The effect of posture and dynamics on the perception of emotion

Figure 1: Characteristic frame for each emotion from the clips with the best recognition rates. Motion capture remains a popular and widely-used method for an-imating 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 edit-ing 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 percep-tual 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, sad-ness, and surprise. We have found that emotions are mostly con-veyed 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.