Looking beyond the static face in emotion recognition: The informative case of interest

A new wave of studies on emotion recognition encourages researchers to look beyond the face as the sole source of pertinent information. One study has proposed that, while there is overwhelming evidence that negative emotions may be differentiated in static facial expressions, postural information is needed to differentiate positive emotions such as pride, love and amusement. We review the most influential of these recent studies before providing some supporting evidence in an exploratory study of a fourth positive emotion – interest – that adds to the recent calls to move beyond static facial expressions of emotion when investigating how we determine how others are feeling and how they are likely to act next.