“Emotions and the Body” [by Beatrice de Gelder, Oxford University Press, 2016]

The emotional body language can be defined as an emotion expressed by the whole body, accompanied by coordinated movements and often by significant actions. Over the past decade, good progresses have been made in respect to the discovery and understanding of the neuro-anatomical and functional bases that underlie human emotions. However, it is noteworthy that our current knowledge concerning human emotions is almost entirely based on studies focused on the perception of facial expressions. Indeed, if we consider the emotional and adaptive relevance of bodily expressions, it is surprising that studies conducted on the perception of the whole body expression are comparatively limited than those carried out on facial expressions. Emotions and the Body by Beatrice de Gelder, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Leader of the Brain and Emotion Laboratory at the Maastricht University, also author of many articles published in significant scientific journals, is an outstanding book on the relationships between whole body emotion and actions. The author follows a Darwin's evolutionary approach for describing bodily expressions, showing that emotions are tools for adaptive action, allowing us to predict the interactions with the real, imagined, and virtual experiences. It describes the most important research on body expression undertaken since 2003, focusing on the neural basis and temporal processing signatures of emotional body language by presenting the state-of the-art on the neuropsychology of emotional face and body perception and its disorders, such as in autism, in schizophrenia and others. The general idea is to illustrate a systematic presentation of psychological and functional studies on the perception and recognition of whole body expressions of emotions, especially focusing on body languages and their neural basis. The book also highlights that the nature of emotion perception cannot be fully understood by separately treating the social, cultural, contextual, individual or interpersonal factors that contribute to body languages. De Gelder’s book begins with a question: “Why Bodies?” which is even the title of the first chapter, also followed by others charming questions such as “Measuring Emotions-Measuring the Impossible?” All text is divided into well organized 10 chapters whose content is clearly explained. The first chapter reviews a series of arguments in favor of the substantial extension and enrichment of current theories on human emotions by adding investigations of bodily expressions. It also underscores the importance of new research on bodily expressions in agreement with theories that consider emotions to be closely linked to adaptive action. Moreover, it discussed some recent studies to illustrate the potential of bodily expression research in the field of neuropsychology as well as of clinical investigation. These issues are then taken up and expanded in detail in the next chapters. A great deal of space of book is devoted to illustrate previously published articles of lab group of de Gelder. These articles have been grouped to address the specific topic of each chapter, reworked and discussed with other overlapping studies by other researchers, to fit with the aims of the book. The final chapter looks at future of social and affective neuroscience, reviewing studies that go in the direction of full-fledged interaction methods. In summary, using a narrative edited-style easily readable, the book assembles all main results in the topic developing in its chapters new perspectives that did not receive consideration in the original publications. All the text is supported by numerous figures and schemes arising from described studies, much aiding to understand aims and results. Emotions and the Body is a book containing a lot of really interesting issues in this stuff. It is very detailed and suitable as a good reference: it is particularly useful the presence of bibliography and references throughout the text. Given the wide-ranging implications of treated affective studies, the book audience targets especially students of cognitive neuroscience, needing to improve the background of their discipline, but also to those working in other related fields, as informatics and communication technology, computer science and robotics.