Dael, N. 1, 2 , Goudbeek, M. 3 & Scherer, K. 1
1 Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences. University of Geneva. Geneva, Switzerland
2 Institute of Psychology. University of Lausanne. Lausanne, Switzerland
3 Department of Communication and Information Sciences. Tilburg University. Tilburg, Netherlands
Gestures serve many cognitive-linguistic functions, but the affective facets of gestural communication have, in contrast to those of vocal and facial expression, not yet been explored. We investigated the perception of spatiotemporal qualities of emotional arm gestures. We examined how the emotion dimensions arousal, valence, and potency, affected the judgment of 6 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). The emotional expressions were taken from the Geneva Multimodal Emotional Portrayals. First, we tested the recognition of these emotion dimensions from bodily expressions and found that the rating of the perceived dimension was most strongly influenced by the corresponding encoded dimension in the predicted direction. Valence, potency and arousal are thus relevant dimensions in the perception of bodily expression of emotion. Second, the gesture ratings revealed that arousal and potency are strong determinants of the perception of gestural dynamics, whereas the differences between positive or negative emotions were less pronounced. In sum, this study identifies perceptual cues in gestural arm movement that are relevant in communicating major emotion dimensions. Gesture thus forms an important part of multimodal emotion communication.