Recognizing Emotion from Postures: Cross-Cultural Differences in User Modeling

The conveyance and recognition of human emotion and affective expression is influenced by many factors, including culture. Within the area of user modeling, it has become increasingly necessary to understand the role affect can play in personalizing interactive interfaces using embodied animated agents. Currently, little research focuses on the importance of emotion expression through body posture. Furthermore, little research aims at understanding cultural differences within this vein. Therefore, our goal is to evaluate whether or not differences exist in the way various cultures perceive emotion from body posture. We used images of 3D affectively expressive avatars to conduct recognition experiments with subjects from 3 cultures. The subjects' judgments were analyzed using multivariate analysis. We grounded the identified differences into a set of low-level posture features. Our results could prove useful for constructing affective posture recognition systems in cross-cultural environments.

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