The effect of posture and dynamics on the perception of emotion

Abstract

AngerDisgust Fear Happiness Sadness Surprise AbstractMotion capture remains a popular and widely-used method for animating virtual characters. However, all practical applications of motion capture rely on motion editing techniques to increase the reusability and flexibility of captured motions. Because humans are proficient in detecting and interpreting subtle details in human motion, understanding the perceptual consequences of motion editing is essential. Thus in this work, we perform three experiments to gain a better understanding of how motion editing might affect the emotional content of a captured performance, particularly changes in posture and dynamics, two factors shown to be important perceptual indicators of bodily emotions. In these studies, we analyse the properties (angles and velocities) and perception (recognition rates and perceived intensities) of a varied set of full-body motion clips representing the six emotions anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. We have found that emotions are mostly conveyed through the upper body, that the perceived intensity of an emotion can be reduced by blending with a neutral motion, and that posture changes can alter the perceived emotion but subtle changes in dynamics only alter the intensity.

A generic framework for editing and synthesizing multimodal data with relative emotion strength

“…In computer animation, both body motions and facial expressions are two popular mediums for a character to express the emotion. To understand and represent the emotion, there is an increasing focus on analyzing how motion emotion is perceived by users . While it is possible to identify emotion automatically from motion, synthesizing motion with controllable emotion intensity is much more challenging due to the high dimensionality in the control parameters as well as the complex relationship between such control parameters and the emotional expressions.…”

Perceptually Guided Processing of Style and Affect in Human Motion for Multimedia Applications

“…Perception of emotions with static vs. dynamic stimuli was investigated and as expected, it was observed that dynamic stimuli are easier to perceive [78]. In [19] Normoyle et al studied the effects of motion editing on perceived intensities of affects especially with respect to changes in dynamics and posture. Moreover, they concluded that the upper body contains more indicators for perception of affect and that while changes in posture can change the perceived affect, changes in dynamics impacts the perceived intensities.…”

“…Analysis of the features in terms of both execution as well as perception is the first route. For these studies, there have been significant amounts of research carried out by the physiology and psychology [16] communities as well as the multimedia community [19]. These studies can be used indirectly towards computational methods for extraction and modeling means as well as interpreting the outcomes of the other two components of motion studies.…”

“…Extraction of SFs in spatiotemporal domain is an extremely difficult task as motion sequences can be carried out in a variety of different styles and be very personalized. Moreover, existence of three different classes of features, namely posture, movement, and time [19], further complicate the task.…”

“…An interesting finding was that exaggerated female body features have a larger impact compared to the male features. Perception of emotions when specific body parts were hidden for the audience was later investigated and error-rates for different parts of the body and emotion classes were reported [19]. The authors showed that the upper body is most important when perceiving emotions.…”