Understanding non verbal signals in social interactions

Social exchange is a critical component of everyday life. It depends on an ability to predict and infer the mental states of others, such as their emotions, beliefs and intentions, from the perception of their motor behaviours. Impaired use of these nonverbal social signals is a core feature in autistic spectrum disorder. There are currently many lines of research on the possible origin of these problems in social communication. Some authors think that the social deficit could be a consequence of amygdala, fusiform and / or superior temporal sulcus dysfunction leading to functional abnormalities that impair the ability to detect socially relevant visual cues. Another model speculates that this impairment could be the consequence of a malfunctioning mirror system generating a deficit in the ability to represent the actions of others. In this presentation, we will review and present neuroimaging studies that explored the neural basis of everyday human competence to understand the actions, intentions and emotions of others. The aims are to clarify to what extent this ability rely on the mirror neuron system, to assess inter-individual differences in these processes and finally to address the questions of the interactions between the mirror neuron and the emotional systems.