Anger and Happiness are Linked Differently to the Explicit Detection of Biological Motion

Abstract

The detection of biological motion and the detection of emotion from this motion are important visual functions with obvious survival and social values. The perception of biological motion is remarkably robust, and numerous studies have shown that the emotional states of a person can be deduced from point-light biological motion. In the present study, we investigated the extent to which the detection of emotion from biological motion is linked to the explicit detection of human gait. Subjects performed gait detection and emotion detection for the same stimulus. The stimulus consisted of one coherent interval and one scrambled biological-motion interval, each of which contained one emotionally neutral and one emotional (angry or happy) walker. Significant correlations with gait detection performance were observed for anger detection but not necessarily for happiness detection, implying that the detection of anger may be more strongly linked to explicit gait detection. This leads to a hypothesis that differential dependence may reflect the differential behavioural meaning between anger and happiness detection; it may be more crucial to localise or identify a person with anger than happiness.

Extraction of social information from gait in schizophrenia

“…Beyond the overall enhancement of biological motion detection, the authors found that the presence of anger in the movement had a uniquely facilitative effect on the detection of biological motion. Similarly, Ikeda & Watanabe (2009) reported that discriminability of biological motion was enhanced when it contained emotional content. Thus, the presence of emotional components in human movement seems to aid in its detection and provide salient distal cues for subsequent social behavior.…”

“…In contrast, human movement cues can be detected at a distance, out of an immediate social interactional range. In other words, an individual’s gait or body movements can provide rich, proximal and distal information in the way of social communication (Barclay et al 1978; Dittrich et al 1998; Ikeda & Watanabe, 2009). …”

A dyadic stimulus set of audiovisual affective displays for the study of multisensory, emotional, social interactions

“…Differences between the perception of happy and angry interactions have been widely reported in the neuroimaging and multisensory literature (e.g. Massaro and Egan, 1996; Fox et al, 2000; Ikeda and Watanabe, 2009). From a practical perspective, it was also easier for our actors to perform happy and angry interactions and for us to create scenarios to help them demonstrate these emotions.…”

Emotion Science in the Twenty-First Century. Time, Sex, and Behavior in Emotion Science: Over and Above

“…we are “standing up for the body” (de Gelder et al, 2010) and exploring body language reading in typical (Atkinson et al, 2004, 2012; Chouchourelou et al, 2006; Ikeda and Watanabe, 2009; Alaerts et al, 2011; Sokolov et al, 2011; Krüger et al, 2013; Actis-Grosso et al, 2015; de Gelder et al, 2015; for review, see Pavlova, 2017) and atypical development (e.g., Nackaerts et al, 2012; Strauss et al, 2015; Van den Stock et al, 2015; Vaskinn et al, 2016; Blain et al, 2017). …”