Movements betray our emotions, psychologists say. New study confirms we look up when we’re happy and down when we’re sad…
Once Steven Livingstone (Steven Livingstone) from McGill University (Canada) met in a bar with friends. Since it was very noisy, he had to strain to hear what his friend was saying, and still he could not understand the words. “It was so dark that I couldn’t even see his face! But I noticed how his movements changed: he nodded his head so enthusiastically … And then I realized that he was very passionate about what he was talking about. It was like a lightbulb went on in my head…”
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After that, Stephen Livinston and Caroline Palmer decided to investigate how head movements betray emotions. They recorded the movements of twelve volunteer singers with experience. “They had to say and sing four phrases with five different intonations: happy, cheerful, neutral, sad and very sad”1. It turned out that when we are sad, we usually tilt our heads. If we are having fun or feeling happy, we raise our head up and do it faster than usual. In addition, the stronger our emotions, the more distinct the movements. When we speak with a neutral intonation, our movements become calmer.
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In the second part of the experiment, the researchers showed the recorded videos, but hid the faces and turned off the sound. Focusing only on the movements of the head, they had to guess the emotion that the person on the recording “spoke out”. Although the videos were short, the results were accurate.
Stephen Livinston is confident that his discovery will help engineers create robots that move more realistically, «more humanely.» However, first he plans to conduct a series of experiments to find out whether such specificity is characteristic only for the inhabitants of North America and what movements are inherent in people from other cultures. “I must admit, I now play scientist at home by watching my family, and it amazes me how easy it is to understand what emotions a person is experiencing just by watching how his head moves!”
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1 S. Livingstone, C. Palmer «Head Movements Encode Emotions During Speech and Song», Emotion, October 2015.