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

By Anthony P. Atkinson, Winand H. Dittrich, A. Gemmell, Andrew W. Young. Perception, 2004

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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.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a48ab2ec145ffd2666372ecf27f7bc34160d85c4

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Citations in the corpus

The Bodily Expressive Action Stimulus Test (BEAST). Construction and Validation of a Stimulus Basis for Measuring Perception of Whole Body Expression of Emotions (2011, methodology): “…1998; Sprengelmeyer et al., 1999; Pollick et al., 2001; Heberlein et al., 2004), only one other validation study of a whole body expression stimulus set has been described in detail (Atkinson et al., 2004) and used in several other experiments (Atkinson et al., 2007; Peelen et al., 2007, 2009).”
Neuroscientific Evidence for Simulation and Shared Substrates in Emotion Recognition: Beyond Faces (2009, background): “patch-light (similar to point-light; Atkinson et al., 2004); and a set of emotional point-light walkers in which the actors were filmed walking, creeping, dancing, or otherwise locomoting”
The perception and categorisation of emotional stimuli: A review (2010, result): “Other studies have furthermore demonstrated above-chance categorisation of bodily expressions of emotion (Atkinson, Dittrich, Gemmell, & Young, 2004 ; de Gelder, 2006 ).”
Inference or interaction: social cognition without precursors (2008, background): “Clarke et al. (2005) extended this paradigm to show that subjects are able to identify emotions in dyadic interaction, but that emotion perception is affected by veridical versus non-veridical context (also see Atkinson et al. 2004).”
Methodology for Assessing Bodily Expression of Emotion (2010, background): “Most previous studies of bodily expression of emotion have used actors to portray the effects of emotion on body movements ( Atkinson et al. 2004; Boone and Cunningham 1998; de Meijer 1989; Montepare et al. 1999; Wallbott 1998).”
Anxious or Angry? Effects of Discrete Emotions on the Perceived Helpfulness of Online Reviews (2014, background): “Abundant evidence has shown that perceivers rapidly identify emotional cues in facial and bodily expressions (Atkinson et al. 2004; Ekman and Friesen 1971), and more recent work has extended this idea to verbal communication.”
Bodily Communication of Emotion: Evidence for Extrafacial Behavioral Expressions and Available Coding Systems (2019, background): “…as communicating joy or happiness: upwards bodily movement (i.e., with the arms, trunk, or shoulders), upwards head tilt, illustrative gestures, opening and closing the hands, expansive bodily displays, and jumping (e.g., Atkinson et al., 2004; Coulson, 2004; de Meijer, 1989; see Table 1).”
Perception of human motion. (2007, background): “It is well established, for example, that observers can readily identify the emotion being portrayed by a PL actor (e.g., Atkinson et al. 2004).”