Abstract
We proved the viability of the general hypothesis that biological motion (BM) processing serves as a hallmark of social cognition. We assumed that BM processing and inferring emotions through BM (body language reading) are firmly linked and examined whether this tie is gender-specific. Healthy females and males completed two tasks with the same set of point-light BM displays portraying angry and neutral locomotion of female and male actors. For one task, perceivers had to indicate actor gender, while for the other, they had to infer the emotional content of locomotion. Thus, with identical visual input, we directed task demands either to BM processing or inferring of emotion. This design allows straight comparison between sensitivity to BM and recognition of emotions conveyed by the same BM. In addition, perceivers were administered a set of photographs from the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), with which they identified either emotional state or actor gender. Although there were no gender differences in performance on BM tasks, a tight link occurred between recognition accuracy of emotions and gender through BM in males. In females only, body language reading (both accuracy and response time) was associated with performance on the RMET. The outcome underscores gender-specific modes in visual social cognition and triggers investigation of body language reading in a wide range of neuropsychiatric disorders.
Highlights
Body language reading is an essential ability for efficient daily interpersonal exchanges and adaptive behavior
In accordance with our assumption that biological motion (BM) processing is firmly linked to expressive body language reading, our data analysis was primarily focused on associations between performance on the emotion recognition task (BME) and the gender recognition task (BMG); the outcome of the analysis of variance (ANOVA) is reported for completeness
Keeping in mind experimental evidence for gender-specific modes in both visual social cognition and BM processing, we focused on the gender specificity of this link
Summary
Body language reading is an essential ability for efficient daily interpersonal exchanges and adaptive behavior. It has been argued that social cognitive abilities (i.e., abilities to perceive and understand emotional states, drives, and intentions of others) and BM processing are tightly linked and, performance on socially neutral tasks (such as detection of camouflaged BM, facing detection, or discrimination between canonical and scrambled BM) may serve as a hallmark of social cognition (Pavlova, 2012): individuals with neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions (such as autism spectrum disorders (ASD), Williams-Beuren syndrome, and Down syndrome) and survivors of premature birth who exhibit aberrant BM processing, have compromised daily social perception and possess lower social competence. In agreement with this assumption, newborn human infants (and newly hatched chicks) appear to be predisposed to BM, though such predispositions are impaired in newborns at high risk of autism (Bidet-Ildei et al, 2014; Di Giorgio et al, 2016, 2017)
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