Our own action kinematics predict the perceived affective states of others.

Abstract

Words in body of text: 2434 (<2500). Acknowledgements:We are grateful to Kaat Alaerts for providing the original stimuli and much useful advice concerning their generation, as well as Nicholas Holmes for advice concerning the bootstrapping analysis. RE was funded by a graduate teaching assistantship from Birkbeck, University of London and DY was funded by an ESRC Studentship. JC is supported by the Birmingham Fellows programme. 2 AbstractOur movement kinematics provide useful cues about our affective states. Given that our experiences furnish models that help us to interpret our environment, and that a rich source of action experience comes from our own movements, the present study examined whether we use models of our own action kinematics to make judgments about the affective states of others. For example, relative to one's typical kinematics, anger is associated with fast movements. Therefore, the extent to which we perceive anger in others may be determined by the degree to which their movements are faster than our own typical movements. We related participants' walking kinematics in a neutral context to their judgments of the affective states conveyed by observed point-light walkers (PLWs). As predicted, we found a linear relationship between one's own walking kinematics and affective state judgments, such that faster participants rated slower emotions more intensely relative to their ratings for faster emotions. This relationship was absent when observing PLWs where differences in velocity between affective states were removed. These findings suggest that perception of affective states in others is predicted by one's own movement kinematics, with important implications for perception of, and interaction with, those who move differently.Keywords: Action perception; emotion; affective states; point-light walkers; expertise Public significance statement: The way that we move provides useful cues about our emotions. For example, we move more quickly than our average speed when we are feeling angry and more slowly when we are feeling sad. The present study shows that we make judgments about others' emotional expressions relative to how we move ourselves. To give an example, rather than everyone interpreting movements of a certain speed as angry, individuals may only think that others feel angry if these movements are faster than their own typical movement speed. Therefore, we are better placed to understand the emotions of others who tend to move more similarly to us. These findings have 3 important implications for our understanding of and interactions with clinical and cultural groups whose movements are dramatically different from our own. 4

Emotions in action: The relationship between motor function and social cognition across multiple clinical populations

“…Building on the observation that visual and motor representations of one's own movements play an important role in the perception, prediction and interpretation of others' movements we have previously argued that socio-cognitive atypicalities in individuals with ASD may, at least in part, be a function of motoric abnormalities (Cook et al, 2013;Cook, 2016;Edey et al, 2016Edey et al, , 2017. The current review extends this logic to three additional clinical conditions in which both socio-cognitive and motor difficulties have been observed: PD, HD and TS.…”

“…Correspondingly, movement similarity between two individuals can influence mental state and emotion attribution. For instance, if participants are required to watch point light displays depicting an actor walking in a happy, sad, or angry fashion, their emotion judgements are biased by their own typical walking speed (Edey et al, 2017). That is, a person who typically walks slowly is likely to judge other slow walkers as being in a neutral frame of mind, whereas the same walker might be judged to appear sad by an individual who typically walks fast.…”

Adults with autism spectrum disorder are sensitive to the kinematic features defining natural human motion

“…We presented profiles derived either from real autistic or typical execution data and interestingly observed no own group benefit. Such a benefit may have been expected given the range of evidence that our perceptual models of action are tuned during development to our own actions [e.g., Edey, Yon, Cook, Dumontheil, & Press, ], likely either due to the role of the motor system in tuning perception [Press & Cook, ] or due to our vast visual experience with our own actions [Peelen & Downing, ]. One possible explanation of the lack of own group advantage is that both groups have frequent experience of both types of movement profile and therefore consider both to represent “natural” motion.…”

Considering context and variability when observing other minds

“…If inter-individual variability is too high to permit accurate cross-actor classification of intentions, then we would predict that observers should show better intention perception for kinematics with which they are familiar. Such a prediction relates to a range of findings, including that participants with atypical action kinematics struggle to identify 'typical' biological motion [3]; that participants with typical action kinematics show reduced ability to identify the mental state expressed by participants with atypical action kinematics [5]; and that one's own action kinematics influence the ability to perceive others' underlying emotional states [6].…”