Perception of Emotion in Body Expressions from Gaze Behavior

Abstract

Developing affectively aware technologies is a growing industry. To build them effectively, it is important to understand the features involved in discriminating between emotions. While many technologies focus on facial expressions, studies have highlighted the influence of body expressions over other modalities for perceiving some emotions. Eye tracking studies have evaluated the combination of face and body to investigate the influence of each modality, however, few to none have investigated the perception of emotion from body expressions alone. This exploratory study aimed to evaluate the discriminative importance of dynamic body features for decoding emotion. Eye tracking was used to monitor participants' eye gaze behavior while viewing clips of non-acted body movements to which they associated an emotion. Preliminary results indicate that the two primary regions attended to most often and longest were the torso and the arms. Further analysis is ongoing, however initial results independently confirm prior studies without eye tracking.