The influences of emotional intensity for happiness and sadness on walking

Abstract

Walking is one of the most common activities that we perform every day. Even if the main goal of walking is to move from one place to another place, walking can also convey emotional clues in social context. Those clues can be used to improve interactions or any messages we want to express. However, there are not many studies on the effects of the intensity of the emotions on the walking. In this paper, the authors propose to assess the differences between the expression of emotion regarding the expressed intensity (low, middle, high and exaggerated). We observed two professional actors perform emotive walking, with different intensities and we analyzed the recorded data. For each emotion, we analyzed characteristic features which can be used in the future to model gait patterns and to recognize emotions from the gait parameters. Additionally, we found characteristics which can be used to create new emotion expression for our biped robot Kobian, improving the human-robot interaction.

Emotional gait: Effects on humans' perception of humanoid robots

“…We asked two professional Japanese actors (who acted in plays, drama and movies) to perform several types of emotional walking such as Sadness, Happiness, Anger and Fear and with different intensities: low, intermediate, high, and exaggerated [23]. We also recorded normal walking.…”

“…With the present paper, we implemented for the first time to our knowledge, biologically-based [23] emotional gait patterns in a human-sized (148cm) humanoid robot. We would like to insist on the possible importance of the size of the robot.…”

Emotional gait generation method based on emotion mental model — Preliminary experiment with happiness and sadness

“…We asked two professional, Japanese actors (each 22 years old, one male and one female) to perform several types of emotive walking (sadness, happiness, anger and fear) with different intensities (low, middle, high, and exaggerated) [16]. The actors have been instructed a few days ahead of the experiment to prepare a scenario and to perform the first three intensities in such a way that they would correspond to natural occurrences of emotion expression.…”

“…From the data captured [16], we extract values for the previous parameters. We use for each parameter a quadratic function in order to model their evolution as the emotional intensity increases (Eq.1 and Eq.…”

Perception of emotion and emotional intensity in humanoid robots gait

“…The goal of our research is to create a more understandable emotional walking pattern for our robot and then be able to use the emotional intensity to fine-tune the social interaction with the human partners. Based on data we obtained from previous works [11,12], we created for our robot WABIAN-2R [13] different walking patterns, for the emotions Sadness, Happiness, Anger, Fear and with different intensities for each of those emotions. We chose those emotions because they are continuous, vary over time and can be used with walking.…”