Emotion in motion: perceiving fear in the behaviour of individuals from minimal motion capture displays

ABSTRACT

The ability to quickly and accurately recognise emotional states is adaptive for numerous social functions. Although body movements are a potentially crucial cue for inferring emotions, few studies have studied the perception of body movements made in naturalistic emotional states. The current research focuses on the use of body movement information in the perception of fear expressed by targets in a virtual heights paradigm. Across three studies, participants made judgments about the emotional states of others based on motion-capture body movement recordings of those individuals actively engaged in walking a virtual plank at ground-level or 80 stories above a city street. Results indicated that participants were reliably able to differentiate between height and non-height conditions (Studies 1 & 2), were more likely to spontaneously describe target behaviour in the height condition as fearful (Study 2) and their fear estimates were highly calibrated with the fear ratings from the targets (Studies 1-3). Findings show that VR height scenarios can induce fearful behaviour and that people can perceive fear in minimal representations of body movement.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion perception
• gait
• emotion
• virtual reality

Acknowledgements

Materials, stimuli, and data for all studies are available on OSF.io at the following link: https://osf.io/vhjfe/?view_only = a259a8747e0e487c898de453bf83e8e5

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The current research was funded by a University Research Fund grant from Victoria University of Wellington to M.T. Crawford and G.M. Grimshaw.