People with Parkinson’s disease still read emotions from the way others walk

Gait has long been treated as a purely motor symptom in Parkinson’s disease, the shuffling, slowed stride that clinicians measure in the clinic. A new study suggests the picture is more nuanced: the way we walk is also a channel for emotional expression, and people with Parkinson’s disease remain largely able to decode the feelings conveyed in someone else’s walk. The work, published in the Journal of Neurology, examined whether individuals with Parkinson’s can recognize emotions from gait videos and whether they show selective deficits in emotional appraisal compared with healthy controls of the same age and sex.

The research team, led by Martina Putzolu and Elisabetta Sarasso with colleagues including Massimo Filippi, Federica Agosta and Elisa Pelosin, recruited 38 individuals with Parkinson’s disease and 38 matched healthy controls. Each participant completed an online questionnaire featuring 12 videos of an actress walking with gait patterns expressing six categories: happiness, sadness, fear, anxiety, anger and a neutral state. Crucially, each clip was shown in two versions, one with the actress’s facial expression blurred and one with the face visible, allowing the researchers to separate what the body alone communicates from cues provided by the face.

Participants were asked to identify which emotion the walker was expressing and to rate the valence, that is how pleasant or unpleasant the movement felt, and its intensity. The researchers then compared recognition accuracy and the valence and intensity scores between the two groups, within each group, and between the blurred-face and visible-face conditions. This design meant the study could probe not just whether patients got the emotion right, but whether they experienced the emotional content of the movement as vividly as healthy viewers did.

The results were strikingly reassuring on the core question. Recognition accuracy and valence ratings were largely preserved in the Parkinson’s group, indicating that patients could generally tell a happy walk from an angry or fearful one and could judge its emotional tone. The one clear difference emerged in intensity: participants with Parkinson’s reported lower overall emotional intensity than the healthy controls, but the researchers found no evidence that this reduction was specific to any particular emotion. In other words, the blunting was general rather than selective, a flattening of the felt strength of emotional expression across the board rather than a loss of sensitivity to, say, fear alone.

The authors conclude that patients with Parkinson’s disease display reduced emotional appraisal regarding intensity yet generally retain the ability to recognize emotions and their valence from gait. Because gait disturbances are a hallmark of the disease, the finding reframes walking as more than a motor function: it is a dynamic channel of emotional communication, one that patients can still read in others even as their own movement patterns change. The researchers suggest these findings may inform future research on the potential integration of emotional gait stimuli into action observation training programs, rehabilitation approaches in which patients observe and imitate movements. As with any study of this scope, the results come from a specific experimental paradigm, videos of a single actress viewed online, and the abstract does not report effect sizes or subgroup analyses, so the findings should be seen as an initial mapping of this ability rather than a definitive clinical test. Still, for a disease so often defined by what movement loses, the study highlights what perception preserves: the emotional signal carried in a human walk remains legible to people with Parkinson’s.

Subject of Research: Emotion recognition from gait videos in Parkinson's disease

Article Title: When gait reveals emotion: recognition through gait videos in Parkinson’s disease

Article References: Putzolu, M., Sarasso, E., Canu, E., Gardoni, A., Terranova, S., Simeon, R., Romano, V., Basaia, S., Avanzino, L., Filippi, M., Agosta, F., & Pelosin, E. (2026). When gait reveals emotion: recognition through gait videos in Parkinson’s disease. Journal of Neurology, 273(11), Article 691. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00415-026-14239-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00415-026-14239-5

Keywords: Parkinson's disease, gait, emotion recognition, emotional appraisal, valence, intensity, action observation, neurodegeneration, motor function, healthy controls, reveals, emotion