Decoding spatiotemporal features of emotional body language in social interactions

How are emotions perceived through body language in human interactions? Although emotion perception is a complex phenomenon integrating various features, humans are highly adept at recognizing and expressing emotions through body movements within social interactions. This study used point-light displays of social interactions portraying emotional scenes to address two issues. First, we examined quantitative intrapersonal kinematic and postural body configurations. Second, we calculated interaction-specific parameters and analysed how far both contribute to emotion and valence perception. By using ANOVA and classification trees we investigated emotion-specific differences in the calculated parameters. Further, we applied representational similarity analyses to determine how perceptual ratings relate to intra- and interpersonal features. Results showed that within an interaction, intrapersonal kinematic cues corresponded to emotional ratings, whereas postural cues reflected valence ratings. Furthermore, perception of emotional content was driven by interpersonal orientation, proxemics, the time spent in the personal space of the counterpart, and the balance in motion energy between interacting people. Both the latter and balance in orientation related to valence ratings. Hence, intrapersonal and interpersonal features of emotional body language relate to not only the emotional content in human interactions but also their perception.