Recognizing Affective Dimensions from Body Posture

The recognition of affective human communication may be used to provide developers with a rich source of information for creating systems that are capable of interacting well with humans. Posture has been acknowledged as an important modality of affective communication in many fields. Behavioral studies have shown that posture can communicate discrete emotion categories as well as affective dimensions. In the affective computing field, while models for the automatic recognition of discrete emotion categories from posture have been proposed, to our knowledge, there are no models for the automatic recognition of affective dimensions from static posture. As a continuation of our previous study, the two main goals of this study are: i) to build automatic recognition models to discriminate between levels of affective dimensions based on low-level postural features; and ii) to investigate both the discriminative power and the limitations of the postural features proposed. The models were built on the basis of human observers’ ratings of posture according to affective dimensions directly (instead of emotion category) in conjunction with our posture features.