In accordance with accumulating evidence from research, this paper assumes a strong but flexible relation between emotional and communicative alignment in interaction. The communicative function of emotional adaptation, the processing of emotions on all linguistic levels and the empirical evidence in studies with neurological patient groups support this approach. This paper will discuss the link, i.e. the differences and influences, between emotional and communicative processes of adaptation and extend on emotional communication in human-robot interaction. In the course of this, the paper proposes a three-layered model of emotional alignment in order to explain how emotional alignment could be computationally modelled in a human-robot setting.