I react to bodies but not faces, a replication and extension of Aviezer et al. (2012)

How do we truly assess the emotions of others? While numerous theories have highlighted the central role of facial expressions in evaluating emotions, some studies have challenged the ability to gauge others' feelings based solely on their faces (Aviezer et al., 2012). These studies suggest that we preferentially use bodies rather than faces to assess others' affective states. The aim of the present work is to replicate and extend these findings. A series of five experiments replicated the results obtained by Aviezer et al. (2012; Experiment 1) and extended them to other tasks (i.e., affective priming, affective misattribution procedure, feeling, and action tendencies). The results show that stimuli presenting only bodies, rather than faces, consistently produce these classic effects found in the literature. Overall, these findings highlight that faces do not seem to be discriminative in detecting emotions, nor do they elicit affective reactions when affective stimuli are extreme. These results thus support the idea that context is predominant in the detection of emotions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).