Emotional gait and approach direction of virtual pedestrians jointly shape collision avoidance behaviour, with angry gait producing the largest onset distances and effects persisting beyond simple speed variations, 'highlighting the social nature of locomotion.'
Minimum distance from virtual pedestrians did not differ across emotional gait or approach direction conditions.
Significant emotion × direction interaction effects emerged for onset distance, maximal lateral deviation, and minimum walking speed.
Angry gait produced larger onset distances than all other emotional gait conditions.
For diagonally-approaching virtual pedestrians, sad gait increased maximal lateral deviations.
For diagonally-approaching virtual pedestrians, angry gait reduced minimum walking speeds.
Emotional gait influenced avoidance strategies independently of walking speed differences between emotional gaits.
The study used a virtual reality paradigm in which healthy adults avoided virtual pedestrians displaying five distinct emotional gait patterns.
The authors propose that findings can serve as a reference for characterizing locomotor strategies in populations with neurological disorders affecting walking and emotion recognition.
This research suggests that the way other people walk — specifically the emotions conveyed through their gait — affects how we navigate around them in a shared space. In a virtual reality experiment, 20 healthy adults walked toward a target while avoiding computer-generated pedestrians who moved with happy, sad, angry, or neutral walking styles, approaching either head-on or from an angle. The study found that people started adjusting their path earlier and moved more to the side when avoiding pedestrians who walked with an angry gait, particularly when those pedestrians were coming straight at them. Sad-walking pedestrians approaching from an angle caused people to swerve more widely, while angry-walking pedestrians from an angle caused people to slow down more. Importantly, these differences could not be explained simply by the fact that emotional gaits tend to be faster or slower than neutral gaits — the effects persisted even when emotional gaits were compared to neutral gaits matched for speed. This means people are picking up on something about the quality of the movement itself, not just how fast someone is moving. The one thing that did not change across conditions was the final closest distance people allowed between themselves and the oncoming pedestrian, suggesting that while the strategy changes, people maintain a consistent personal space boundary. This research matters because it reveals that human walking is inherently social — we unconsciously read emotional signals from how others move and adjust our own movement accordingly, likely as part of an ongoing assessment of potential threat or social context. The authors note this framework could help researchers better understand how people with neurological conditions like traumatic brain injury — which can impair both walking and the ability to recognize emotions — might struggle with everyday navigation in crowded environments.
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Upload Your LabsMaulet T, Lynch S, Shaikh A, Jackson P, McFadyen B, Lamontagne A. (2026). Emotion in motion: The impact of affective gait on pedestrian collision avoidance strategies.. Human movement science. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.humov.2026.103487