Perception of Emotion and Personality through Full-Body Movement Qualities: A Sport Coach Case Study

Virtual sport coaches guide users through their physical activity and provide motivational support. Users’ motivation can rapidly decay if the movements of the virtual coach are too stereotyped. Kinematic patterns generated while performing a predefined fitness movement can elicit and help to prolong users’ interaction and interest in training. Human body kinematics has been shown to convey various social attributes such as gender, identity, and acted emotions. To date, no study provides information regarding how spontaneous emotions and personality traits together are perceived from full-body movements. In this article, we study how people make reliable inferences regarding spontaneous emotional dimensions and personality traits of human coaches from kinematic patterns they produced when performing a fitness sequence. Movements were presented to participants via a virtual mannequin to isolate the influence of kinematics on perception. Kinematic patterns of biological movement were analyzed in terms of movement qualities according to the effort-shape [Dell 1977] notation proposed by Laban [1950]. Three studies were performed to provide an analysis of the process leading to perception: from coaches’ states and traits through bodily movements to observers’ social perception. Thirty-two participants (i.e., observers) were asked to rate the movements of the virtual mannequin in terms of conveyed emotion dimensions, personality traits (five-factor model of personality), and perceived movement qualities (effort-shape) from 56 fitness movement sequences. The results showed high reliability for most of the evaluated dimensions, confirming interobserver agreement from kinematics at zero acquaintance. A large expressive halo merging emotional (e.g., perceived intensity) and personality aspects (e.g., extraversion) was found, driven by perceived kinematic impulsivity and energy. Observers’ perceptions were partially accurate for emotion dimensions and were not accurate for personality traits. Together, these results contribute to both the understanding of dimensions of social perception through movement and the design of expressive virtual sport coaches.