Additivity in perception of affect from limb motion

Abstract

In this study, the notion of additivity in perception of affect from limb motion is investigated. Specifically, we examine whether the impact of multiple limbs in perception of affect is equal to the sum of the impacts of each individual limb. Several neutral, happy, and sad walking sequences are first aligned and averaged. Four distinct body regions or limbs are defined for this study: arms and hands, legs and feet, head and neck, and torso. The three average walks are used to create the stimuli. The motion of each limb and combination of limbs from the neutral sequence are replaced with those of the happy and sad sequences. Through collecting perceptual ratings for when individual limbs contain affective features, and comparing the sums of these ratings to instances where multiple limbs of the body simultaneously contain affective features, additivity is investigated. We find that while the results are highly correlated, additivity does not hold in the classical sense. Based on the results, a mathematical model is proposed for describing the observed relationship.