How emotional expressions motivate action

Emotional coordination constitutes one of the crucial building blocks for social adaptation. Humans, like other primate species, are able to rapidly and accurately respond to others' non-verbal emotional signals by preparing and executing adaptive motor responses. In this chapter, we present a general overview of how emotional expressions emitted by others promote, in the observer’s brain, fast processing and elaboration of multiple possibilities for action of different levels of complexity, from stimulus-driven reactions to goal-directed actions, via different communicating subcortical and cortical pathways, that compete to flexibly orchestrate our social behavior.