Critical features for the perception of emotion from gait

Abstract

Human observers readily recognize emotions expressed in body movement. Their perceptual judgments are based on simple movement features, such as overall speed, but also on more intricate posture and dynamic cues. The systematic analysis of such features is complicated due to the difficulty of considering the large number of potentially relevant kinematic and dynamic parameters. To identify emotion-specific features we motion-captured the neutral and emotionally expressive (anger, happiness, sadness, fear) gaits of 25 individuals. Body posture was characterized by average flexion angles, and a low-dimensional parameterization of the spatio-temporal structure of joint trajectories was obtained by approximation with a nonlinear mixture model. Applying sparse regression, we extracted critical emotion-specific posture and movement features, which typically depended only on a small number of joints. The features we extracted from the motor behavior closely resembled features that were critical for the perception of emotion from gait, determined by a statistical analysis of classification and rating judgments of 21 observers presented with avatars animated with the recorded movements. The perceptual relevance of these features was further supported by another experiment showing that artificial walkers containing only the critical features induced high-level after-effects matching those induced by adaptation with natural emotional walkers.

Emotion expression in body action and posture.

“…For example, to maximize experimental control on the behavior variable of interest, several researchers have used visually abstracted stimulus sets of dynamic point-light displays (e.g., Atkinson et al, 2004;Pollick et al, 2001;Roether et al, 2009).…”

Technology-Facilitated Diagnosis and Treatment of Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Engineering Perspective

“…In [62], three levels of intensity are used, ranging from attenuated (50%), prototypical (100%), and exaggerated (150%). The emotion can be expressed via the flexion of the head and arms, as well as the torso positioning [63]. For example, the happy emotion can be expressed by tilting the head backward and leaning back the torso, and the anger emotion can be expressed by tiling the head forward and leaning forward the torso.…”

First impressions: Gait cues drive reliable trait judgements

“…Although kinematic analyses of gait and other whole-body movement have been used to discover which visual cues drive perception of sex Mather & Murdoch, 1994;Troje, 2002), vulnerability (Gunns, Johnston, & Hudson, 2002;Johnston, Hudson, Richardson, Gunns, & Garner, 2004) or emotion (Pollick, et al, 2001;Roether, Omlor, Christensen, & Giese, 2009), we here present for the first time a kinematic analysis of personality trait judgments.…”

“…For example, in addition to subjective ratings, both posture cues, such as joint angles, and movement cues, such as a change in the linear weights of different body parts relative to neutral walking, have been found to classify emotional expressions (Roether, et al, 2009). …”