What do we express without knowing? Emotion in Gesture

Emotional Gestural Expression is an aspect of nonverbal communication that is critical for social agents. The way we perform gestures provides both intentional and unintentional information, leaking our emotional state. In this paper we analyze the perception of a group of base gestures under a wide set of modifications to understand how users perceive the emotional content of the movement, according to the valence and arousal dimensions of Russell's Circumplex model. From these results we are able to extract the perceived emotional quality of the base gesture forms and how the modifications shift that perception. An analysis is provided on the impact of different performance modifications of the gesture.