Perceiving affect from arm movement

Pollick, F.E., Paterson, H.M. , Bruderlin, A. and Sanford, A.J. (2001) Perceiving affect from arm movement. Cognition, 82(2), B51-B61. (doi: 10.1016/S0010-0277(01)00147-0) (PMID:11716834)

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Abstract

We examined the visual perception of affect from point-light displays of arm movements. Two actors were instructed to perform drinking and knocking movements with ten different affects while the three-dimensional positions of their arms were recorded. Point-light animations of these natural movements and phase-scrambled, upside-down versions of the same knocking movements were shown to participants who were asked to categorize the affect of the display. In both cases the resulting confusion matrices were analyzed using multidimensional scaling. For the natural movements the resulting two-dimensional psychological space was similar to a circumplex with the first dimension appearing as activation and the second dimension as pleasantness. For the scrambled displays the first dimension was similar in structure to that obtained for the natural movements but the second dimension was not. With both natural and scrambled movements Dimension 1 of the psychological space was highly correlated to the kinematics of the movement. These results suggest that the corresponding activation of perceived affect is a formless cue that relates directly to the movement kinematics while the pleasantness of the movement appears to be carried in the phase relations between the different limb segments.

Item Type:Articles
Status:Published
Refereed:Yes
Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID:Paterson, Dr Helena and Pollick, Professor Frank and Sanford, Professor Anthony
Authors: Pollick, F.E., Paterson, H.M., Bruderlin, A., and Sanford, A.J.
Subjects:B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
College/School:College of Science and Engineering > School of Psychology
Journal Name:Cognition
ISSN:0010-0277
ISSN (Online):1873-7838
Published Online:14 November 2001

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