Most people walk. But that seemingly simple act is actually a series of movements,each requiring their own timing and path。Not only that,everybody has a special style of walking, and if you know someone well enough,you can probably identify him by his movements,even from far away.
A new paper published in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior presents a technique for making assumptions about a person's entire personality based on their walk. The 29participants first took the Big Five Inventory,a commonly used personality test helping predict patterns in a person's thought and behavior,social skills,tendency to worry, creativity and intellect and extraversion(外向性). The researchers then recorded and analyzed the gaits (步态) of each participant.
"We found that larger relative-upper-to-lower body movement was a strong predictor of aggression, " says co-author Liam Satchell,a PhD student at the University of Portsmouth. This research mathematically explains previous research where distinctive"gait was helpful in predicting upcoming crimes through security cameras。lf police officers were trained in recognizing aggressive gaits,they might be able to prevent crimes before they happened. Satchell adds,"Possibly a further scientific exploration could reveal more evidence that the behaviors of another person can be predicted from how they move through space. "
One such study has come out recently. PLOS Computational Biology published a model to predict the probability of the path and timing of the parts of the movement shared by all people, and even the movements shared by people who have similar personality traits (特点) or are in the same moods - like people who are aggressive or bad-tempered.
Dr. Lars Lau Rake,a postdoctoral researcher a the University of Copenhagen, says,"In our model,we can combine information from thousands of movement patterns to get precise information about the structure of the movement, which ultimately allows us to judge whether the movement of an individual differs significantly from what we would expect to see in a given situation. "