Watch your steps: Your walking style can tell a lot about your inner emotional state

Both anger and happiness are characterised by profound and exaggerated limb swings, scientists have found out.

The way a person walks can say a lot about their inner emotional states, a study has found out.

Apart from facial expressions and vocal tone, a person’s gait can become an important cue in understanding the dominant emotion driving their behaviour at that moment.

While facial expressions could be consciously controlled, the way a person walks is a spontaneous motor activity which can provide a reliable cue for their inner emotional states.

Many studies in the past have shown a connection between movement and emotions -- for instance, a broad expansive torso conveys happiness whereas limited arm swings could project sadness.

Similarly, a shorter, quicker gait with reduced arm swings could suggest fear or anxiety.

What did the study find?

Co-ordinated movement is important for balance, with arms and legs moving in a line to prevent a person from falling off. However, some movements like drooping the shoulder or tilting the neck happen more independently, the study observed.

Led by Mina Wakabayashi, a group of researchers at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute in Kyoto, Japan aimed at finding specific coordinated movement patterns associated with each kind of emotion.

They assumed if there was one specific movement linked with one particular kind of emotion, including anger, happiness, fear, sadness and others.

For the experiments, the scientists had asked some actors to recall some memories and feel emotions evoked by those episodes. They were asked to dwell in those feelings, covering some distance and wearing skin-tight clothing. The clothing had markers with which point light videos were generated. The participants were asked to review the walk of these actors, and assess the emotion each actor was experiencing. The participants were only able to observe the walking pattern without facial expressions and other behavioural cues.

In the first experiment, the participants were asked to assess if each one of those actors was happy, sad, fearful, neutral or angry.

Each movement was labelled with the emotion most frequently perceived by the participants.

Data collected from 58 Japanese participants was quantified and a co-ordinated movement pattern was associated with each kind of emotion.

In the second experiment, the scientists retained the walking video which participants had attributed showing a neutral state of being. They manipulated this video by tweaking a movement here and there to assess if any change in the movement will make participants see the emotion differently.

When the neutral gait video was tweaked by an extra movement, the emotion perceived got changed.

They observed that movements with larger arm and leg swings were perceived as an expression of anger whereas smaller swings in the limbs were perceived as sad or fearful.

Similarly, sad walking involves the entire arms whereas fearful walking involves only the forearms.

Both anger and happiness are characterized by profound and exaggerated limb swings.

Could prevent negative experiences

Asked how understanding the movements will help in assessing emotions, the scientists said if one could guess the emotions from a distance, it could enable the social decision making as to whether to approach or avoid the person before their physical emotions became visible.

It could also help identify vulnerable or aggressive people using CCTV footage in cases of bullying, violence or abuse.

As per some experts, fear is the most easily recognised emotion and happiness or neutral state of being the most difficult to guess.