EMOTION IN MOTION (AND MUSIC)
Why is happy music bouncy and sad music heavy?
If you read the lyrics to "Close to Me" by The Cure, you'd be forgiven for thinking it would put you in a melancholy, introspective kind of mood.
i've waited hours for this
i've made myself so sick
i wish i'd stayed asleep today…
But give the song a listen. The tinkling ivories and snappy beat are just plain happy. Music, beyond lyrics, sets a tone. It can be up tempo and light or slow and plodding and these qualities telegraph emotion the same way that a person walking can look happy or sad depending on their gait (bouncy step vs downcast trudge).
We propose that movement and music convey similar types of information such as emotion. Our project seeks to discover the underlying structure of emotions that allows them to be represented similarly by movement and music.
EMOTION IN MOTION
Click here to see Happy in Motion (Quicktime Movie 1.5 MB)
Click here to see Proud in Motion (Quicktime Movie 1.3 MB)
We have shown that emotion can be decoded easily from motion cues and relies on an area in the brain known to process biological motion: posterior superior temporal sulcus (Silvers et al., 2007; Wheatley et al, in prep). Indeed, this area activates more to emotionally-expressive biological motion than to emotionally-neutral biological motion. This suggests that pSTS is involved in gleaning social information from movement (intentions, emotions).
 We are currently examining whether music conveys similar information as movement in a human fMRI project. In addition, via collaboration with Yale Cohen and Yung-Sang Lee, we are testing whether rhesus macaques match emotional information conveyed in music with the same information conveyed in movement. This should help us answer how old the mental hardware may be.
RELATED PUBLICATIONS
 Silvers, J., Wheatley, T., Martin, A., (2007) Selective Involvement of Posterior STS in Recognizing Emotion from Motion. Cognitive Neuroscience Society Abstracts, 2007.
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