Postural expressions of action tendencies

One of the challenges of virtual character research is the specification of reliable and discriminative features of complex emotions in multiple modalities. Whereas expressions of different emotion categories in facial expressions, gaze, and gestures were explored in several studies, postural expressions of emotion and other components of emotions received less attention. In this paper, we propose an approach for designing and evaluating postural expressions of action tendencies. We designed postural expressions of several action tendencies using MARC, our virtual character animation platform. These postures were informed by data from the literature completed with the manual annotations of an exploratory video corpus. A decoding study tested 5 pairs of static pictures of postural expressions in terms of action tendencies as well as discrete emotion categories. Subjects reliably recognized the postural expressions of the following action tendencies: attending, disappear from view and exuberant. Perception of emotion categories was also consistent with psychological predictions about action tendencies. These results suggest that postural expressions can be useful to express action tendencies in virtual characters.

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