Affective meaning from unlabeled biological motion: Associations with social-perceptual sensitivity

Although the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of others are not directly accessible to perception, they are often inferred from observable behavior. Human movement may be especially important in this process because it provides continuously unfolding spatiotemporal structure through which socially meaningful interpretations can emerge. Prior work has shown that observers can derive social and affective meaning from movement, even when it is reduced to point-light displays (PLDs). Less is known, however, about whether perceivers can form affective judgments from movement when contextual and categorical emotion cues are reduced while natural individual variation in expressive movement is preserved, and whether this ability is related to social-perceptual sensitivity. In the present study, participants viewed unlabeled PLDs depicting bodily movements originally generated by actors attempting to express anger, fear, or happiness. Participants were not informed of the intended affective state of each PLD and provided valence-arousal ratings based only on the movement patterns they observed. Ratings were transformed into angular representations within circumplex affective space and compared with theoretically derived reference locations associated with the actor-instructed movement conditions. Results showed that higher social-perceptual sensitivity was associated with valence-arousal judgments positioned closer to the theoretically derived circumplex reference locations associated with the movement conditions. This relationship differed across movement conditions, with the strongest associations observed for anger-related PLDs relative to happiness-related PLDs. Together, these findings suggest that social-perceptual functioning contributes to how perceivers derive affective meaning from human movement when contextual and categorical emotion cues are reduced. More broadly, the findings support the view that affective meaning derived from movement reflects an interaction between the spatiotemporal organization of movement and the perceiver's attunement to that organization.