Something in the Way You Move: The Kinematics of Emotion and Beauty

I’m very happy to announce that our work with the team led by Dr. Julia F. Christensen at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics is starting to produce nice results, and our poster was accepted at the 2021 Congress of the International Association of Empirical Esthetics.

In this work, we investigate our ability to convey and perceive emotions through dance, and present an exploratory analysis of the kinematics.

Results show that the dancer’s intended emotion was recognized above chance level, and reveal interesting relationships between recognition and beauty ratings. Furthermore, clear trends can be recognized for different emotions when observing the kinematics for maximum acceleration and velocity.

More results will be coming, stay tuned!