An emotional expression is a behavior that communicates an emotional state or attitude. It can be verbal or nonverbal, and can occur with or without self-awareness. Emotional expressions include facial movements like smiling or scowling, simple behaviors like crying, laughing, or saying "thank you," and more complex behaviors like writing a letter or giving a gift. Individuals have some conscious control of their emotional expressions;Dorset Research & Development Support Unit, 2003. "Emotional Expression." Retrieved on: July 23, 2007. however, they need not have conscious awareness of their emotional or affective state in order to express emotion.
Researchers in psychology have proposed many different and often competing theoretical models to explain emotions and emotional expression, going as far back as Charles Darwin's discussion of emotion as an evolved capacity. Though there is no universally accepted theory of emotion, theorists in emotion agree that experience of emotions and expression of them in a variety of ways, such as with voices, faces, and bodies, is key to human communication."Emotional Expression." The SAGE Encyclopedia of Lifespan Human Development, edited by Marc H. Bornstein, vol. 2, SAGE Reference, 2018, pp. 724-727. The cultural norms and beliefs of a society also affect and shape the emotional expressions of its members, and expressions appropriate and important in one culture may be taboo in another.Marshall, T. C. (2005). Emotional intimacy in romantic relationships: A comparison of European and Chinese Canadian students
High expressiveness could be useful in constructively resolving relationship-related conflict.
Models of emotion There are many different theories about the nature of emotion and the way that it is represented in the brain and body. Of the elements that distinguish between the theories of emotion, perhaps the most salient is differing perspectives on emotional expression.
Some theories about emotion consider emotions to be biologically basic and stable across people and cultures. These are often called "basic emotion" perspectives because they view emotion as biologically basic. From this perspective, an individual's emotional expressions are sufficient to determine a person's internal, emotional state. If a person is smiling, they are happy. If a person is crying, they are sad. Each emotion has a consistent and specific pattern of expressions, and that pattern of responses is only expressed during that emotion and not during other emotions. Facial emotional expressions are particularly salient stimuli for transferring important nonverbal signals to others. For that reason, emotional expressions are the best direct indicators of affective attitudes and dispositions. There is growing evidence that brain regions generally engaged in the processing of emotional information are also activated during the processing of facial emotions.
Some theories of emotion take the stance that emotional expression is more flexible, and that there is a cognitive component to emotion. These theories account for the malleability in emotion by proposing that humans appraise situations and, depending on the result of their appraisal, different emotions and the corresponding expressions of emotion are triggered. The tendency to appraise certain situations as one emotion or another can vary by person and culture; however, appraisal models still maintain that there are basic responses that are specific and consistent to each emotion that humans feel.
Other theories of emotion propose that emotions are constructed based upon the person, situation, culture, and past experiences, and that there are no preset emotional responses that are consistent and specific to one emotion or another.
Basic model The basic model of emotions finds its roots in Charles Darwin's The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. Darwin claimed that the expression of emotions involves many systems: facial expression, behavioral response, and physical responses, which include physiological, postural, and vocal changes. Most importantly, Darwin claimed that emotional expression was consistent with his theories on evolution and thus, the expression of emotion is universal and should therefore be expressed similarly across race or culture. This is known as the universality hypothesis. Lastly, primates and animals exhibit precursors of muscle actions of the facial expressions of humans.
Many researchers have expanded on Darwin's original theories on emotional expression. Paul Ekman and Carroll Izard were the first to test Darwin's theory. These psychologists, through cross-cultural empirical tests found that there were a number of basic emotions that were universally recognized. Later studies suggested that facial expressions are unique to each emotion and are signals that convey information of one's internal state, and this information is used to coordinate social interactions. Overall, the basic emotion perspective assumes that emotions are unique events that occur as a result of special mechanisms, and each emotion has its own respective specific brain circuit. Moreover, the expression of each emotion has its own respective response, manifestation in face, voice, and body.
Further, recent research on emotional expression across different cultures indicates that while some emotions, such as fear response, appear to be universally experienced, the way emotions are expressed tends to vary significantly depending on cultural context, occasionally for basic emotions as well. This variation can be attributed to differences between independent and interdependent cultures, which shape individuals' perceptions of the self and influence the specific emotions that are emphasized within each cultural framework. As a result, cultural norms and values directly affect how individuals express their emotions, highlighting the complex interplay between cultural background and emotional experience.Miyamoto, Y., Eggen, A., Ward, A., & DeLamater, J. (2013). Cultural Perspectives. In Handbook of Social Psychology (pp. 595–624). Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6772-0_20
The basic emotion view brought Ekman to create the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) and Facial Expression Awareness Compassion Emotions (FACE). FACS is a database of compiled facial expressions, wherein each facial movement is termed an action unit (AU). FACE explains how to become keen at observing emotion in the faces of others. It consists of the Micro Expression Training Tool (METT), which trains individuals to disambiguate between emotional expressions through recognizing distinct facial expressions that are unique to each emotion. The second part of this training program trains individuals to read microexpressions; a face elicits an emotion very quickly and the individual is prompted to report which emotion was seen. The Subtle Expression Training Tool (SETT) trains individuals to be able to recognize the subtle changes in a person's facial expression due to slight changes in emotional experiences. These subtle expressions can occur at the onset of emotions, or when an individual is actively suppressing the emotion.
Appraisal model
Appraisal models of emotion propose that emotions are triggered by specific mental states, each with their own distinct form and function. Like the basic model of emotion, appraisal models suggest that once an emotion is activated, its expression is biologically programmed and manifests consistently whenever that emotion is experienced.
The main difference between basic emotion models and appraisal models is that appraisal models assume that there is a cognitive antecedent that determines which emotion is triggered. Emotions go beyond simple judgments of stimuli in our environment and are forms of motivation that drive action. Traditional appraisal theories consider appraisals to be universal and like a set of switches that can be turned on by biological and environmental triggers. When a person makes an appraisal, an individual will react with an appropriate, emotional response that can include an external, emotional expression.
The appraisal model supports the idea that emotions are not solely positive or negative attitudes towards an attitude object, but they are motivated states that drive action. They take priority over any other behaviours and mediate physiological responses to stimuli, that either motivate us to terminate or maintain that stimuli. For example, if you encounter an unfair situation, you would act on it to terminate the unfairness. According to appraisal theory, the reason for your action is your motivated state to stop the unfair treatment, which, we call, emotion. Existing studies also demonstrated that whether a behaviour is through autonomous or controlled motivation, depends on the intensity and context of underlying emotion.
More recent appraisal models account for variation in emotional expression by suggesting that cognitive appraisals are more like themes that can be triggered by a number of different actions and situations. Emotional expressions arise from these appraisals, which essentially describe the context of the situation. One appraisal model has developed the law of situational meaning, which states that emotions tend to be evoked by certain kinds of events. For example, grief is elicited by personal loss. In this case, personal loss would be the appraisal and one can be expressed through emotional expressions.
Psychological construction model Another model of emotion, called psychological construction, describes emotion as a construction that results from more basic psychological processes. In a psychological construction model, basic psychological processes like affect (positive or negative feeling combined with some degree of physiological activation), previous experiences, language, and executive functioning combine to form a discrete emotion experience. This perspective is extensively explored in Lisa Feldman Barrett's work, The Psychological Construction of Emotion, which argues that emotions are not biologically hardwired but rather emerge from core psychological ingredients.Barrett, L. F. (2015). An introduction to psychological construction. In The psychological construction of emotion /. The Guilford Press,. https://doi.org/info:doi/ While some discrete emotions tend to have typical responses (e.g. crying when sad, laughing when happy), a psychological construction model can account for the wide variability in emotional expression (e.g. crying when extremely happy; laughing when uncomfortable).