What swinging your arms when you walk really means, according to science

The way a person moves their hands and legs while walking can reveal clues to how they are feeling, scientists discover in a new study.

The way we walk in terms of our hand and leg movements can help further understand how we're feeling, according to scientists.
We all know there's a scope of cues, these include micro-expressions like slight movement of our eyebrows, eyes, and mouth, which can indicate our internal emotional state - whether we're feeling happy, sad, angry, fearful or surprised.

Body language and posture can also lend a hand at understanding a person's state of mind and emotions. Openness shows interest, while being closed off can suggest stress or uneasiness.

Humans often pick up on these cues to understand each other's feelings, but it's more difficult to understand the specifics of how we're able to read movements and pick up on emotions.

Recently, researchers have looked into this and in a new study say the way we swings their arms and legs is linked to certain emotions.

Movement patterns in gait were analysed by scientists in order to find out how this can influence emotion recognition, and they noted that people could judge someone's emotions from a motion capture video.

Experiments carried out

As part of the study (published in the journal Royal Society Open Science), there was an experiment where participants assessed videos of trained actors’ coordinated movement patterns and from this concluded what emotions the trained actors were feeling.

Meanwhile, the actors were briefed to remember personal life events that spurred feelings of anger, happiness, fear or sadness, and they would then walk a short distance while recalling the memory, all the while sporting reflective markers for researchers to create point-light videos.

In a second experiment, varied people’s gait with emotion to resemble angry, sad, and fearful states and as a result, the participants’ emotion judgments shifted in a way the researchers expected.

From these, the study found that participants could deduce the actors’ emotions at a better than level chance.
More specifically, larger arm movements were associated with anger, while feelings of sadness were expressed with reduced movements.

What did the scientists say about their findings?

"To some degree, the walkers’ intended emotions were indeed perceived by the observers,” wrote the scientists in the study.

They added, “Our approach offers an effective framework for isolating and manipulating dynamic features within complex movements, thereby advancing understanding of emotional, aesthetic, and technical evaluations of movement."

The study suggests certain patterns of movement can help us recognise different emotions in others.

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