The building blocks of social communication

In the present review, social communication will be discussed in the context ofsocial cognition, and cold and hot cognition. The review presents research onprosody, processing of faces, multimodal processing of voice and face, and theimpact of emotion on constructing semantic meaning. Since the focus of this minireview is on brain processes involved in these cognitive functions, the bulk ofevidence presented will be from event related potential (ERP) studies as thismethodology offers the best temporal resolution of cognitive events under study.The argument is made that social communication is accomplished via fast actingsensory processes and later, top down processes. Future directions both in termsof methodology and research questions are also discussed.