In Experiment 2, we measured the weight of body and face cues in conveying emotional information when intense genuine emotions are expressed, a situation in which face expressions alone may have ambiguous valence. In Experiment 1, we compared deaf participants and hearing controls in a task measuring recognition of the six basic emotions expressed by actors in a series of video-clips in which either the face, the body, or both the face and body were visible. Here we assessed whether this also applies to recognition of emotions expressed by bodily and facial cues.
Deaf individuals may compensate for the lack of the auditory input by showing enhanced capacities in certain visual tasks.