We would like to congratulate Thomaz Freire Offrede, a member of the EU-funded COBRA-ESR5 project ‘Communicative Alignment at the Physiological Level’, on the successful defence of his dissertation at the Institute for German Language and Linguistics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In his dissertation entitled ‘F0 Adaptation and Bodily Processes: An Exploration’, he investigates the relationship between speech adaptation (specifically, fundamental frequency; f0) in social interactions and three bodily aspects: respiration, eye gaze and temperature change.
Although a direct relationship between speech and the bodily processes studied was not observed, some physiological effects emerged in relation to social and emotional factors. F0 was also found to be modulated by the conversational content and the conversation's intimacy level.