Emotion Perception from Dynamic and Static Body Expressions in Point-Light and Full-Light Displays

Abstract

Research on emotion recognition has been dominated by studies of photographs of facial expressions. A full understanding of emotion perception and its neural substrate will require investigations that employ dynamic displays and means of expression other than the face. Our aims were: (i) to develop a set of dynamic and static whole-body expressions of basic emotions for systematic investigations of clinical populations, and for use in functional-imaging studies; (ii) to assess forced-choice emotion-classification performance with these stimuli relative to the results of previous studies; and (iii) to test the hypotheses that more exaggerated whole-body movements would produce (a) more accurate emotion classification and (b) higher ratings of emotional intensity. Ten actors portrayed 5 emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness) at 3 levels of exaggeration, with their faces covered. Two identical sets of 150 emotion portrayals (full-light and point-light) were created from the same digital footage, along with corresponding static images of the 'peak' of each emotion portrayal. Recognition tasks confirmed previous findings that basic emotions are readily identifiable from body movements, even when static form information is minimised by use of point-light displays, and that full-light and even point-light displays can convey identifiable emotions, though rather less efficiently than dynamic displays. Recognition success differed for individual emotions, corroborating earlier results about the importance of distinguishing differences in movement characteristics for different emotional expressions. The patterns of misclassifications were in keeping with earlier findings on emotional clustering. Exaggeration of body movement (a) enhanced recognition accuracy, especially for the dynamic point-light displays, but notably not for sadness, and (b) produced higher emotional-intensity ratings, regardless of lighting condition, for movies but to a lesser extent for stills, indicating that intensity judgments of body gestures rely more on movement (or form-from-movement) than static form information.

TAME: Time-Varying Affective Response for Humanoid Robots

“…For the positive robot mood, Positive Affect score was significantly higher than that for the negative robot mood (21 vs. 12.3 out of 30, p<0.001), and vice versa, its Negative Affect score was significantly lower than that of negative robot mood (8.6 vs. 12.3 out of 30, p<0.001); see Table 2 for Mean and STD. Finally, the recognition rates for emotions of joy and fear were high -85% and 81%, respectively; these rates are comparable to those obtained in judgments of joy and fear portrayals by human actors in movie clips (facial features obscured), which were 87% and 91%, respectively [48]. Given this successful encoding of a number of affective behaviors, we are currently designing and conducting a set of human-robot interaction studies to test the effect of the system on physically present users.…”

“…Based on an extensive literature review [38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46], we designed expressions of Extraversion and Introversion, Positive and Negative Mood, and Emotions of Fear and Joy. Figure 12 (Left) and (Right) provides examples of static poses of Joy and Fear, respectively.…”

Brief Report: Recognition of Emotional and Non-emotional Biological Motion in Individuals with Autistic Spectrum Disorders

“…Social meanings are known to be conveyed by faces but also by the movements of body parts (e.g., Clarke, Bradshaw, Field, Hampson, & Rose, 2005;Johansson, 1973;Pollick, Hill, Calder, & Paterson, 2003). Recognition of biological motion is known to be one of the essential ingredients of human evolutionary survival (Atkinson, Dittrich, Gemmell, & Young, 2004). As a consequence, in the normal population, even when human biological motion is presented solely as the motion of a set of point-lights attached to the joints of an invisible human in a dark room, the perceptual system rapidly and reliably identifies humans and distinguishes this movement from other similar motion patterns (e.g., Johansson, 1973).…”

First impressions: Gait cues drive reliable trait judgements

“…Point-light displays, initially developed by Johansson (1973), therefore constitute a popular form of impoverished visual stimuli to investigate the contribution of motion (kinematic and form-from-motion) cues to observers' ratings of personality and other trait impressions. Previously, it has been shown that observers reliably judge transient states such as emotions from point-light displays showing movements of the whole-body (Atkinson, Dittrich, Gemmell, & Young, 2004;Dittrich, Troscianko, Lea, & Morgan, 1996;Heberlein, et al, 2004) or of the arm alone (Pollick, Paterson, Bruderlin, & Sanford, 2001). They also reliably judge stable characteristics such as identity Loula, Prasad, Harber, & Shiffrar, 2005) and sex from point-light whole-body motion.…”