Toward an Asian-based bodily movement database for emotional communication

Most current databases for bodily emotion expression are created in Western countries, resulting in culturally skewed representations. To address the obvious risk this bias poses to academic comprehension, we attempted to expand the current repertoire of human bodily emotions by recruiting Asian professional performers to wear whole-body suits with 57 retroreflective markers attached to major joints and body segments, and express seven basic emotions with whole-body movements in a motion-capture lab. For each emotion, actors performed three self-created scenarios that covered a broad range of real-life events to elicit the target emotion within 2-5 seconds. Subsequently, a separate group of participants was invited to judge the perceived emotional category from the extracted biological motions (point-light displays with 18 or 57 markers). The results demonstrated that the emotion discrimination accuracy was comparable to Western databases containing standardized performance scenarios. The results provide a significant step toward establishing a database using a novel emotional induction approach based on personalized scenarios. This database will contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of emotional expression across diverse contexts.