An Effect of Gender in the Interpretation of Affective Cues in Avatars

Many factors affect how people express emotion and affective messages, such as culture, gender, posture, etc. Many studies within neuroscience and psychology aim at evaluating if, and how, gender in particular affects emotion recognition. The majority of this research shows that females are better perceivers of emotion from facial expressions than males. However, there are few studies aimed at addressing the issue of which factors are important for recognizing emotion conveyed by body posture and avatars. In this paper we examine the effect of gender on the recognition of affect from whole body postures of 3D avatars. Our first results, indicating that females tend to be faster in recognizing affect from body posture seem to reinforce the results of studies on the recognition of affect from facial expression.