Emotions are expressed by physical expressions such as body posture. Physical cues play a crucial role in recognizing emotional states. We hypothesized that bodily expressions are stored in long-term memory in association with emotion and that such memory representation, knowledge of emotion, enables us to recognize mental states as a certain emotion. The present study focused on sadness as the target emotion and aimed to clarify how bodily expressions are associated with sadness. We decomposed bodily expressions into body-trunk and hand-arm postures and created body-expression photographs by combining these bodily postures. The 44 participants assessed 16 body-expression photographs to evaluate the extent to which they expressed four major emotions (sadness, anger, fear, and happiness), sadness-related body-expression properties (e.g., duration of physical expression), and social situations (e.g., loss of loved one). Sadness was more associated with the two types of body-trunk postures (deep and shallow forward-bent) and the two types of hand-arm postures (overall-face and around-eye). We subsequently classified the bodily expressions based on three kinds of assessment and specified three main groups associated with sadness. Each sadness-related body-expression group was differently associated with body-expression properties and sadness-related situations; for instance, one sadness-related body-expression group was assessed as an activated body-expression property with short-term duration and was associated with failure situations. These findings suggest that nonverbal bodily expressions play a key part in memory representations of sadness in association with body-expression properties and social situations.

情绪是通过身体姿势等身体表情来表达的。物理提示在识别情绪状态中起着至关重要的作用。我们假设身体表达与情感相关联地存储在长期记忆中，并且这种记忆表示，情感知识使我们能够将心理状态识别为某种情感。本研究集中于悲伤作为目标情感，旨在阐明身体表情与悲伤之间的关系。我们将身体表情分解为大腿姿势和手臂姿势，并通过结合这些身体姿势来创建身体表达照片。44位参与者评估了16张身体表达照片，以评估他们表达四种主要情绪（悲伤，愤怒，恐惧和幸福），与悲伤相关的身体表达特性（例如，身体表现的持续时间）和社交情况（例如失去亲人）。悲伤与身体姿势的两种类型（深弯和浅向前弯）和手臂姿势的两种类型（全脸和眼睛周围）联系在一起。随后，我们基于三种评估对身体表情进行分类，并指定了与悲伤相关的三个主要类别。每个与悲伤相关的身体表达组与不同的身体表达特性和与悲伤相关的情况相关；例如，一个悲伤相关的身体表达组被评估为具有短期持续时间的激活的身体表达属性，并与衰竭情况相关。