Next D5 Seminar will take place on Wednesday, 1st December at 11am in the Amphitheater with Yvonne Delevoye, Professor in Cognitive Psychology at the Université de Lille – Human motor performance ; Leader of the Playful City Lille community-based research project.
She will make a presentation entitled “Move your body and I will tell you how you feel: Motor timing to reveal affective states”.
Asbtract:
Emotions influence decisions to act. Anger, fear and joy are coded by contrasting gestures and attitudes in social situations. During my talk, I will expose the methods and results developed in our laboratory around the general theme of emotional body movements.
The aim of our work is to demonstrate that emotions impact not only the decision to act and the gesture to produce, but also the way a movement unfolds through space and time.
In a first study, I will report how music can change body kinematics both in simple actions (finger tapping) and in gait. In a second study, we used imagery to trigger emotional movements. Here, a total of eight actors were invited to recall a life-event that engaged social human events that triggered contrasting states of emotions, before walking freely through a gymnasium following a marked path. Markers (18) placed on body-joints provided the means to collect 3D kinematics of whole-body movements in a series of 30s gait trials. The findings confirm that high-energy emotions (anger; joy) are characterized by faster gait patterns compared to that observed in low-energy emotions (sadness; contentment). Negative-valanced emotions (anger; fear; sadness) were characterized by closed postures (shoulders in; head down) and more jerky patterns compared to that observed in positive-valanced emotions (joy; contentment). The final part of my talk will present how markerless technology can now offer ecological studies. By applying cross-wavelet techniques, our work suggests that clustering techniques applied to 3D whole-body actions may offer a window in the cognitive mechanisms of emotional body movements.
Keywords: Kinematics, Motor Control, Time Series, Affective States, Posture
Biography:
Theme: “Motor tempo, interactions and emotional body movements”
After a PhD thesis in behavioral neuroscience (Birmingham, UK – Prof. Alan Wing), I studied the role of motor prediction in the emergence of the sense of agency and in the sensory experience of the body in action. The concepts of effort, tolerance, pleasure are at the heart of a reflection around emotional body movement.
Teacher and researcher at the University of Lille since 2004, I work in a multidisciplinary team to develop studies in action psychology in laboratory-set and natural environments (3D kinematics; physiological responses; eye tracking) and also in virtual reality (UNITY). Through public (ANR) and private fundings, our results have confirmed that emotional experiences depend on the ability to properly predict expected sensations. We have shown that the spontaneous tempo is the pace for which actions are the easiest to plan and control; it is the pace for which our predictions are the best. Thus, spontaneous tempo could be the cadence promoting minimal effort for the emergence of pleasurable experiences.
Since 2017, we have created a research group to create innovating tools to measure how human adults predict and maintain the same behavior over time. More specifically, we study the psycho-physiological mechanisms influencing emotional motor behaviors with the analysis of brain activities (FNIRS), physiological responses (Empatia) and motor behavior modulations (Qualysis). Various inductions are used as music, odors and colored designs.
Professor in neuropsychology since 2012, I lead the collaborative project entitled Sport-Plaisir with Decathlon from 2013 to 2016. Today, I am the main investigator of the Living Lab project POC Playful City, funded by the University of Lille and the University of Lille MEL from 2018 to 2020. In collaboration with Trinoma, our future studies will aim to develop increased and interactive sensory environments in the Lille agglomeration using the new generation of markerless 3D camera systems. This project is funded in part by the CNRS (80Prime) and is developed at the Imaginarium Building in Tourcoing.
