PERCEPTION OF EMOTION FROM DYNAMIC POINT-LIGHT DISPLAYS REPRESENTED IN DANCE

It is well known that biological motion, as produced by point-light di splays 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 i n. The question is whether it is possible to judge the emotional state of a human body from motion information alone. An ability to make thi s 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 c lips protrayed fully lit scenes and point-light scenes, with thirteen small points of light attached to the body of each dancer. Half the st imuli were presented the right way up, while half were inverted. The s ubjects' task was to judge which emotion was being portrayed. Full-bod y clips gave good recognition of emotionality (88% correct), but the r esults for upright biological-motion displays were also significantly above chance (63% correct). Inversion of the display reduced biologica l-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 discriminabil ity of the different emotions. Biological-motion displays, which conve y no information while static, are able to give a rich description of the subject matter, including the ability to judge emotional state. Th is ability is disrupted when the image is inverted.