Body Talk: Thoughts and Feelings in Action

The human body communicates messages from its appearance and its movements. The processes underlying those movements are a function of our thoughts and feelings. This chapter will examine the distal and proximal factors that may account for these movements and their signals, through processes such as evolution, Darwin’s application of evolution to emotions, and embodied cognition. We will end with a discussion of how these account for more complex interpersonal states such as immediacy, rapport, trust, and deception, as well as a brief description of coding systems. This material is based upon work supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant BCS-1651118 to the first and fourth author. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.