Emotions affect every aspect of our daily lives. They are vital to our social relationships, mental health, cognitive function, sensitivity, and other important developmental processes. Furthermore, since they are signals that convey information about our environment as friendly or dangerous, the communication and recognition of emotions has proven to be critical to our survival. In everyday life, emotions can be conveyed through speech prosody and speech quality. However, they can also be distributed through non-verbal communication channels. Embodied cognition theory suggests that perceiving, experiencing, and thinking about emotions involves an embodiment or interaction between a person's emotional state and his or her body. Charles Darwin introduced the idea that both humans and animals are capable of expressing emotions through motor behaviour, especially posture. Recent research has confirmed, for example, that emotions can be identified from facial expressions, which have unique and pervasive expressive characteristics that indicate positive and negative feelings, attitudes, and intentions. Other research has shown how to successfully identify emotions through bodily expressions, especially from specific parts of the body such as the torso, arms, and hands. In addition, both children and adults have been shown to master the ability to read emotions from whole body movements. Looking at emotionally expressive movement from yet another perspective, some studies have found that body movements and postures elicit feelings and emotion-related behaviours.

In response, I have recorded, through moving-images, how the emotions of the abstract soul in the body break through the physical boundaries and are distributed into different movements when a person is affected by different environmental factors. Emotional content can be successfully decoded from human dance movements. Most previous studies have used videos of actors or dancers portraying emotions through choreography. The current study applied emotion-inducing techniques and free movement to examine the recognition of emotional content in dance. These videos show dancers' depersonalised avatars turning to emotionally neutral musical stimuli after sad or happy emotions are induced. My project is a two-channel installation; one video features a dancer expressing emotion of happiness through their movements, while the other video features a dancer expressing a feeling of sadness, or absence of happiness / joy. Audience is invited to identify the emotions dancers are experiencing by observing their movements.