Perceiving emotion in crowds: the role of dynamic body postures on the perception of emotion in crowded scenes

Abstract

Although the perception of emotion in individuals is an important social skill, very little is known about how emotion is determined from a crowd of individuals. We investigated the perception of emotion in scenes of crowds populated by dynamic characters each expressing an emotion. Facial expressions were masked in these characters and emotion was conveyed using body motion and posture only. We systematically varied the proportion of characters in each scene depicting one of two emotions and participants were required to categorise the overall emotion of the crowd. In Experiment 1, we found that the perception of emotions in a crowd is efficient even with relatively brief exposures of the crowd stimuli. Furthermore, the emotion of a crowd was generally determined by the relative proportions of characters conveying it, although we also found that some emotions dominated perception. In Experiment 2, we found that an increase in crowd size was not associated with a relative decrease in the efficiency with which the emotion was categorised. Our findings suggest that body motion is an important social cue in perceiving the emotion of crowds and have implications for our understanding of how we perceive social information from groups.

EVA: Generating Emotional Behavior of Virtual Agents using Expressive Features of Gait and Gaze

“…Many approaches have been proposed to simulate emotions in virtual agents using verbal communication [11,58], facial expressions [4,7,11,19,35,60], gaze [30], gaits [39], and gestures [47]. McHugh et al [39] studied the role of dynamic body postures on the perception of emotion in crowded scenes. Clavel et al [12] evaluated how both face and posture modalities affect the perceptions of emotions in virtual characters.…”

Fear Modulates Visual Awareness Similarly for Facial and Bodily Expressions

“…For bodily expressions this is shown in healthy participants (Stienen and de Gelder, 2011) and hemianopic patients (Tamietto et al, 2009). Unattended bodily expressions can influence the judgment of the emotion of facial expressions (Meeren et al, 2005; Van den Stock et al, 2007) and the emotion of crowds is determined by a relative proportion expressing the emotion (McHugh et al, 2011) and influences the recognition of the individual bodily expressions (Kret and de Gelder, 2010). However, the relative importance of facial and bodily signals and its relation to visual awareness is still poorly understood.…”

(Un-)Biasing the Morphologies of Affect for HRI Purposes

“…According to the previous data it is obvious that besides of considering the functional design of a robot, several socio-cognitive aspects related to their morphology must be taken into account: gender [20], related language semantics [21], social context [22][23], body gestures/cinematic [24], among a long list. It is very important for example, that most of previous studies have been related to visual and linguistic HRI interactions, while others extremely important, like touch or olfactory have been almost neglected, basically due to the high complexity of these processes.…”