The Role of Velocity in Affect Discrimination

Abstract

Two experiments are described that examine the role of speed in the categorisation of affective biological motion displays.For the first experiment movements were recorded for 10 affects and the point-light animations of them were shown to participants in a recognition task.The resultant confusion matrices were analysed using the ALSCAL multi-dimensional scaling procedure and produced a 2-dimensional psychological space.The psychological space for discrimination was similar to that from recent models of experienced affect in that the first dimension corresponded to the activation dimension from these models.A strong correlation between the movement speed and the activation dimension confirmed the finding.From these results it would appear that the mapping between stimulus properties and representation of activation in affect is a fairly direct one.For the second experiment more sad, angry and neutral movements were collected.New movements of different duration, but identical spatial displacement were made using an interpolation algorithm.Observers viewed the movements as point light displays and heir task was to rate intensity of affect.Results from this experiment indicate speed plays a major role in modulating the intensity of activation in perceived affect.