Abstract
The perception of emotional signals is at the core of the study of the social brain. In this chapter, we discuss research in the field of affective and social neuroscience that specifically uses bodily expressions. Starting with the initial studies mapping the neural substrate of perception of simple bodily expressions, several steps have been taken to grasp the full extent of genuine interactions, from the use of multiple emotional cues, to dynamic social interactions, and recently the use of virtual reality. With increasing complexity of the emotional signals used in neuroscientific research, we can approximate the natural richness of the social and emotional reality.
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Acknowledgments
B.d.G. and R.H. were partly funded by project TANGO. Project TANGO acknowledges the financial support of the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) program within the Seventh Framework Programme for Research of the European Commission, under FET-Open grant number: 249858. B.d.G. has also received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC grant agreement number 295673.
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de Gelder, B., Hortensius, R. (2014). The Many Faces of the Emotional Body. In: Decety, J., Christen, Y. (eds) New Frontiers in Social Neuroscience. Research and Perspectives in Neurosciences, vol 21. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02904-7_9
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