area(EBA), fusiform body area(FBA), superior parietal lobule(SPL) and inferior parietal lobe(IPL)are where human brain undertakes high-level information processing which includes selecting categorized areas in light of specific targets of bodily information processing as well as getting engaged in body behaviors and emotional expression. At present, there are two existing theoretical models which have interpreted EBL psychological processing mechanism: one model tends to stress bottom-up processing; the other is a bi-directional model that combines both bottom-up and top-down processes. Those two models on EBL psychological processing mechanism fundamentally differ from the existing models on psychological processing mechanism of facial expression. As double activation at both stages of behavior observation and implementation has been proven to be the typical feature of mirror neuron systems, the neural network involved partially overlaps with bodily expressions. Therefore, further explorations should be combined with mirror neuron systems and made on the impact of behavior and emotions on EBL processing. Future research needs to analyze the possibility of integrating the neural mechanisms underlying facial, body vocal cues of emotion. In addition, cross-cultural differences in body emotion processing constitute a promising area of inquiry. Besides, processing traits of bodily expression of emotional-handicapped patients should also be surveyed.

Key words: emotion perception, bodily expression, facial expression, body postures, Neural Bases, Mechanism

摘要： 躯体和面孔是个体情绪表达与识别的重要线索。与面部表情相比，躯体表情加工的显著特点是补偿情绪信息，感知运动与行为信息，及产生适应性行为。情绪躯体与面孔加工的神经基础可能相邻或部分重合，但也存在分离；EBA、FBA、SPL、IPL等是与躯体表情加工相关的特异性脑区。今后应系统研究面孔、躯体及语音情绪线索加工潜在的神经基础，探讨躯体情绪加工的跨文化差异，考察情绪障碍患者的躯体表情加工特点。

关键词: 情绪知觉 躯体表情 面部表情 身体姿势 神经基础 加工机制