Perceived Gesture Dynamics in Nonverbal Expression of Emotion

Dael, Nele; Goudbeek, Martyn; Scherer, Klaus R.

doi:10.1068/p7364

Scientific article

English

Perceived Gesture Dynamics in Nonverbal Expression of Emotion

Contributors

Dael, Nele; Goudbeek, Martyn; Scherer, Klaus R.

Published in

Perception, vol. 42, no. 6, p. 642-657

Publication date

2013

Abstract

Recent judgment studies have shown that people are able to fairly correctly attribute emotional states to others' bodily expressions. It is, however, not clear which movement qualities are salient, and how this applies to emotional gesture during speech-based interaction. In this study we investigated how the expression of emotions that vary on three major emotion dimensions-that is, arousal, valence, and potency-affects the perception of dynamic arm gestures. Ten professional actors enacted 12 emotions in a scenario-based social interaction setting. Participants (N = 43) rated all emotional expressions with muted sound and blurred faces on six spatiotemporal characteristics of gestural arm movement that were found to be related to emotion in previous research (amount of movement, movement speed, force, fluency, size, and height/vertical position). Arousal and potency were found to be strong determinants of the perception of gestural dynamics, whereas the differences between positive or negative emotions were less pronounced. These results confirm the importance of arm movement in communicating major emotion dimensions and show that gesture forms an integrated part of multimodal nonverbal emotion communication.

Keywords

Gesture
Dynamics
Emotion dimensions
Emotion expression
Movement perception

UNIGE affiliation entities

Centres et instituts / Centre interfacultaire en sciences affectives

UNIGE research groups

Affective sciences

Citation (ISO format)

DAEL, Nele, GOUDBEEK, Martyn, SCHERER, Klaus R. Perceived Gesture Dynamics in Nonverbal Expression of Emotion. In: Perception, 2013, vol. 42, n° 6, p. 642–657. doi: 10.1068/p7364

Article (Published version)

Identifiers

PID : unige:97853
DOI : 10.1068/p7364

Journal ISSN

0301-0066

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31/08/2017 11:20:00

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31/08/2017 11:20:00

Update

15/03/2023 02:09:47

Status update

15/03/2023 02:09:46

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31/10/2024 08:10:19

Perceived Gesture Dynamics in Nonverbal Expression of Emotion

Contributors

Published in

Publication date

Abstract

Keywords

UNIGE affiliation entities

UNIGE research groups

Citation (ISO format)

Main files (1)

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Journal ISSN

Technical informations

Creation

First validation

Update

Status update

Last indexation