Abstract
We describe the creation of the first multisensory stimulus set that consists of dyadic, emotional, point-light interactions combined with voice dialogues. Our set includes 238 unique clips, which present happy, angry and neutral emotional interactions at low, medium and high levels of emotional intensity between nine different actor dyads. The set was evaluated in a between-design experiment, and was found to be suitable for a broad potential application in the cognitive and neuroscientific study of biological motion and voice, perception of social interactions and multisensory integration. We also detail in this paper a number of supplementary materials, comprising AVI movie files for each interaction, along with text files specifying the three dimensional coordinates of each point-light in each frame of the movie, as well as unprocessed AIFF audio files for each dialogue captured. The full set of stimuli is available to download from: http://motioninsocial.com/stimuli_set/.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.3758/s13428-015-0654-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Every day we observe social interactions around us, and those social scenes typically comprise complex and emotional situations, which engage multiple senses
We conducted a series of between-subject experiments to examine how accurately the emotional interactions were identified by observers when presented with the displays as point-lights, voice dialogues or a combination of point-lights and dialogues
Happy displays were identified more accurately than angry displays (F(1,40) = 17.86, p < 0.001, ηG2 = 0.17), but emotional intensity played a key role in identification accuracy and confidence of responses
Summary
Every day we observe social interactions around us, and those social scenes typically comprise complex and emotional situations, which engage multiple senses. In order to empirically study the perception of emotions in such complex conditions, a stimulus set is needed that will be flexible enough to enable us to manipulate visual and auditory cues, but simple enough to reduce the enormous complexity of such social scenes. A large number of studies have shown that observers can recognise specific actions (Dittrich, 1993; Vanrie & Verfaillie, 2004), gender (Mather & Murdoch, 1994; Troje, 2002), age (Montepare & Zebrowitz-McArthur, 1988), identity (Cutting & Kozlowski, 1977; Hill & Pollick, 2000) and affect (Dittrich et al, 1996; Pollick et al, 2001; Atkinson et al, 2004; Clarke et al, 2005) from just a set of point-lights representing the main joints of human movement.
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