In order to correctly interpret the emotional state of another person, it is important to analyze not only his face, but also the posture as a whole.
If you weren’t able to correctly interpret the other person’s emotions, it might be because you were looking at them… exclusively in the face, suggests Dr. Hillel Aviezer of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem*. When, as part of his study, he handed out portrait photos of different people to volunteers and asked them to rate their emotions, the subjects did poorly on the task: for example, they could not distinguish the winners of a tennis tournament from the losers. But they did a much better job when they got full-length photos of the same people. “In Western society, the main source of information about a person is considered to be his face,” the author of the study notes. “However, our whole body expresses emotions: sometimes it makes sense to look from a distant angle in order to get a clearer idea of uXNUMXbuXNUMXbthe feelings of another.”
* Cortex, 2012, vol. 48, № 6.