In press at Journal of Nonverbal Behavior This is the pre-print unedited version of the manuscript Emotion Expression in Context: Full Body Postures of Christian Prayer Orientations Compared to Specific Emotions Patty Van Cappellen and Megan Edwards Social Science Research Institute, Duke University, Durham NC, USA Author Note Corresponding Author: Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dr. Patty Van Cappellen, Duke University, Social Science Research Institute, Box 90420, Durham NC 27708-0420. Orcid number: 0000-0001-5880-6232. E-mail: [email protected] We would like to thank Lani Shiota for her guidance and help with data coding. We also thank Stephanie Cassidy, Daniel DeVault, Jordan Hepburn, and Camden Nelson for their help with data collection and coding, and Kerry O’Brien for editing. Data collection was facilitated by the Duke Interdisciplinary Behavioral Research Center and Duke Behavioral Participant Pool. Funding: Preparation of this manuscript and data collection were funded by a John Templeton Foundation grant awarded to the first author (grant #60836). Conflicts of interest/Competing interests: The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this article. Availability of data and material: The data presented are freely accessible through the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/awzs5/ Running Head: PRAYERS, EMOTIONS, AND THE BODY 2 Abstract 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). U.S. 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 vs. 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. Running Head: PRAYERS, EMOTIONS, AND THE BODY 3 Emotion Expression in Context: Full Body Postures of Christian Prayer Orientations Compared to Specific Emotions We stand tall in confidence; we jump with joy; we curl up when we cry. These examples demonstrate that emotions are visibly expressed in the full body. As Darwin (1872) was perhaps the first to document, humans have unique ways of expressing emotions that serve as signals to others. Indeed, plenty of research thereafter has documented nonverbal communication of an ever broadening range of emotions through facial, vocal, and bodily expressions (See for a review, Keltner et al., 2019). The bulk of this work has focused on the distinct facial expressions that characterize emotions (Campos et al., 2013; Cowen & Keltner, 2020). Only a subset, which we will expand upon below, has examined how emotions are expressed in the full body ( Witkower & Tracy, 2019), hence the need for the present Special Issue (although note that much work has been conducted on people’s recognition of full-body expressions, for a review see De Gelder, 2016). In addition, positive emotions have been even less the target of such research compared to negative emotions, with the exception of joy and pride (Sauter, 2017). Importantly, such nonverbal expression of emotions does not take place in a vacuum but varies by historical, cultural, and socio-ecological contexts (Niedenthal et al., 2017). Because nonverbal expressions serve communication purposes, they are situated in a communication context (Mehrabian, 1972). How does this context affect emotion full body expressions? Here, we study such emotion expression in a general/secular context as well as in a particular context relevant to millions of people worldwide: the context of communication with a God. Polls show that a vast majority of the population is religious: worldwide, 84% affiliate with a religion, and 31% identify as Christian, which is the world’s largest religious group. Many Running Head: PRAYERS, EMOTIONS, AND THE BODY 4 also regularly practice their religion, with high percentages in the U.S.: at least 55% pray daily and 36% attend worship weekly (Pew Research Center, 2014). These numbers vary around the world: about 75% pray daily and attend worship weekly in sub-Saharan Africa but only around 25% in many European countries to cite some extreme examples (Pew Research Center, 2018). Because of this, emotions are often and by many people expressed in a religious context. Embodied religious activities such as prayer represent communicative acts through which people constitute their relationship with the divine (Spilka & Ladd, 2013). While engaging in prayer and worship, people can express their emotions to the divine, and in doing so, experience these emotions themselves. Indeed, although each are of different forms and fulfilling various goals, prayer and worship are always entangled with emotion (Corwin & Brown, 2020). Importantly, these practices are embodied: from standing, sitting, kneeling, prostrating, clasping or raising the hands, or bowing. Researchers in the psychology of religion have recently called for more attention to the corporeal nature of prayer and worship (see also Hammond, 2015 for a historical survey of the use of posture in prayer and liturgy ; Jones, 2019; Van Cappellen & Edwards, 2021). However, there is still very little empirical work on exactly how the full body is used to express, represent, and create the religious experience (but see review of such work in Van Cappellen & Edwards, 2021). In Christianity, prayer and worship represent two broad categories of practice. While prayer and worship can’t be sharply distinguished, researchers understand prayer as personal and private devotional activity and worship as more public and formal religious activities (Spilka & Ladd, 2013). In everyday language, prayer appears to be more associated with requests and worship with adoration. Our preliminary research has found that Christians tend to distinguish between these two concepts with implications for the bodily postures associated with them. In a Running Head: PRAYERS, EMOTIONS, AND THE BODY 5 study asking Christians to report the postures they adopted while attending a Sunday religious service, participants most frequently attributed the overarching meaning of prayer to postures that are downward and constrictive, and the overarching meaning of worship to postures that are upward and expansive (Van Cappellen et al., in press). However, it is still unclear whether people would show different full-body postures when asked to express prayer vs. worship. Beyond these two broad categories of prayer and worship, prayers involve different communicative genres and functions and are performed in various emotional registers (Corwin & Brown, 2020). Below, we discuss in depth four common prayer orientations in the context of Christianity (which is the religious majority of the U.S.) and their closely related emotions: praise, thanksgiving, confession and repentance. We also explore a less common orientation, anger toward God. To our knowledge, no research exists on whether full body expressions of prayers involving different emotional registers are similar or different from each other and what they look like. Below, we turn to basic emotion research to make predictions about how different prayer orientations are represented in the body. However, we also acknowledge that the context of communicating with a supernatural being like a God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and represented as being “up” (Meier et al., 2007) may impact the expressive postures used during such communication, hence the need for the present research. We focus first on situating the prayer orientations within two basic affective dimensions: valence (positive or negative) and dominance (dominance or submission). The prayer orientations were are investigating can be clearly distinguished based on valence as described below. Dominance is our second affective dimension of interest because, although less frequently studied than arousal, we reasoned that postural features of dominance may be downplayed when emotions are expressed in a religious context where dominance is unlikely to be expressed toward God. Dominance