Perception of Emotion from Dynamic Point-Light Displays Represented in Dance

Abstract

It is well known that biological motion, as produced by point-light displays on a human body, gives a good representation of the represented body-eg its gender and the nature of the task which it is engaged in. The question is whether it is possible to judge the emotional state of a human body from motion information alone. An ability to make this kind of judgment may imply that people are able to perceive emotion from patterns of movement without having to compute the detailed shape first. Subjects were shown brief video clips of two trained dancers (one male, one female). The dancers were aiming to convey the following emotions: fear, anger, grief, joy, surprise, and disgust. The video clips portrayed fully lit scenes and point-light scenes, with thirteen small points of light attached to the body of each dancer. Half the stimuli were presented the right way up, while half were inverted. The subjects' task was to judge which emotion was being portrayed. Full-body clips gave good recognition of emotionality (88% correct), but the results for upright biological-motion displays were also significantly above chance (63% correct). Inversion of the display reduced biological-motion (but not full-body) performance to close to chance but still significantly above chance. A space-time analysis of the motion of the points of light was carried out, and was related to the discriminability of the different emotions. Biological-motion displays, which convey no information while static, are able to give a rich description of the subject matter, including the ability to judge emotional state. This ability is disrupted when the image is inverted.

Static and dynamic body image in bulimia nervosa: Mental representation of body dimensions and biological motion patterns

“…The point-light displays consist of an array of 15 white dots on a black background. They generate a vivid percept of a body in motion 26,43,44 and can be altered by the participants along a BMI axis.…”

“…Further details of data acquisition and data processing are described in Troje. 26,44 In the present study, participants could actively change the animation of walking patterns by navigating from displays corresponding to higher or lower BMIs. The BMI axis was scaled in z-scores.…”

“…In fact, neurophysiological investigations of nonhuman primates as well as brain imaging work in humans have provided first hints that the brain is more responsive to conspecific action and movement patterns than it is to static images of a human figure. [18][19][20][21] The movement of a human body contains information about identity 22 as well as a variety of different attributes such as sex, [23][24][25] emotional states, 26,27 and body weight. [28][29][30] All of these attributes are socially relevant 31 and probably play an important role in body image formation.…”

Infants perceive human point-light displays as solid forms

“…It has also been found that there are specific areas of the brain that are particularly sensitive to these movements (Bonda, Petrides, Ostry, & Evans, 1996;Downing, Jiang, Shuman & Kanwisher, 2001) and observers find human displays compelling and attractive, and appear well attuned to the meanings they depict. For example, adults can detect the identity, gender and age of the person filmed Frykholm, 1983;Runeson & Frykholm, 1986), are able to describe their actions easily, can identify their emotional state (Dittrich, Infants perceive human point-light displays as solid forms, page 6 Troscianko, Lea & Morgan, 1996;Moore, et al, 1997;Pollick, 2002), and even can tell a person's real versus deceptive intentions (Runeson & Frykholm, 1983).…”

Different contributions of visual and motor brain areas during liking judgments of same- and different-gender bodies

“…Nevertheless, only few neuroscientific studies have so far investigated the brain bases of perceiving and appreciating the beauty of the body (Kirsch et al, 2016). As one of the most artistic expressions, the art of dance has offered an ideal paradigm for the study of the aesthetic appreciation of another person's body in motion, seen that dance may induce emotional reactions in the observer (Chichella & Bianchini, 2004;Dittrich et al, 1996;Sawada et al, 2003). Recently, Calvo-Merino and colleagues (2008) have reported that more dynamic ballet moves were more liked by participants as compared to less dynamic ones, pointing to the role of implied motion in driving the appreciation of the beauty of the body.…”