The Avatar’s Gist: How to Transfer Affective Components From Dynamic Walking to Static Body Postures

• Published in: Frontiers in neuroscience Vol. 16; p. 842433
• Main Authors: Presti, Paolo, Ruzzon, Davide, Galasso, Gaia Maria, Avanzini, Pietro, Caruana, Fausto, Vecchiato, Giovanni
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Frontiers Research Foundation 15.06.2022; Frontiers Media S.A
• Subjects: Affect (Psychology); Arousal; Behavior; body posture; Cognition & reasoning; Cognitive ability; dynamic walking; Emotional behavior; Emotions; Experiments; Kinematics; Motion capture; Neuroscience; Posture; valence; virtual reality; virtual reality; dynamic walking; valence; body posture; arousal
• ISSN: 1662-453X; 1662-4548; 1662-453X
• DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2022.842433

Dynamic virtual representations of the human being can communicate a broad range of affective states through body movements, thus effectively studying emotion perception. However, the possibility of modeling static body postures preserving affective information is still fundamental in a broad spectrum of experimental settings exploring time-locked cognitive processes. We propose a novel automatic method for creating virtual affective body postures starting from kinematics data. Exploiting body features related to postural cues and movement velocity, we transferred the affective components from dynamic walking to static body postures of male and female virtual avatars. Results of two online experiments showed that participants coherently judged different valence and arousal levels in the avatar’s body posture, highlighting the reliability of the proposed methodology. In addition, esthetic and postural cues made women more emotionally expressive than men. Overall, we provided a valid methodology to create affective body postures of virtual avatars, which can be used within different virtual scenarios to understand better the way we perceive the affective state of others.