SATO Wataru Laboratory

Editorial: Dynamic emotional communication

(Sato, Krumhuber, Jellema, & Williams: Front Psychol)

Psychological and neuroscientific research has a long history of investigating facial and bodily expressions associated with emotion.
However, most previous research assessing emotional communication has been conducted using static stimuli.
Although researchers have accumulated valuable information about the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying the processing of emotional signals using such stimuli, their static nature may have left important phenomena unexamined.
To address this issue, recent studies have explored emotional communication using dynamic facial and bodily expressions of emotion.
Because dynamic emotional expressions are associated with increased ecological validity, resulting in a number of important differences in the psychological/neural processing between dynamic and static information, a host of novel aspects of emotional communication have been elucidated.
Furthermore, the dynamic perspective can be applied to broader methodological and conceptual areas.
The present Research Topic brings together a collection of new articles that have investigated dynamic emotional communication and demonstrates recent advances in this field of research.
Here, we introduce these articles and discuss them in the context of related studies by grouping them into the following four areas: (a) decoding of dynamic emotional signals, (b) moderators of dynamic emotional signal decoding, (c) encoding of dynamic emotional signals, and (d) other dynamic aspects of emotional communication.

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