| Many emotional stimuli are processed without being consciously perceived. Recent evidence indicates that subcortical structures have a substantial role in this processing. These structures are part of a phylogenetically ancient pathway that has specific functional properties and that interacts with cortical processes. There is now increasing evidence that non-consciously perceived emotional stimuli induce distinct neurophysiological changes and influence behaviour towards the consciously perceived world. Understanding the neural bases of the non-conscious perception of emotional signals will clarify the phylogenetic continuity of emotion systems across species and the integration of cortical and subcortical activity in the human brain.

In our natural world, a face is usually encountered not as an isolated object but as an integrated part of a whole body. The face and the body both normally contribute in conveying the emotional state of the individual. Here we show that observers judging a facial expression are strongly influenced by emotional body language. Photographs of fearful and angry faces and bodies were used to create face-body compound images, with either matched or mismatched emotional expressions. When face and body convey conflicting emotional information, judgment of facial expression is hampered and becomes biased toward the emotion expressed by the body. Electrical brain activity was recorded from the scalp while subjects attended to the face and judged its emotional expression. An enhancement of the occipital P1 component as early as 115 ms after presentation onset points to the existence of a rapid neural mechanism sensitive to the degree of agreement between simultaneously presented facial and bodily emotional expressions, even when the latter are unattended.emotion communication ͉ event-related potentials ͉ visual perception T he face and the body both normally contribute in conveying the emotional state of the individual. Darwin (1) was the first to describe in detail the specific facial and bodily expressions associated with emotions in animals and humans and regarded these expressions as part of emotion-specific adaptive actions. From this vantage point, face and body are part of an integrated whole. Indeed, in our natural world, faces are usually encountered not as isolated objects but as an integrated part of a whole body. Rapid detection of inconsistencies between them is beneficial when rapid adaptive action is required from the observer. To date, there has been no systematic investigation into how facial expressions and emotional body language interact in human observers, and the underlying neural mechanisms are unknown.Here, we investigate the inf luence of emotional body language on the perception of facial expression. We collected behavioral data and simultaneously measured electrical eventrelated potentials (ERP) from the scalp to explore the time course of neuronal processing with a resolution in the order of milliseconds. We predicted that recognition of facial expressions is inf luenced by concurrently presented emotional body language, and that affective information from the face and the body start to interact rapidly. In view of the important adaptive function of perceiving emotional states and previous findings about rapid recognition of emotional signals, we deemed it unlikely that integrated perception of face-body images results from relatively late and slow semantic processes. We hypothesize that the integration of affective information from a facial expression and the accompanying emotional body language is a mandatory automatic process occurring early in the processing stream, which does not require selective attention, thorough visual analysis of individual features, or conscious deliberate evaluatio...

People's faces show fear in many different circumstances. However, when people are terrified, as well as showing emotion, they run for cover. When we see a bodily expression of emotion, we immediately know what specific action is associated with a particular emotion, leaving little need for interpretation of the signal, as is the case for facial expressions. Research on emotional body language is rapidly emerging as a new field in cognitive and affective neuroscience. This article reviews how whole-body signals are automatically perceived and understood, and their role in emotional communication and decision-making.

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a b s t r a c tInterest in sex-related differences in psychological functioning has again come to the foreground with new findings about their possible functional basis in the brain. Sex differences may be one way how evolution has capitalized on the capacity of homologous brain regions to process social information between men and women differently. This paper focuses specifically on the effects of emotional valence, sex of the observed and sex of the observer on regional brain activations. We also discuss the effects of and interactions between environment, hormones, genes and structural differences of the brain in the context of differential brain activity patterns between men and women following exposure to seen expressions of emotion and in this context we outline a number of methodological considerations for future research. Importantly, results show that although women are better at recognizing emotions and express themselves more easily, men show greater responses to threatening cues (dominant, violent or aggressive) and this may reflect different behavioral response tendencies between men and women as well as evolutionary effects. We conclude that sex differences must not be ignored in affective research and more specifically in affective neuroscience.

The perception of simultaneity between auditory and visual information is of crucial importance for maintaining a coordinated representation of a multisensory event. Here we show that the perceptual system is able to adaptively recalibrate itself to audio-visual temporal asynchronies. Participants were exposed to a train of sounds and light flashes with a constant time lag ranging from -200 (sound first) to +200 ms (light first). Following this exposure, a temporal order judgement (TOJ) task was performed in which a sound and light were presented with a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) chosen from 11 values between -240 and +240 ms. Participants either judged whether the sound or the light was presented first, or whether the sound and light were presented simultaneously or successively. The point of subjective simultaneity (PSS) was, in both cases, shifted in the direction of the exposure lag, indicative of recalibration.

Darwin regarded emotions as predispositions to act adaptively, thereby suggesting that characteristic body movements are associated with each emotional state. To this date, investigations of emotional cognition have predominantly concentrated on processes associated with viewing facial expressions. However, expressive body movements may be just as important for understanding the neurobiology of emotional behavior. Here, we used functional MRI to clarify how the brain recognizes happiness or fear expressed by a whole body. Our results indicate that observing fearful body expressions produces increased activity in brain areas narrowly associated with emotional processes and that this emotion-related activity occurs together with activation of areas linked with representation of action and movement. The mechanism of fear contagion hereby suggested may automatically prepare the brain for action.emotion communication ͉ body movement ͉ action ͉ social cognition ͉ amygdala

The kinds of aftereffects, indicative of cross-modal recalibration, that are observed after exposure to spatially incongruent inputs from different sensory modalities have not been demonstrated so far for identity incongruence. We show that exposure to incongruent audiovisual speech (producing the well-known McGurk effect) can recalibrate auditory speech identification. In Experiment 1, exposure to an ambiguous sound intermediate between /aba/ and /ada/ dubbed onto a video of a face articulating either /aba/ or /ada/ increased the proportion of /aba/ or /ada/ responses, respectively, during subsequent sound identification trials. Experiment 2 demonstrated the same recalibration effect or the opposite one, fewer /aba/ or /ada/ responses, revealing selective speech adaptation, depending on whether the ambiguous sound or a congruent nonambiguous one was used during exposure. In separate forced-choice identification trials, bimodal stimulus pairs producing these contrasting effects were identically categorized, which makes a role of postperceptual factors in the generation of the effects unlikely.