For many people, emotions are frequently expressed in the context of communication with their God. The practice of prayer is clearly embodied and affords the study of full body expressions of emotions in a relevant context. Surprisingly uncharacterized in empirical scientific research, we document full body postures representing prayers in different emotional registers (i.e., prayer, worship, praise, thanksgiving, repentance, confession, anger toward God) and compare them to postures representing specific emotions varying on two basic affective dimensions (valence and dominance), and to specific relevant emotions (gratitude for thanksgiving, guilt for confession and repentance). US community participants with knowledge of Christianity (n = 93) were asked to show how they would express these feelings in the full body by positioning a small mannequin. Postures were analyzed to derive objective measurements of the body’s vertical, horizontal, and total space, and subjective perceptions of the same dimensions from a separate sample. An observational coding system was also developed to code for components of the body, such as head and arm positions. Results show distinct differences between postures representing the overarching categories of prayer versus worship. Further, postures representing praise and to a lesser extent those of thanksgiving were found to be expansive and oriented upward, slightly smaller than postures of positive valence but bigger than dominance. Postures representing repentance and confession were found to be constrictive and oriented downward, even smaller than postures of negative valence and similar to submission. These results add to our limited knowledge of postural expressions of emotions and particularly that of positive emotions. Implications for the psychology of religion are also discussed.

对许多人来说，情感经常在与他们的上帝交流的背景下表达。祈祷的实践清楚地体现出来，并提供了在相关背景下对情绪的全身表达的研究。在实证科学研究中出人意料地没有特征，我们记录了代表不同情感记录（即祈祷、敬拜、赞美、感恩、悔改、认罪、对上帝的愤怒）的祈祷的全身姿势，并将它们与代表在两种基本情感上不同的特定情绪的姿势进行比较。维度（效价和支配地位），以及特定的相关情绪（感恩的感恩，忏悔和忏悔的内疚）。具有基督教知识的美国社区参与者 ( n = 93) 被要求展示他们如何通过放置一个小人体模型来表达他们全身的这些感受。分析姿势以从单独的样本中得出对身体垂直、水平和总空间的客观测量，以及对相同维度的主观感知。还开发了一个观察编码系统来编码身体的组成部分，例如头部和手臂的位置。结果显示代表祈祷与敬拜的总体类别的姿势之间存在明显差异。此外，表示赞美的姿势和在较小程度上表示感恩的姿势被发现是膨胀的和向上的，比积极效价的姿势略小，但比支配姿势大。发现代表忏悔和认罪的姿势是收缩的，向下的，甚至比负价的姿势还要小，类似于屈服。这些结果增加了我们对情绪姿势表达的有限了解，尤其是积极情绪的姿势表达。还讨论了对宗教心理学的影响。