Pascal Belin

Thomas Ethofer

Salvatore Campanella

This book follows a successful symposium organized in June 2009 at the Human Brain Mapping conference. The topic is at the crossroads of two domains of increasing importance and appeal in the neuroimaging/neuroscience community: multi-modal integration, and social neuroscience. Most of our social interactions involve combining information from both the face and voice of other persons: speech information, but also crucial nonverbal information on the person’s identity and affective state. The cerebral bases of the multimodal integration of speech have been intensively investigated; by contrast only few studies have focused on nonverbal aspects of face-voice integration. This work highlights recent advances in investigations of the behavioral and cerebral bases of face-voice multimodal integration in the context of person perception, focusing on the integration of affective and identity information. Several research domains are brought together. Behavioral and neuroimaging work in normal adult humans included are presented alongside evidence from other domains to provide complementary perspectives: studies in human children for a developmental perspective, studies in non-human primates for an evolutionary perspective, and studies in human clinical populations for a clinical perspective. Several research domains are brought together. Behavioral and neuroimaging work in normal adult humans included are presented alongside evidence from other domains to provide complementary perspectives: studies in human children for a developmental perspective, studies in non-human primates for an evolutionary perspective, and studies in human clinical populations for a clinical perspective. Several research domains are brought together. Behavioral and neuroimaging work in normal adult humans included are presented alongside evidence from other domains to provide complementary perspectives: studies in human children for a developmental perspective, studies in non-human primates for an evolutionary perspective, and studies in human clinical populations for a clinical perspective. Several research domains are brought together. Behavioral and neuroimaging work in normal adult humans included are presented alongside evidence from other domains to provide complementary perspectives: studies in human children for a developmental perspective, studies in non-human primates for an evolutionary perspective, and studies in human clinical populations for a clinical perspective.

Integrating Face and Voice in Person Perception

Georg Northoff

Cornelia Herbert

Andreas J. Fallgatter

Peter Walla

Language has long been considered independent from emotions. In the last few years however research has accumulated empirical evidence against this theoretical belief of a purely cognitive-based foundation of language. In particular, through research on emotional word processing it has been shown, that processing of emotional words activates emotional brain structures, elicits emotional facial expressions and modulates action tendencies of approach and avoidance, probably in a similar manner as processing of non-verbal emotional stimuli does. In addition, it has been shown that emotional content is already processed in the visual cortex in a facilitated manner which suggests that processing of emotional language content is able to circumvent in-depth semantic analysis. Yet, this is only one side of the coin. Very recent research putting words into context suggests that language may also construe emotions and that by studying word processing one can provide a window to one’s own feelings. All in all, the empirical observations support the thesis of a close relationship between language and emotions at the level of word meaning as a specific evolutionary achievement of the human species. As such, this relationship seems to be different from the one between emotions and speech, where emotional meaning is conveyed by nonverbal features of the voice. But what does this relationship between written words and emotions theoretically imply for the processing of emotional information? The present Research Topic and its related articles aim to provide answers to this question. This book comprises several experimental studies investigating the brain structures and the time course of emotional word processing. Included are studies examining the affective core dimensions underlying affective word processing and studies that show how these basic affective dimensions influence word processing in general as well as the interaction between words, feelings and (expressive) behavior. In addition, new impetus comes from studies that on the one hand investigate how task-, sublexical and intrapersonal factors influence emotional word processing and on the other hand extend emotional word processing to the domains of social context and self-related processing. Finally, future perspectives are outlined including research on emotion and language acquisition, culture and multilingualism. In summary, this textbook offers scientists from different disciplines insight into the neurophysiological, behavioral and subjective mechanisms underlying emotion and language interactions. It gives new impulses to existing theories on the embodiment of language and emotion and provides new ways of looking at emotion-cognition interactions.

Thomas Ethofer

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