Action and emotion recognition from point light displays: an investigation of gender differences

Abstract

Folk psychology advocates the existence of gender differences in socio-cognitive functions such as 'reading' the mental states of others or discerning subtle differences in body-language. A female advantage has been demonstrated for emotion recognition from facial expressions, but virtually nothing is known about gender differences in recognizing bodily stimuli or body language. The aim of the present study was to investigate potential gender differences in a series of tasks, involving the recognition of distinct features from point light displays (PLDs) depicting bodily movements of a male and female actor. Although recognition scores were considerably high at the overall group level, female participants were more accurate than males in recognizing the depicted actions from PLDs. Response times were significantly higher for males compared to females on PLD recognition tasks involving (i) the general recognition of 'biological motion' versus 'non-biological' (or 'scrambled' motion); or (ii) the recognition of the 'emotional state' of the PLD-figures. No gender differences were revealed for a control test (involving the identification of a color change in one of the dots) and for recognizing the gender of the PLD-figure. In addition, previous findings of a female advantage on a facial emotion recognition test (the 'Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test' (Baron-Cohen, 2001)) were replicated in this study. Interestingly, a strong correlation was revealed between emotion recognition from bodily PLDs versus facial cues. This relationship indicates that inter-individual or gender-dependent differences in recognizing emotions are relatively generalized across facial and bodily emotion perception. Moreover, the tight correlation between a subject's ability to discern subtle emotional cues from PLDs and the subject's ability to basically discriminate biological from non-biological motion provides indications that differences in emotion recognition may - at least to some degree - be related to more basic differences in processing biological motion per se.

Figure 1. To create the point light displays, twelve reflective markers were attached to an actor's shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees and ankles, and were tracked using a Vicon motion-capture-system.

(A) An exemplary photograph of the male actor with the 12 markers attached to the body. (B) The corresponding point light figure. (C) Examples of point light figures, viewed from different perspectives i.e., the front, the side, and the 45° view.

Figure 2. Gender differences in test performance.

Accuracy (% correct scores) (A–E) and Reaction times (F–J) are displayed as a function of participant group (male, female) separately for each test of experiment 1 [Action Recognition Test (A, F); Gender Recognition Test (B, G)] and experiment 2 [Biological motion Recognition Test (C, H); Emotion Recognition Test (D, I); Control Color Test (E, J)]. Vertical lines denote ±standard error. [(*) p = .05; * p<.05; ** p<.01].

Figure 3. Performance on the ‘Emotion Recognition Test’ correlates with performance on the ‘Biological Motion Recognition Test’ and the ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test’.

Figure 3 shows linear fits for correlated performance (% correct answers) on the ‘Emotion Recognition Test’ and respectively the ‘Biological Motion Recognition Test’ (A) and the ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test’ (B) of experiment 2. Dotted lines denote 0.95 confidence intervals.