Perception and interpretation of emotions are crucial elements to effective social interactions in everyday life. Humans observe and analyze movements of others in an attempt to deduce their emotional states on a regular basis. Even without verbal communication, basic emotional states are conveyed through bodily movements. Research exploring emotion recognition has been pursued by utilizing facial expressions (Pollick, Hill, Calder, & Paterson, 2003), but other studies have demonstrated that even in the absence of vocal or facial cues humans are adept at identifying emotions. These studies have investigated a full range of biological motions for emotion recognition, such as static body postures (Atkinson, Dittrich, Gemmell, & Young, 2004), arm movement (Pollick, Paterson, Bruderlin, & Sanford, 2001), and whole-body movement (Atkinson, Dittrich, Gemmell, & Young, 2004). However, in order to study the ability of humans to recognize emotions through their most natural and common form of biological motion, we focus on the biological motion of walking in the current study. …show more content…
In order to determine the movement characteristics related to distinct emotions, like joy and sadness, Gross and colleagues compiled a motion capture database by having individuals walk while experiencing certain emotions. They found that walking speed was slowest for sadness and fastest for joy and anger. Also, they observed increased amplitude of movement in the hips and shoulders in accordance with the expression of joy when compared to the expression of sadness. Consequently, the most noticeable kinematic distinctions occurred between the emotions of sadness and joy. To further investigate the results presented by Gross and his colleagues, we will be testing the emotion recognition of happy, sad, and neutral through the biological motion of