Moving the Body and the Mind: Links Between Emotion and Rhythmic Communication and Underlying Neurobiological Mechanisms

Abstract Rhythmic patterning is a widespread structural trait of animal (including human) communication. Concomitantly, a key role of communication functions to convey and induce emotion. The expression and modulation of emotion is also hypothesised to be a key mechanism underlying the evolution of rhythmic synchronisation 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 how rhythmic properties encode and communicate emotional states and how variations in these properties influence the emotional states of receivers. Taken together, this review of literature demonstrates that the main rhythmic parameter currently evaluated in emotion research is temporal rate (often referred to as frequency rate), which is reliably associated with levels of emotional arousal in all surveyed taxa. We discuss a range of neurobiological mechanisms that could link rhythm and emotion. We also identify several avenues for future research that address current limitations, such as the overwhelming focus on the acoustic modality and frequency rate, while other communication modalities and rhythmic feature remain understudied.