The many faces of the emotional body

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.