Cross-cultural differences in recognizing affect from body posture

Conveyance and recognition of human emotion and affective expression is influenced by many factors, including culture. Within the user modeling field, it has become increasingly necessary to understand the role affect can play in personalizing interactive interfaces using embodied animated agents. However, little research within the computer science field aims at understanding cultural differences within this vein. Therefore, we conducted a study to evaluate if differences exist in the way various cultures perceive emotion from body posture. We used static posture images of affectively expressive avatars to conduct recognition experiments with subjects from three cultures. After analyzing the subjects’ judgments using multivariate analysis, we grounded the identified differences into a set of low-level posture features. We then used Mixture Discriminant Analysis (MDA) and an unsupervised Expectation Maximization (EM) model to build separate cultural models for affective posture recognition. Our results could prove useful to aide designers in creating more effective affective avatars.