Cerebellar Contribution to Emotional Body Language Perception

Body language is a powerful form of non-verbal communication providing important information about the emotions and intentions of others. The ability to infer other’s emotions from their bodily movements and postures recruits an extended network in the brain that encompasses both cortical and subcortical regions. In this chapter, we review recent evidence suggesting that the cerebellum is a critical node of this network. Specifically, we present convergent findings from patients’, neuroimaging and non-invasive brain stimulation studies that have shown that the cerebellum is involved in both biological motion perception and in discrimination of bodily emotional expressions. We discuss the potential underlying mechanisms that drive the recruitment of the sensorimotor (anterior) and cognitive (posterior) cerebellum in inferring others’ emotions through their bodily movements and postures and how the cerebellum may exert these functions within different cortico-cerebellar and limbic-cerebellar networks dedicated to body language perception.