On Happy Dance : Emotion Recognition in Dance Movements

Movements are capable of conveying emotions, as shown for instance in studies on both non-verbal gestures and music-specific movements performed by instrumentalists or professional dancers. Since dancing/moving to music is a common human activity, this study aims at investigating whether quasi-spontaneous music-induced movements of non-professional dancers can convey emotional qualities as well. From a movement data pool of 60 individuals dancing to 30 musical stimuli, the performances of four dancers that moved most notably, and four stimuli representing happiness, anger, sadness, and tenderness were chosen to create a set of stimuli containing the four audio excerpts, 16 video excerpts (without audio), and 64 audio-video excerpts (16 congruent music-movement combination and 48 incongruent combinations). Subsequently, 80 partici-pants were asked to rate the emotional content perceived in the excerpts according to happiness, anger, sad-ness, and tenderness. The results showed that target emotions could be perceived in all conditions, although systematic mismatches occurred, especially with examples related to tenderness. The audio-only condition was most effective in conveying emotions, followed by the audio-video condition. Furthermore in the audio-video condition, the audi