Person or Puppet? The Role of Stimulus Realism in Attributing Emotion to Static Body Postures

Knowledge of the relation between body posture and the perception of affect is limited. Existing studies of emotion attribution to static body postures vary in method, response modalities and nature of the stimulus. Integration of such results proves difficult, and it remains to be investigated how the relation can be researched best. In this study we focus on the role of stimulus realism. An experiment has been conducted where computer generated body postures in two realism conditions were shown to participants. Results indicate that higher realism not always results in increased agreement but clearly has an influence on the outcome for distinct emotions.

[1]  Mark C. Coulson.  Attributing Emotion to Static Body Postures: Recognition Accuracy, Confusions, and Viewpoint Dependence , 2004 .

[2]  William Thomas James,et al.  A Study of the Expression of Bodily Posture , 1932 .

[3]  E. Vesterinen,et al.  Affective Computing , 2009, Encyclopedia of Biometrics.

[4]  H. Wallbott.  Effects of distortion of spatial and temporal resolution of video stimuli on emotion attributions , 1992 .

[5]  Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze,et al.  Modeling human affective postures: an information theoretic characterization of posture features , 2004, Comput. Animat. Virtual Worlds.

[6]  H. Wallbott.  Bodily expression of emotion , 1998 .

[7]  Karl Grammer,et al.  The representation of self reported affect in body posture and body posture simulation. , 2004, Collegium antropologicum.

[8]  W. Rinn,et al.  The neuropsychology of facial expression: a review of the neurological and psychological mechanisms for producing facial expressions. , 1984, Psychological bulletin.

[9]  Andrea Kleinsmith,et al.  Cross-cultural differences in recognizing affect from body posture , 2006, Interact. Comput..

[10]  Cross-cultural examination of the semantic dimensions of body postures. , 1985 .

[11]  Mark Cook,et al.  Perceiving Others: The Psychology of Interpersonal Perception , 1979 .

[12]  T. Dalgleish.  Basic Emotions , 2004 .

[13]  J. Hoogstraten,et al.  Head position and spinal position as determinants of perceived emotional state. , 1995, Perceptual and motor skills.

[14]  P. Ekman,et al.  Emotion in the Human Face: Guidelines for Research and an Integration of Findings , 1972 .

[15]  Allison Winters.  Perceptions of Body Posture and Emotion: A Question of Methodology , 2005 .

[16]  Hallee Pitterman,et al.  A Test of the Ability to Identify Emotion in Human Standing and Sitting Postures: The Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy-2 Posture Test (DANVA2-POS) , 2004, Genetic, social, and general psychology monographs.

[17]  D. Matsumoto,et al.  Cross-cultural examination of the semantic dimensions of body postures. , 1985, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[18]  P. Ekman,et al.  Head and body cues in the judgment of emotion: a reformulation. , 1967, Perceptual and motor skills.

[19]  K. Scherer,et al.  Cues and channels in emotion recognition. , 1986 .

[20]  T. Dalgleish,et al.  Handbook of cognition and emotion , 1999 .