Research into the visual perception of human emotion has traditionally focused on the facial expression of emotions. Recently researchers have turned to the more challenging field of emotional body language, i.e. emotion expression through body pose and motion. In this work, we approach recognition of basic emotional categories from a computational perspective. In keeping with recent computational models of the visual cortex, we construct a biologically plausible hierarchy of neural detectors, which can discriminate seven basic emotional states from static views of associated body poses. The model is evaluated against human test subjects on a recent set of stimuli manufactured for research on emotional body language.