Emotional Reactions to Point-Light Display Animations

Emotional reactions to basic, artificial, yet carefully controllable point-light displays (PLDs) were investigated with ratings of valence, arousal, approachability, and dominance. PLDs were varied by movement location (upper and lower) and intensity (10°, 20°, and 30° angular change) for angular upward and downward movements. Half of participants (N = 28) were told that PLDs were related to face while to other half nothing was hinted. Results showed that 20° and 30° angle lower location upward movements were rated as significantly more pleasant, relaxing, and approachable than corresponding upper location downward movements. Informed participants rated 20° and 30° angle lower movements as significantly more controllable than corresponding upper movements. Results are important from many perspectives, like for understanding human perceptual mechanisms. When using PLDs only a small amount of information needs to be transmitted. This enables low bandwidth requirements. As PLD visualisations are simple, there is no need for high-definition displays. Author keywords: Point-light displays; biological movement; biological motion; emotions; face perception; human-computer interaction ACM classification keywords: Laboratory experiments; Information visualization; Psychology Research highlights: The aim of the experiment was to investigate emotional reactions to basic, artificial, yet carefully controllable point-light display (PLD) animations with the ratings of valence, arousal, approachability, and dominance. It was found that the PLDs convey emotional information. The knowledge of PLD processing can be valuable both for basic research and for humancomputer interaction applications. This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Interacting with Computers following peer review. The version of record (Hanna Venesvirta, Veikko Surakka, Yulia Gizatdinova, Jani Lylykangas, Oleg Špakov, Jarmo Verho, Akos Vetek, and Jukka Lekkala; Emotional Reactions to Point-Light Display Animations; Interact. Comput. (2016) 28 (4): 521-531; doi: 10.1093/iwc/iwv028) is available online at: http://iwc.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/4/521.