The perception of emotion is impaired for a variety of neurological and psychiatric diseases, such as schizophrenia, or autism spectrum diorder. We model emotional body movements with highly controlled properties by morphing techniques and techniques that are based on learned movement primitives, which we derive from data by blind source separation.These highly controlled stimuli are used in studies with patients to quantify their capability to recognize emotions form body movements. In additon, we use such stimuli to investigate correclates of the processing of emotion from body movements in imaging experiments.

Figure 1: Emotion and gender recogniton from body motion in schizophrenic patients (SZ) and healthy contgrols (CO) (from Peterman et a. 2013).

Figure 2: Activity patterns measured by Near Infrared Süectroscopy (NIRS) contrasting different emotional body expressions (from Schneider et al. 2013).