Action and Emotion Recognition from Point Light Displays: An Investigation of Gender Differences

Abstract

Folk psychology advocates the existence of gender differences in socio-cognitive functions such as ‘reading’ the mental states of others or discerning subtle differences in body-language. A female advantage has been demonstrated for emotion recognition from facial expressions, but virtually nothing is known about gender differences in recognizing bodily stimuli or body language. The aim of the present study was to investigate potential gender differences in a series of tasks, involving the recognition of distinct features from point light displays (PLDs) depicting bodily movements of a male and female actor. Although recognition scores were considerably high at the overall group level, female participants were more accurate than males in recognizing the depicted actions from PLDs. Response times were significantly higher for males compared to females on PLD recognition tasks involving (i) the general recognition of ‘biological motion’ versus ‘non-biological’ (or ‘scrambled’ motion); or (ii) the recognition of the ‘emotional state’ of the PLD-figures. No gender differences were revealed for a control test (involving the identification of a color change in one of the dots) and for recognizing the gender of the PLD-figure. In addition, previous findings of a female advantage on a facial emotion recognition test (the ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test’ (Baron-Cohen, 2001)) were replicated in this study. Interestingly, a strong correlation was revealed between emotion recognition from bodily PLDs versus facial cues. This relationship indicates that inter-individual or gender-dependent differences in recognizing emotions are relatively generalized across facial and bodily emotion perception. Moreover, the tight correlation between a subject's ability to discern subtle emotional cues from PLDs and the subject's ability to basically discriminate biological from non-biological motion provides indications that differences in emotion recognition may - at least to some degree – be related to more basic differences in processing biological motion per se.

The Reading the Mind in the Eyes test: validation of a French version and exploration of cultural variations in a multi-ethnic city

“…Some studies have observed differences between male and female participants on this test (Alaerts, Nackaerts, Meyns, Swinnen, & Wenderoth, 2011;Carroll & Chiew, 2006;Dehning et al, 2012;Hallerbäck et al, 2009;Vellante et al, 2012;Voracek & Dressler, 2006;Yildirim et al, 2011), suggesting that women perform better at the RMET than men. Testing people who are inherently very good at this test and who might easily overcome subtle difficulties added by the translation might thus bias the validation.…”

Psychometric Evaluation of the ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes’ Test With Samples of Different Ages From a Polish Population

“…To the best of our knowledge, only one paper thus far has presented a positive correlation between the RMET and ad hoc emotion recognition task (Alaerts, Nackaerts, Meyns, Swinnen, & Wenderoth, 2011). Emotional intelligence scale-faces is developed to measure the ability to recognize mimic expressions, a component of cognitive skill involved in emotional intelligence.…”

Brain activity correlates with emotional perception induced by dynamic avatars

“…One option for dealing with this complex problem is using more minimalistic and controlled stimuli depicting biological motion. Indeed, previous studies have shown that human observers can successfully recognize expressed emotions even in extremely impoverished stimuli such as point-light displays (Alaerts et al, 2011;Atkinson et al, 2004;Clarke et al, 2005;Dittrich et al, 1996;Nackaerts et al, 2012).…”