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Human body movements are important for emotion recognition and social communication and have received extensive attention from researchers. In this field, emotional biological motion stimuli, as depicted by point-light displays, are widely used. However, the number of stimuli in the existing material library is small, and there is a lack of standardized indicators, which subsequently limits experimental design and conduction. Therefore, based on our prior kinematic dataset, we constructed the Dalian Emotional Movement Open-source Set (DEMOS) using computational modeling. The DEMOS has three views (i.e., frontal 0°, left 45°, and left 90°) and in total comprises 2664 high-quality videos of emotional biological motion, each displaying happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and neutral. All stimuli were validated in terms of recognition accuracy, emotional intensity, and subjective movement. The objective movement for each expression was also calculated. The DEMOS can be downloaded for free from https://osf.io/83fst/. To our knowledge, this is the largest multi-view emotional biological motion set based on the whole body. The DEMOS can be applied in many fields, including affective computing, social cognition, and psychiatry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to explore whether reward learning would affect the processing of targets when an emotional stimulus was task irrelevant. In the current study, using a visual search paradigm to establish an association between emotional faces and reward, an emotional face appeared as a task-irrelevant distractor during the test after reward learning, and participants were asked to judge the orientation of a line on the face. In experiment 1, no significant difference was found between the high reward-fear distractor condition and the no reward-neutral condition, but the response times of the high reward-fear condition were significantly longer than those of the low reward-happy condition. In experiment 2, there was no significant difference in participants' performance between high reward-happy and no reward-neutral responses. In addition, response times of the low reward-fear condition wear significantly longer than those of the high reward-happy and no reward-neutral conditions. The results show that reward learning affects attention bias of task-irrelevant emotional faces even when reward is absent. Moreover, the high reward selection history is more effective in weakening the emotional advantage of the processing advantage than the low reward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans are more proficient at processing visual display of body posture when the body is in upright orientation, compared to when inverted (inversion effect). Here we investigated whether extensive exposure or expertise on body posture recognition would affect the efficiency with which body-posture is processed. Using whole-body and piecemeal-body postures as stimuli, we performed two experiments to investigate whether body-posture recognition differed between two groups of participants: undergraduates majoring in physical education (PE) and those in other subjects (non-PE), respectively. These two groups differed significantly in the frequency and intensity of exercise per day and/or accumulated exercise time. In our experiments, following initial presentation of an image of a body posture, participants were shown the same or a different stimulus and were asked to report whether or not they had been previously shown the same image. The orientations of the body postures were also varied between trials. Our results showed that, in Experiment 1, for whole-body posture recognition, both the PE and non-PE groups showed a robust body-inversion effect in terms of both error rate and reaction time (RT), but the magnitude of the body-inversion effect in the RT measure was greater in the PE than the non-PE group. In Experiment 2, for piecemeal-body postures, both groups showed the inversion effect in terms of both error rate and RT measures and the PE group made fewer overall errors than the non-PE group. These cumulative results suggest that a superiority effect exists for PE participants compared with non-PE participants. Our results are generally consistent with the expertise hypothesis., (Copyright © 2020 Tao, Du, Li, He and Sun.)