Raphaela Heesen

What are the affective/cognitive mechanisms (e.g., synchrony, emotion-sharing/expressions, mimicry) driving joint action coordination and social success?

What are the evolutionary and ontogenetic blocks of joint action?

What role do emotions and emotion expressions play in cooperation and joint action?

What are the parallels and discrepancies in the way we humans communicate compared to our closest living ape relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos?

Is there evidence for an interactional basis for language, i.e., a pre-linguistic basis that preceded the evolution of language? If so, then what are the uniquely derived elements of this engine in humans, versus those that are phylogenetically shared or convergently derived?