Featured Image Credit: Getty Stock Images
Topics: News, Education, World News, Science
Kit Roberts
A study has examined how the way that we walk could communicate things about our personality.
Researchers working at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Japan aimed to give people a better looked at how different gaits might reflect someone's mood or personality.
Our gait can tell people a lot about us, especially if they know what to look for, and body language is a massive factor in how others around us perceive us.
So what did they manage to uncover in their walking analysis?
Advert
Well, among the results was that someone walking quickly and swinging their arms a lot could mean that they're angry.
Alternatively a lot less swinging of the arms, walking slowly, and slouched shoulders is more indicative that someone is feeling sad.
What about someone feeling happy? The research suggested that this was from someone having a nice bounce to how they walk.
"An individual's gait can reveal their emotional state from a distance, enabling social decision-making - such as whether to approach or avoid them - before their facial expressions become visible," the study said.
It added: "While facial expressions can be consciously controlled, gait represents a spontaneous and habitual motor behaviour that may provide reliable cues for one's internal emotional state."
The study was published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
Describing some of the different ways that people might walk depending on their mood, it said: "Angry gait involves exaggerated arm swings, whereas sad and fearful gaits involve reduced arm movement."
They added: "We observed clear differences in specific movement patterns, especially the arm–leg swing patterns, across perceived emotions, suggesting that these patterns serve as perpetual clues."
But how did they actually conduct the study?
Part of the research included asking actors to walk a certain distance while expressing one of five emotions, which were anger, sadness, fear, happiness, and a neutral walk.
They then used a motion capture system to observe how certain parts of the body moved while the actors were walking.
Once this was ready, they showed it to a different set of people and asked them to guess the emotion.
Researchers found that people were able to correctly guess a lot, with arm movements in particular being a factor in how they felt someone was feeling.
Other studies have looked into how subtle differences in arm movement could indicate differences in someone's mood, including one at the University of Portsmouth which examined how likely they are to become aggressive.