What postures communicate

Social communication is initiated and orchestrated by our understanding of the nonverbal signals. These are mainly provided by the movements of the face and the body. Until very recently research mainly focused on faces making facial expressions the privileged object of study for emotion research. Fortunately, communication with whole body postures and expressions has now become an important topic. Here, we briefly summarize the literature on whole body perception, and we discuss how body perception is related to emotion perception. In the final sections we present an approach to the study of body emotion expressions that uses novel methods of behavior analysis in combination with neuroimaging.