Whether you’re striding with purpose, swaggering with confidence, or trudging slowly along the street, the way you walk can reveal how you’re feeling, according to new research published in the journal Royal Society Open Science. We already know that some features of our gait can reflect our emotional state, such as heavy steps conveying anger and slumped shoulders indicating sadness. However, researchers led by Mina Wakabayashi at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Japan and her colleagues sought to determine whether there is a specific, coordinated movement pattern that reliably signals these emotional states.

The team conducted two experiments. In the first, they asked actors to recall life events that evoked anger, happiness, fear, and sadness, and to then walk a short distance while contemplating each memory. The actors also walked with a neutral expression to give the researchers a baseline for comparison.

The recordings were then converted into point-light videos of 17 white dots representing the body’s main joints, which were shown to adult volunteers who had to click a button to identify the emotion they perceived. They correctly identified emotions at a level significantly above chance.