Moving the Body and the Mind - Links between Emotion and Rhythmic Communication and the underlying Neurobiological Mechanisms

Rhythmic patterning is a widespread structural trait of animal (including human) communication. Concomitantly, a key role of communication is to convey and/or induce emotion. The expression and modulation of emotion is also hypothesized to be a key mechanism for the evolution of rhythmic synchronization in humans. Despite the centrality of both rhythm and emotion to human and nonhuman communication, a systematic treatment of the link between them is currently lacking. In this chapter we bridge these two areas of research by reviewing findings from human and animal studies. These studies show how emotional states can be encoded and decoded through rhythmic parameters and how rhythmic parameters modulate the emotional states of receivers. Taken together, this review of literature demonstrates that the main rhythmic parameter currently evaluated in emotion research is frequency rate, which in all the surveyed taxa is reliably associated with levels of emotional arousal. We discuss a range of neurobiological mechanisms that could mediate the link between rhythm and emotion. We also identify several avenues for future research that address current limitations, such the overwhelming focus on acoustic modality and frequency rate, while other communication modalities and rhythmic parameters remain understudied.