NEURAL MECHANISMS SUBSERVING THE ABILITY TO UNDERSTAND PEOPLE’ EMOTIONAL AND MENTAL STATES by perceiving their bodies 

From the very beginning, a large part of studies on emotion perception and comprehension used as experimental stimuli specifically emotional faces, at the same time leaving out any depiction and therefore representation of the whole body. Similarly, the field of Affective Neuroscience has been dominated by emotional facial expression studies. This is a curious circumstance given the long known fact that also bodies contribute to express our emotional and mental states (e.g. De Gelder, 2009; De Gelder et al., 2010; Proverbio et al., 2014)

In my talk I will briefly resume the state of the art on Emotional Body Language research, and I will present my current EEG and eye-tracking studies aiming at investigate how affective information is processed during facial and bodily expressions’ perception, and how affective information conveyed by faces and bodies interact with each other.

Finally, I will discuss the possibility to adopt a broad perspective investigating how affective information conveyed by bodies is perceived and processed during Film, or Theatrical performance fruition.

References:

De Gelder B. (2009). Why bodies? Twelve reasons for including bodily expressions in affective neuroscience. Philosophical  Transactions of the Royal Society  B Biological Science, 364, 3475-3484.

De Gelder B. , Van den Stock J. , Meeren H. K. , Sinke C. B. , Kret M. E. , Tamietto M. (2010). Standing up for the body. Recent progress in uncovering the networks involved in the perception of bodies and bodily expressions. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 34(4), 513-527.

Proverbio AM, Calbi M, Manfredi M, Zani A (2014) Comprehending Body Language and Mimics: An ERP and Neuroimaging Study on Italian Actors and Viewers. PLoS ONE 9(3): e91294. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0091294

Marta Calbi, University of Parma

From 2014:

Ph.D. student in Neuroscience, University of Parma, Neuroscience department.

Tutor: Professor Vittorio Gallese

2013:

Master degree in Clinical and Developmental psychology, and Neuropsychology. University of Milano – Bicocca.

Thesis title:  “Neural mechanisms of body language comprehension: an ERP study”.

Tutor: Professor Alice Mado Proverbio