Perception of emotional body expressions in narrative scenarios

People use body motion to express and recognise emotions. We investigated whether emotional body expressions can be recognised when they are recorded during natural narration, where actors freely express the emotional colouring of a story told. We then took only the upper body motion trajectories and presented them to participants in the form of animated stick figures. The observers were asked to categorise the emotions expressed in short motion sequences. The results show that recognition level of eleven emotions shown via upper body is significantly above chance level and the responses to motion sequences are consistent across observers.