The Social Nature of Emotion Expression

This book provides an overview of theoretical thinking about the communicative scope of emotional expressions as well as an overview of the state of the art research in emotional psychology. For many years, research in emotional psychology has been primarily concerned with the labeling of emotion expressions and the link between emotion expressions and the expresser's internal state. Following recent trends in research devoting specific attention to the social signal value of emotions, contributors emphasize the nature of emotion expressions as information about the person and the situation, including the social norms and standards relevant to the situation.

Focusing on the role of emotion expressions as communicative acts, this timely book seeks to advance a line of theoretical thinking that goes beyond the view of emotion expressions as symptoms of an intrapersonal phenomenon to focus on their interpersonal function. The Social Nature of Emotion Expression will be of interest to researchers in emotional psychology, as well as specialists in nonverbal behavior, communication, linguistics, ethology and ethnography.

Auteur

Ursula Hess is Professor of Psychology at the Humboldt-University, Berlin. She has published numerous articles in scientific journals as well as chapters in edited volumes. She is co-editor of a textbook on research methodology (Méthodes de recherche en psychologie, Gaëtan Morin, 2000) and author of a textbook on motivation and emotion (Motivation und Emotion, Kohlhammer, forthcoming). She has co-edited two book on emotion communication (Group Dynamics and Emotional Expression, Cambridge University Press, with Pierre Philippot, 2007; Emotional Mimicry in Social Context, Cambridge University Press, with Agneta Fischer, 2016).

Shlomo Hareli is a Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Haifa. He has published numerous theoretical and empirical articles in scientific journals as well as chapters in edited volumes.

Contenu

Preface.-

Introduction.-

Part I The communicative scope of emotion expressions.-

Chapter 1. The Emotion-based Inferences in Context (EBIC) model.-
Chapter 2. How Can the Theory of Affective Pragmatics Help Us Make Sense of Emotional Communication?.-

Part II How to draw inferences from emotion expressions.-

Chapter 3. Making meaning with social referencing.-
Chapter 4. What makes us accurate perceivers of emotions in others? The role of social appraisal and similarity.-
Chapter 5. Perceiving emotion in the neutral face: A powerful mechanism of person perception.-

Part III What emotion expressions tell us about the expresser.-

Chapter 6. The reverse engineering of emotions.-
Chapter 7. Emotional States and Emotional Roles as Signals of Moral Character.-
Chapter 8. How You Cry, Why You Cry, and Who You Are: Responses to Adult Crying in Social Contexts.-
Chapter 9. Smiles are polysemic.-
Chapter 10. Can we use emotions to infer how powerful people are?.-

Part IV What emotion expressions tell us about what the emotion eliciting situation.-

Chapter 11. Functions of Emotional Communication: The role of affective expressions in social interactions.-
Chapter 12. Are we tuned to threat detection? On the preferential processing of facial expressions of anger vs. happiness.- Chapter 13. Using facial expressions to deceive.-
Chapter 14. The use of emotions to infer norms and standards.-

Conclusion.