Abstract

Empathy topic becomes popular among many areas of studies such as literature, psychology, education, design, and others. In those areas, most research topics were either unapproachable to normal users or too comprehensive for academic scholars. For instance, given empathy definitions vary from different publications. Empathy and sympathy-related distinction and comparison are also difficult topics for many scholars throughout history. Based on such reality, the aim of this study was to narrow down empathy topic into a specific area with an intuitive way for users to digest its essential knowledge visually. Body gestures acting as a nonverbal language could potentially act as causes of empathy or connect with the procedure of empathy engagement if the empathetic gesture could benefit animators by offering emotion to its character performance regarding empathetic gestures. This study also determiend typical gestures and academic evidence behind such findings. We first determined academic correlation between two concepts - gesture and empathy. We then proposed empathetic gesture guidance with four categorized directions to express empathetic gestures supported by evidence in gesture and empathy-related literature. Based on such presumption, this study invited 13 animation major participants for an experiment. It captured representative empathetic gesture-related photos and a series of empathy-related keywords followed by the proposed empathetic gesture guidance. Experiment results were then analyzed and discussed. It was found that a series of empathetic keywords and gestures could be potentially important for animators to create character animation with empathetic feelings.