10.1007@s10919-019-00293-3

Journal of Nonverbal Behavior
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-019-00293-3
REVIEW PAPER
Emotional Expression: Advances in Basic Emotion Theory
Dacher Keltner1 · Disa Sauter2 · Jessica Tracy3 · Alan Cowen1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract
In this article, we review recent developments in the study of emotional expression within
a basic emotion framework. Dozens of new studies find that upwards of 20 emotions are
signaled in multimodal and dynamic patterns of expressive behavior. Moving beyond word
to stimulus matching paradigms, new studies are detailing the more nuanced and com-
plex processes involved in emotion recognition and the structure of how people perceive
emotional expression. Finally, we consider new studies documenting contextual influences
upon emotion recognition. We conclude by extending these recent findings to questions
about emotion-related physiology and the mammalian precursors of human emotion.
Keywords Emotional expression · Physiology · Contextual influences · Basic Emotion

Theory · Social interaction · Vocal expression · Facial expression · Emotion
Introduction
Basic Emotion Theory (BET) is guided by convergent analogies found in the writings of
scientists working in different traditions: Emotions are a “grammar of social living” that
situate the self within a social and moral order; they structure interactions, like scripts in
pieces of fiction, in relationships that matter (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989; Oatley 2004). In more
specific terms, within BET emotions are thought of as distinct and brief states involv-
ing physiological, subjective, and expressive components that enable humans to respond
in ways that are typically adaptive in relation to evolutionarily significant problems, from
negotiating status hierarchies to avoiding peril to taking care of vulnerable offspring
(Ekman 1992; Ekman and Cordaro 2011; Keltner and Lerner 2010; Shariff and Tracy
2011; van Kleef 2016).
These core assumptions of BET have been foundational to new empirical advances,
ranging from the study of a broad number of previously unexplored specific positive emo-
tions (e.g., Campos et al. 2013; Shiota et al. 2017) to progress in understanding basic
* Dacher Keltner
keltner@berkeley.edu
1
Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
2
Department of Psychology, Amsterdam University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
3
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
mechanisms of emotion-related appraisal, language, development, and central and periph-

eral nervous system physiology (e.g., Lench et al. 2011; Nummenmaa and Saarimäki
2017).
BET has also been central to the study of emotional expression. It was a focus, of
course, of Darwin, who was an inspiration of the rich literature that we summarize here. In
the simplest of terms, Basic Emotion Theory posits that nonverbal expressions of emotion
share five properties. (1) They are brief, coherent patterns of behavior that tend to covary
with distinct subjective experiences; (2) they signal the current emotional state, intentions,
and/or assessment of the eliciting situation of the individual; (3) they manifest some degree
of cross-cultural similarity in both production and recognition; (4) they find evolutionary
precursors in the behaviors of other mammals in contexts similar to the contexts humans
encounter (e.g., when signaling adversarial or cooperative intentions); and (5) they tend
to covary with emotion-related physiological responses (Ekman and Davidson 1994; Hess
and Fischer 2013; Keltner and Haidt 2001; Keltner and Lerner 2010; Matsumoto et al.
2008; Shariff and Tracy, 2011).
A first wave of BET-inspired studies on emotional expression find their provenance in
the studies of Ekman and Friesen in New Guinea (Ekman et al. 1969), with which many are
now familiar, but whose details are worth recalling. Using still photographs of prototypical
emotional facial expressions, Ekman and Friesen were able to document some degree of
universality in the production and recognition of a limited set of “basic” emotions, includ-
ing anger, fear, happiness, sadness, disgust, and surprise (for review, see Matsumoto et al.
2008). This study inspired hundreds like it, and led to the replicated finding that observers
could reliably identify with some degree of consistency these six emotions in static photos
of facial muscle configurations (Elfenbein and Ambady 2002).
Clearly there is much more to emotional expression—both in the behavior people emit
and how they judge it—than matching static images of facial muscle movement configura-
tions to words or situations (as in the original Ekman and Friesen work). People clearly
express emotions in more ways than in facial muscle movements, and rely on more than
just single words or scenarios to make sense of emotional expression. The Ekman and
Friesen work inspired several robust critiques. Questions have been raised about biases
in the forced choice paradigms, the robustness of those results from forced studies, and
the reliance upon such exaggerated, stereotypical expressions (Russell 1994; Matsumoto
and Hwang 2017; Nelson and Russell 2013). Reviews have revealed that the relationship
between self-reports of subjective experience and facial muscle movements is more mod-
est than perhaps assumed in BET (Duran et al. 2017). More recent data raises questions
about the degree to which people from remote cultures actually recognize emotion in static
photos of the six emotions (Crivelli et al. 2016). Particularly generative is Fridlund’s cri-
tique of BET, summarized in his Behavioral Ecological theory (BECV, see Fridlund 1991,
this volume). Fridlund’s theorizing, steeped in evolutionary accounts of nonhuman display,
argues that human facial displays did not evolve to signal interior feeling, as presupposed
in BET, but social intentions or motives instead (see Parkinson 2005, for a detailed review
of BET and BECV claims). This theorizing has inspired studies of how people infer inten-
tions, feelings, and appraisals from expressive behavior, which we consider later.
The Ekman and Friesen empirical work—the focus on how people label static images
of facial muscle configurations—has inspired another class of developments in the field
that are still guided by the core assumptions of BET but that move beyond the study of the
recognition of static images of facial expressions of six emotions. It is these developments
that we focus on here. We attend, in particular, to three areas of empirical advance. A first
concerns the nature of emotional expression, which has been shown to include much more
13
than six distinct facial expressions, and, in fact, upwards of 20 multimodal expressions. A
second set of advances is found in the study of emotion perception, which concerns the
processes by which social perceivers derive meaning from emotional expressions of differ-
ent kinds. Guided by the aforementioned critiques of the Ekman and Friesen studies, the
field has moved beyond relying exclusively on forced choice labeling of expressions, and
progress is being made in understanding how social perceivers infer intentions, motives,
action tendencies, and relational properties of signaler and perceiver in brief expressions
of emotion. Finally, arising out of the functional foundation of BET has emerged a new
line of inquiry—how expressions coordinate interactions between individuals (e.g., Kelt-
ner and Kring 1998; Niedenthal et al. 2010; van Kleef et al. 2016). This line of work most
explicitly returns to a core notion of BET—that emotions are the grammar of social liv-
ing—to detail how brief emotional expressions, in single modalities and in multimodal
forms, coordinate interactions within meaningful relationships, such as those between par-
ent and child, romantic partners and friends, or individuals within status hierarchies (e.g.,
for review, see van Kleef 2016).
Advances in Understanding the Nature of Emotional Expression
Emotional Expressions are Multimodal, Dynamic Patterns of Behavior
Central to Basic Emotion Theory is the assumption that emotions enable the individual to
respond adaptively to evolutionarily significant threats and opportunities in the environ-
ment, such as the cry of offspring, a threat from an adversary, or a potentially available sex-
ual partner (Ekman 1992; Keltner and Haidt 2003). Emotions enable such responses pri-
marily through shifts in peripheral physiology (Levenson et al. 1990), patterns of cognition
(Oveis et al. 2010), movements of the body (e.g., the proverbial fight or flight response),
and expressive behaviors that coordinate social interactions through the information they
convey and the responses the evoke in others (e.g., Keltner and Kring 1998; van Kleef
2009).
Within this framework, emotions are fundamentally about instigating action and chang-
ing the probabilities of future actions (Frijda 1986). Emotions enable people to react to
significant stimuli (in the environment or within themselves), with complex patterns of
behavior involving multiple modalities—facial muscle movements, vocal cues, bodily
movements, gesture, posture, and so on. For example, studies of the emotion sympathy find
that this brief state involves bodily movements forward, soothing tactile behavior, oblique
eyebrows, a fixed pattern of gaze, vocalizations, and skin-to-skin contact when sympathy
leads to embrace (Goetz et al. 2010).
Early studies of emotional expression largely focused on whether perceivers could infer
emotions from static portrayals of prototypical configurations of facial muscles thought to
convey anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise, and happiness (Ekman and Davidson 1994;
Russell 1994). The last 20 years of scientific study has moved significantly beyond static
facial portrayals of these six emotions, revealing that emotional expressions are multi-
modal, dynamic patterns of behavior, involving facial action, vocalization, bodily move-
ment, gaze, gesture, head movements, touch, autonomic response, and even scent (Keltner
et al. 2016).
Notably, the notion that emotional expressions are multimodal patterns of behavior was
evident already in Charles Darwin’s original, rich descriptions of the expressions of over
13
40 emotional states (Keltner 2009), as illustrated in Table 1 (focusing specifically on posi-

tive emotions). As is evident in the table, Darwin focused on extended and multimodal
dynamic patterns of behavior, that involve not only facial muscle movements but also
changes in gaze, body movements, respiration, gestures, hand movements, the voice, tactile
contact, and autonomic responses (e.g., tears).
Early studies, as we have noted, focused almost exclusively on facial muscle movements.
The more recent consideration of other modalities of communication has greatly expanded
the field’s understanding of emotional expression. Studies of emotional expressions associ-
ated with experiences of embarrassment, shame, pride, and love have discerned distinct
expressions of these emotions by incorporating measurements of gaze activity (e.g., the
gaze aversion of shame and embarrassment), body movements (e.g., the chest expansion
of pride and the open posture of love), hand activity (e.g., the face touch of embarrassment
and open handed gesture of love), and movements of the head, such as the head tilt back
during expressions of pride (Keltner 1995; Tracy and Robins 2004, 2007). These findings
have prompted studies to systematically characterize how emotions are communicated in
movements of the body (Dael et al. 2012; Gross et al. 2010) and gaze (Sander et al. 2007).
These developments in the study of emotional expression are clearly in keeping with Dar-
win’s more comprehensive analysis, and his suggestion that there should be signal value
in how emotions are conveyed from a vast array of communicative behaviors, from simple
movements of the hands to shifts in body posture to head movements.
To take one example of a major stream of research in this vein, the human voice has
consistently been documented to be a rich modality of emotional expression, as antici-
pated in the seminal theorizing of Scherer (1986). To study whether people can commu-
nicate emotions with the voice, researchers have relied on two methods. In one, people,
often trained actors, attempt to express different emotions in prosody, the tone and rhythm
of our speech, while reading nonsense syllables or neutral passages of text (Banse and
Scherer 1996; Juslin and Laukka 2003). These samples of emotion-related prosody are
Table 1 Darwin’s descriptions of the expressive behavior of positive emotions
Astonishment Eyes open, mouth open, eyebrows raised, hands placed over mouth
Contemplation Frown, wrinkle skin under lower eyelids, eyes divergent, head droops, hands to forehead,
mouth, or chin, thumb/index finger to lip
Determination Firmly closed mouth, arms folded across breast, shoulders raised
Devotion Face upwards, eyelids upturned, fainting, pupils upwards and inwards, humbling kneeling
posture, hands upturned
Happiness Eyes sparkle, skin under eyes wrinkled, mouth drawn back at corners
High spirits Smile, body erect, head upright, eyes open, eye brows raised
Cheerfulness Eyelids raised, nostrils raised, eating gestures (rubbing belly), air suck, lip smacks
Joy Muscle tremble, purposeless movements, laughter, clapping hands, jumping, dancing
about, stamping, chuckle/giggle, smile, muscle around eyes contracted, upper lip raised
Laughter Tears, deep inspiration, contraction of chest, shaking of body, head nods to and fro, lower
jaw quivers up/down, lip corners drawn backwards, head thrown backward, shakes, head
face red, muscle around eyes contracted, lip press/bite
Love Beaming eyes, smiling cheeks (when seeing old friend), touch, gentle smile, protruding
lips (in chimps), kissing, nose rubs
Maternal love Touch, gentle smile, tender eyes
Pride Head, body erect, look down on others
Sympathy Tears
13
then presented to listeners, who select from a series of options the term that best matches
the emotion conveyed in the speech output. For example, Petri Laukka, Hillary Elfenbein
and their colleagues had actors from five countries—India, USA, Singapore, Australia, and
Kenya—attempt to convey 11 different emotions—anger, contempt, fear, happiness, inter-
est, neutral, sexual lust, pride, relief, sadness, and shame—while uttering sentences of neu-
tral content (e.g., “Let me tell you something”). They then presented these clips of emo-
tional prosody to people in different cultures, and found that listeners could recognize most
of the intended states when asked to label the sounds’ emotional content (e.g., Laukka et al.
2016). These findings build upon a review of 60 earlier studies of this kind, which found
that listeners can judge five different emotions in the prosody that accompanies speech—
anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and tenderness—with accuracy rates that approach 70%
(Juslin and Laukka 2003). Judgments are most accurate when listeners hear members of
their own culture (Pell et al. 2009).
In a second line of study of vocal expression, participants communicate emotions
through vocal bursts, which are brief, non-word utterances that arise between speech inci-
dents. Laughs, shrieks, growls, sighs, oohs, and ahhs, are examples of vocal bursts. In stud-
ies of vocal bursts, people are typically given a situation that produces an emotion (e.g., for
awe, “you are seeing a large waterfall for the first time”) and asked to communicate that
emotion with a brief vocal burst but no words (Laukka et al. 2013; Sauter and Scott 2007;
Sauter et al. 2010a, b; Simon-Thomas et al. 2009). These sounds are then played to listen-
ers, who attempt to label the sound with one of many emotion terms, or to match the sound
to the appropriate emotion eliciting situation. As with emotional prosody, people are quite
adept at communicating emotions with vocal bursts. For example, Cordaro and colleagues
presented vocal bursts of 16 emotions to people in 10 different cultures in Western Europe
(Germany, Poland), East Asia (China, Japan, South Korea) and South East Asia (India,
Pakistan) (Cordaro et al. 2016). In this study participants were asked to match emotion-
ally rich but simple situations (e.g., someone has insulted you; you hit your leg on a rock)
to one of four vocal bursts. Overall, participants were correct in matching stories to vocal
bursts of 16 emotions 79% of the time. People in these 10 countries were able to iden-
tify vocal bursts of six positive emotions—amusement, awe, contentment, desire, interest,
relief, and triumph—and six negative emotions—anger, contempt, disgust, embarrassment,
fear, pain, and sadness. Subsequent studies have documented that even in remote cultural
groups in Bhutan and Namibia, people are able to reliably discern a number of emotions
from vocal bursts (Cordaro et al. 2016; Sauter et al. 2010a; Sauter et al. 2015).
Yet another modality that has been of increasingly systematic focus in the study of
emotional expression is touch. In one line of research inspired by BET, Hertenstein et al.
(2006, 2009) brought an encoder (the person charged with expressing emotion via touch)
and decoder (the person being touched) to the lab. The encoder and decoder sat at a table,
separated by an opaque black curtain which prevented communication other than touch.
The encoder was given a list of emotions and asked to make contact with the decoder on
the arm to communicate each emotion, using any form of touch. The decoder could not
see any part of the touch because his or her arm was positioned on the encoder’s side of
the curtain. After each touch, the decoder selected from 13 response options the term that
best described what the encoder was communicating. Participants were found to reliably
communicate anger, disgust, and fear from a brief one- or two-second touch of another’s
forearm, as well as love, gratitude, and sympathy (see also Piff et al. 2012, for replication).
Emotions like embarrassment, awe, and sadness were not reliably communicated via touch.
In other research, it was found that people are more reliable in communicating emotion
through touch when allowed to touch other regions of the body than the arm (Hertenstein
13
et al. 2009). Finally, there are cross-cultural similarities in which emotions can be con-
veyed through tactile contact (see Hertenstein et al. 2009).
There are also emerging literatures on potential autonomic signals of emotion, including
the blush (van Dijk et al. 2009), the chills (Maruskin et al. 2012), and tears (Balsters et al.
2013; Vingerhoets and Bylsma 2016). Thinking of emotional expressions as dynamic mul-
timodal patterns of behavior points to intriguing new questions (e.g., Aviezer et al. 2012).
What is the relative contribution of different modalities to the perception and signal value
of emotional expressions (e.g., Flack 2006; Scherer and Ellgring 2007)? Why is it that cer-
tain emotions are more reliably signaled in multiple modalities, whereas other emotions are
only recognized from one modality? For example, sympathy is reliably signaled in touch
and the voice, but less so in the face (Goetz et al. 2010). It is nearly impossible to commu-
nicate embarrassment through touch, but it is reliably communicated in patterns of gaze,
head, and facial behavior (App et al. 2011).
There are Expressions of More Emotions than the “Basic” Six
Critical to Basic Emotions Theory is the question of which emotions have distinctive sig-
nals. Evidence germane to this question informs taxonomies of emotion (e.g., Keltner and
Lerner 2010). As evident in the previous section, evidence has emerged revealing that emo-
tions beyond the “basic six” have distinct multimodal and dynamic expressions, including
emotions such as embarrassment, pride, shame, and love. In recent years, dozens of stud-
ies have contributed to this line of work differentiating expressions of a wider range of
emotions (e.g., Keltner et al. 2016; Laukka et al. 2013; Sauter and Scott 2007; Tracy and
Robins 2004). Three methods have been at the heart of this new development. A first is
emotion encoding studies, where behavioral analyses ascertain whether the experience of
closely related emotions, such as sympathy or distress, or love or desire, or embarrassment,
shame, and amusement, are expressed in different patterns of behavior (e.g., for review, see
Matsumoto et al. 2008).
A second approach is found in emotion production studies. In these studies, participants
are given a prompt, most typically the definition of an emotion or an emotion-specific
story, and asked to communicate each emotion nonverbally. For example, in one recent
study, participants in five different cultures—China, India, Japan, Korea, and the USA—
heard twenty-two emotion-specific situations in their native language and were asked to
express the emotion in whatever fashion they desired, which could include facial, vocal,
or bodily expressions; the only requirement was that the expressions be nonverbal (Cord-
aro et al. 2018). Over 5500 facial expressions, bodily movements, gaze movements, hand
gestures, and patterns of breathing were coded using an expanded Facial Action Coding
System (Ekman and Friesen 1978), and a large subset of these was analyzed for patterns
across and within cultures. For the 22 emotions that were studied, certain configurations
of expressive behaviors were observed with above chance frequency across all five cultural
groups, which one might think of as the prototypical elements of the multimodal expres-
sion. Across cultures the expression of awe, for example, tended to involve the widening of
the eyes and a smile as well as a head movement up. Across cultures, head nods expressed
interest. Confusion was generally expressed with behaviors including furrowed brows, nar-
rowed eyes, and a head tilt. Overall, 22 emotions were found to have distinct, multimodal
expressions.
A third approach to documenting distinct expressions is with emotion recognition par-
adigms, in which participants attempt to map an emotion concept—in their own words,
13
in stories, or emotion terms—to different emotion-expressions. Based on the advances in

understanding facial expression, Cordaro took photographs of prototypical facial-bodily
expressions of 18 different emotions and then gathered data from 10 different cultures,
ranging from Pakistan to New Zealand (Keltner and Cordaro 2016). In this study, as in the
Ekman and Friesen work, participants were presented with emotion specific scenarios for
each of 18 different emotions (e.g., for pain: “this person just stubbed their toe on a rock”).
For each scenario they were required to choose from one of four static photos of facial/
bodily expressions the photo that best captured the scenario. Table 2 presents examples and
descriptions of the photos in this study. As can be seen from the recognition rates presented
in Fig. 1, the landscape of emotional expression in the face and body is increasingly rich.
In Table 3, we summarize this new literature on multi modal expressions beyond the
basic 6, indicating whether studies reveal that the facial, bodily, vocal, tactile, and music-
related expressions of each emotion can be differentiated from expressions of other emo-
tions. In the respective columns, “yes” indicates that the evidence suggests that the emo-
tion is communicated in a modality at above chance levels; “no” indicates that the emotion
cannot be reliably communicated in the modality. These data make the case for distinct
expression or 24 emotional states when different modalities are considered. We note, how-
ever, that these findings leave open the possibility that there will be emotions with distinct
multimodal expressions that are not readily recognized, and that few if any studies have
looked at how reliably these emotions are identified when all modalities are considered.
Within Category Prototypes, Variations, and Cultural Dialects
An early assertion of BET is that emotions are expressed not only in prototypical expres-
sions involving the behaviors common to that category, but also via within-category varia-
tions of expressions (Ekman 1992). For example, Ekman observed that alongside the pro-
totype of an anger expression—furrowed brow, raised upper eyelids, lip tighten and press
together—there are upwards of 60 variants of anger-elated expressions (Ekman 1993).
More generally, within an emotion category variations might include additional behav-
iors—an eye brow flash in the embarrassment expression—or fewer of the prototypical ele-
ments of an expression—an expression of anger that only involves the lip press and tight-
ening, but no movement in the eye brow region.
Empirical studies have been fruitfully guided by this analysis of within category var-
iation in emotional expression. For example, early studies of the expressive behavior of
embarrassment documented a multimodal prototypical expression that included gaze down,
head movement down, awkward smile. Further, naïve observers were better able to recog-
nize expressions of embarrassment as they increasingly resembled the prototypical expres-
sion (Keltner 1995). A similar analysis has been taken to the analysis of pride, uncovering
a prototypical expression and variations (see Tracy and Robins 2007). Likewise, studies
find that within the category of laughter, there are multiple variations (Szameitat et al.
2009). Studies of emotion-related tactile contact similarly find variation in the patterns of
tactile behavior (location, pressure, configuration of hand) within the expression of one
emotion, such as gratitude or sympathy, and, as in studies of facial and bodily movement,
observer accuracy varies depending on which particular expression is observed (Herten-
stein et al. 2006).
There is clear precedent in BET that there is not necessarily a one-to-one correspond-
ence between the occurrence of an emotion and a prototypical expression (see Ekman
1992). Rather, emotions are expressed in prototypical multimodal patterns of behavior, with
13
Table 2 Facial expression examples, FACS action units, and physical descriptions for each expression
Emotion Example photo Action units Physical description
13
Amusement 6 + 7+12 + 25 + 26 + 53 Head back, Duchenne smile, lips separated, jaw dropped
Anger 4 + 5+17 + 23 + 24 Brows furrowed, eyes wide, lips tightened and pressed together
Boredom 43 + 55 Eyelids drooping, head tilted, (not scored with FACS: slouched posture, head resting on hand)
Confusion 4 + 7+56 Brows furrowed, eyelids narrowed, head tilted

Table 2 (continued)
Contentment 12 + 43 Smile, eyelids drooping

Coyness 6 + 7+12 + 25 + 26 + 52 + 54 + 61 Duchenne smile, lips separated, head turned and down, eyes turned opposite to head turn
Desire 19 + 25 + 26 + 43 Tongue show, lips parted, jaw dropped, eyelids drooping
Disgust 7 + 9+19 + 25 + 26 Eyes narrowed, nose wrinkled, lips parted, jaw dropped, tongue show
13
Table 2 (continued)
13
Embarrassment 7 + 12 + 15 + 52 + 54 + 64 Eyelids narrowed, controlled smile, head turned and down, (not scored with FACS: hand touches
face)
Fear 1 + 2+4 + 5+7 + 20 + 25 Eyebrows raised and pulled together, upper eyelid raised, lower eyelid tense, lips parted and stretched
Happiness 6 + 7+12 + 25 + 26 Duchenne display

Table 2 (continued)
Interest 1 + 2+12 Eyebrows raised, slight smile

Pain 4 + 6+7 + 9+17 + 18 + 23 + 24 Eyes tightly closed, nose wrinkled, brows furrowed, lips tight, pressed together, and slightly puckered
Pride 53 + 64 Head up, eyes down
13
Table 2 (continued)
13
Sadness 1 + 4+6 + 15 + 17 Brows knitted, eyes slightly tightened, lip corners depressed, lower lip raised
Shame 54 + 64 Head down, eyes down
Surprise 1 + 2+5 + 25 + 26 Eyebrows raised, upper eyelid raised, lips parted, jaw dropped
Table 2 (continued)
Sympathy 1 + 17 + 24 + 57 Inner eyebrow raised, lower lip raised, lips pressed together, head slightly forward
13
Fig. 1 Recognition rates across five cultures in identifying 18 emotions from facial/bodily expressions por-
trayed in static photos (from Keltner and Cordaro 2016)
striking variations. To make sense of emotion-related prototypes and within category varia-
tions, Hillary Elfenbein, Ursula Hess, and their colleagues have offered their dialect theory of
emotional expression (Elfenbein 2013; Elfenbein et al. 2007). This theorizing posits that emo-
tional expression is likely to function much like language, such as English, in the sense that
languages have elements—select phonemes, words, forms of syntax—shared by all speakers
of the language, as well as dialects, or specific variations of the language in sound and word
use that are specific to a geographical region. For example, although standard English is com-
mon to the English speaker in England, different regions—London, Newcastle, or the Mid-
lands—are known to speak their own dialects, with unique words, phrases, and accents and
forms of prosody.
Several recent studies speak to the prevalence of dialects in emotional expressions (e.g.,
Cordaro et al. 2018; Elfenbein et al. 2007; Laukka et al. 2016). In these studies, people from
different cultures were given a definition of different emotions or a situation likely to produce
the emotion, and then asked to express the emotion with any behavior that feels natural. These
patterns of expression were then carefully analyzed for their specific facial, bodily, or vocal
behaviors, identifying what is universal and how prevalent culturally specific dialects are. A
first generalization of the results is just how pervasive emotion dialects are. For example, in
one study that looked at expressions of 22 emotions, every emotion was found to have a dia-
lect specific to the culture, and about 25% of an individual’s expressive behavior across emo-
tions was based on dialect, while around 50% of an individual’s expressive behavior adhered
to the universal prototype (Cordaro et al. 2018). Second, dialects appear to be more likely to
emerge for emotions that are more directly involved in social interactions, such as anger, hap-
piness, or shame—compared to emotions that are less directly or frequently involved in social
interactions, such as disgust or fear (Elfenbein et al. 2007).
13
Table 3 Evidence related to Emotion Facial, head, or Voice Touch Music

the expression of emotion in bodily action
different modalities
Amused Yesa,b,d,i Yesy,z,bb n/a n/a
Anger Yesd,w,x Yesy,aa,bb Yesdd,ee Yesff
Awe Yesa,c,d Yesy No n/a
Boredom Yesn Yesaa n/a n/a
Confused Yesn,u n/a n/a n/a
Contempt Yesv,w Yesy,aa n/a n/a
Content Yesd Yesz n/a n/a
Coy Yese,f,g n/a n/a n/a
Desire Yesh,i Noy n/a n/a
Disgust Yesd,w,x Yesy,aa,bb Yesdd,ee n/a
Embarrassed Yesd,i,j,k,l,ii Yesy Noee n/a
Fear Yesd,w,x Yesy,aa,bb Yesdd,ee Yesff
Gratitude n/a Noy Yesdd,ee n/a
Happiness Yesi,w,x Yesaa Yesdd Yesff
Interested Yesi,m,n Yesy n/a n/a
Love Yesd,i Noy Yesdd,ee Yesff
Pain Yeso,p,q,r Yescc n/a n/a
Pride Yesa,i,s,ii,jj,t Noy Noee n/a
Relief n/a Yesy,z,aa,bb n/a n/a
Sadness Yesd,w,x Yesy,bb yesdd,ee Yesff
Shame Yesd,i,t,ii,jj Noy n/a n/a
Surprise Yesw,x Yesy,bb,ee Noee n/a
Sympathy Yesi Yesy Yesdd,ee n/a
Triumph n/a Yesy n/a n/a
a
Shiota et al. (2003)
b
Keltner and Bonanno (1997)
c
Shiota et al. (2007)
d
Hejmadi et al. (2000)
e
Reddy (2000)
f
Reddy (2005)
g
Bretherton and Ainsworth (1974)
h
Gonzaga et al. (2006)
i
Keltner and Shiota (2003)
j
Keltner and Buswell (1997)
k
Keltner (1996)
l
Ekman and Rosenberg (1997)
m
Silvia (2008)
n
Reeve (1993)
o
Prkachin (1992)
p
Williams (2002)
q
Grunau and Craig (1987)
r
Botvinick et al. (2005)
s
Tracy and Robins (2004)
t
Tracy and Matsumoto (2008)
13
u
Table 3 (continued) Rozin and Cohen (2003)
v
Ekman and Friesen (1986)
w
Ekman (1992)
x
Levenson et al. (1990)
y
Simon-Thomas et al. (2009)
z
Sauter and Scott (2007)
aa
(Schröder 2003)
bb
Sauter et al. (2010a, b)
cc
Dubois et al. (2008)
dd
Hertenstein et al. (2009)
ee
Hertenstein et al. (2006)
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Juslin and Laukka (2003)
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Hejmadi et al. (2000)
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Piff et al. (2012)
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Tracy et al. (2009)
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Tracy and Robins (2008)
Process, Structure, and Contextual Shaping of Emotion Perception
The first wave of science on emotional expression—largely focused on the face—involved

emotion recognition studies that most typically entailed participants matching an emo-
tion term, or an emotional-specific story, from a list of options to a specific expression. A
meta-analysis of 182 independent samples examining judgments of emotion from facial
and other nonverbal cues yielded an average accuracy rate of 58.0% (a large effect size),
after correcting for chance guessing (Elfenbein and Ambady 2002). With respect to vocal
expressions of emotion, in a review of over 100 studies largely using single word emotion
recognition paradigms, Juslin and Laukka (2003) concluded that listeners can judge at least
five different emotions in the voice—anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and tenderness—with
accuracy rates that approach 70% (see Hawk et al. 2009; Sauter et al. 2013).
These findings have been critiqued, and debate continues about the degree of agree-
ment in the recognition of emotion from expressive behavior (Nelson and Russell 2013;
Russell 1994). Fridlund has also raised theoretical questions about what exactly is signaled
by expressive behavior (Fridlund, this volume; Parkinson 2005). Feelings? Intentions?
Likely actions? Properties—e.g., of dominance or affiliation—of the relationship between
the communicator and perceiver? This critique and theorizing has inspired considerable
advances in the conceptualization of the process, structure, and contextual shaping of emo-
tion perception.
The Process of Emotion Perception
Clearly, when an individual encounters emotional expression in others, he or she is likely

to engage in complex inferential processes that involve more than the ascription of single
word labels; inferences are made about the target’s desires and intentions, trait-like tenden-
cies, strategic motivations, and surrounding context (Sander et al. 2007).
One approach to this issue is that of Scherer and colleagues, who propose that perceivers
first infer specific appraisals in the expresser that prompted the expressive behavior in the
first place (Scherer and Grandjean 2008). That is, if a person sees another person express
13
anger in the face, or interest in the voice, or sympathy in a pattern of postural movement
and tactile contact, the social perceiver first infers a pattern of appraisals that would lead
the individual to express that particular emotion. From these inferred appraisals, the social
perceiver, this line of theory maintains, then infers the experience of specific emotions. To
illustrate, seeing someone express surprise in the face and voice might lead the observer to
infer that the individual has been exposed to novel, unexpected information, which in turn
would lead the observer to infer that the person is surprised. According to this account, the
first inferences perceivers draw upon when seeing others’ expressive behavior is a pattern
of appraisals, rather than distinct emotions.
In a similar spirit, Scarantino has synthesized studies of emotion perception in a theory
of affective pragmatics (Scarantino 2017; Fischer and Sauter 2017). He makes the case that
emotional expressions—in the present case facial/bodily expressions—communicate four
kinds of information: (1) the individual’s current feeling (the expressive function of expres-
sion); (2) what is happening in the present context (the declarative function of expression);
(3) desired courses of action from other people who perceive the expression (the impera-
tive function of expression); and (4) intention and plans about what the person might do
(the commissive function of expression).
As one empirical illustration of this thinking about the inferences that expressive behav-
ior prompt, Shuman and colleagues presented observers with dynamic, videotaped portray-
als of five different emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust (Shuman et al.
2015). The expressions were dynamic, more realistic, and less exaggerated than those in
the Ekman and Friesen photos, more like the expressions people see in everyday social
interactions. In different response formats, participants matched each expression to either:
feelings (“fear”), appraisals (“that is dangerous”), social relational meanings (“you scare
me”), or action tendencies (“I might run”). Results showed that participants labeled the
dynamic but subtle expressions with the expected response 62% of the time, with greater
accuracy revealed when labeling expressions with feeling states, and reduced accuracy
found in labeling action tendencies (see Hortsmann 2003). More recent work in the Trobri-
and Islands found that action tendencies were more prominent in the interpretation of facial
expressions than emotion words, suggesting possible cultural variations in the labeling of
emotional expression (Crivelli et al. 2016).
This emerging literature on the process of emotion recognition from expressive behav-
ior, would be well served by taking on intriguing questions. Given what has been learned
about the automaticity of inferring trust, warmth, and dominance from human faces (e.g.,
Oosterhof and Todorov 2008), more fine-grained methods oriented toward unpacking the
process of emotion recognition could yield insights into the primacy of what informa-
tion is conveyed—feelings, appraisals, intentions—and the unfolding process of emotion
perception.
The Structure of Emotion Perception
Emotion perception involves more than labeling multimodal expressions with words
that capture distinct emotions. The way that distinct emotional expressions relate to each
other—that is, the structure of recognition—is also critically important. For instance, sup-
pose a given study found that expressions of “love,” “joy,” and “embarrassment” were
accurately identified in two cultures. If, in the same study, members of one culture thought
the expression of “love” was similar in meaning to that of “joy” but not that of “embarrass-
ment,” whereas in another culture individuals thought the expression of “love” was more
13
similar in meaning to “embarrassment”, this would reveal a potentially important cultural

difference in the emotional meaning attributed to the three expressions. The structure of
the relatedness of meaning of the three expressions may, in fact, be as interesting as the fact
that they can be differentiated in forced choice type labeling paradigms.
Consider this intriguing study on the structure of emotion perception by Jack et al.
(2012). These researchers relied on computer morphing technologies to generate over
2500 facial expressions based on the combined movements of anywhere from 1 to 6
Facial Action Units. They then presented these 2500 facial expressions as animations
in sequences of four separate photos unfolding over 1.25 s, and had participants rate the
emotional meaning of these expressions. With traditional factor analytic approaches, they
documented that between 25 and 35 distinct states could be discerned in facial muscle
movements, but that this realm of expression could be reduced to a simpler structure of
four distinct patterns of Action Units well preserved in meaning across cultures. In both
cultures, they distinguished (1) positive emotions, (2) sadness/fear-related emotions, (3)
surprise-related emotions, and (4) disgust/anger-related emotions, respectively (for similar
results on the variety of expressions see Cordaro et al. 2018; Du et al. 2014; for critique of
study, see Sauter and Eisner 2013).
Another recent study took a different approach to examining cultural similarities and
differences in the structure of emotion perception. Bai et al. (2018) began with more cari-
catured representations of 51 emotion concepts, created by asking a professional illustrator
to draw each concept using emoji-like images. In one experiment, participants self-sorted
the drawings, which were printed onto cards, into multiple stacks of drawings with simi-
larity meaning. These data were processed with an agglomerative hierarchical clustering
algorithm, resulting in tree-like representations of the structure of emotion perception,
which correlated over .90 across the two cultures, and which we portray in Fig. 2.
As with the research by Rachel Jack and her colleagues, these approaches have the
promise of capturing how expressions relate to one another, and broader categories of
affective states that include distinct emotions.
The Contextual Shaping of Emotion Perception
A final growth area in the study of emotion perception is a focus on how emotion percep-
tion is shaped by features of the social context (Barrett et al. 2011; Hess and Hareli 2017;
Scherer 1986). An important source of contextual shaping of emotion perception is, of
course, culture. Cultures vary greatly in their prioritization and understanding of emotion
concepts, knowledge, and representations, so culture will necessarily influence the percep-
tion of emotion in expression. For example, cultures vary in their attention to the surround-
ing context of an expression. In one paradigmatic experiment, Masuda and colleagues
showed Japanese and American participants cartoon figures with various facial expres-
sions (Masuda et al. 2004). The central, target face was always surrounded by smaller, less
salient faces, that displayed expressions that were dissimilar to those of the target. Japa-
nese participants’ judgments about the central target’s facial expression were more influ-
enced by the surrounding faces than were judgments made by Americans –who tended
to restrict their focus to the expression shown by the central target. Differences between
groups of perceivers have also been found for populations that differ on other dimensions
than culture, such as social class. In this vein, Kraus and colleagues have found that lower
class individuals—more oriented to the social context than upper class individuals—also
13
Fig. 2 A hierarchical taxonomy of perception of 51 emoji-like drawings based on data from a card sorting
study, averaging across US and Chinese participants. Note Leaves (outer edge of the hierarchy) correspond
to individual drawings. These drawings are paired based on correlations in the proportion of matches with
each other drawing. These pairings are then linked iteratively based on the average correlations between the
judgment profiles of the two sets of drawings they contain, so as to maximize the correlations in judgments
of the drawings that are grouped together. The correlation corresponding to each linkage is represented by
its distance from the center, with the grey outer edge corresponding to a correlation of 1 and the inner circle
corresponding to a correlation of 0. The branches of the tree are colored according to 5 top-level clusters
linked at a correlation > 0. All linkages shown correspond to correlations that are significantly higher than
would be expected if the linked branches were correlated only by chance, based on the number of leaves
contained in each branch (p < .05) (Color figure online)
incorporate contextual information into their judgments of expressive behavior to a greater

extent (Kraus et al., 2010).
A second source of variation is situational—who is the person expressing emotion, and
what context are they in? How might the gender, power, ethnicity or social class of the
individual expressing emotion shape what emotion observers perceive? For example, peo-
ple are more likely to detect anger in men’s expressions of emotion, but sadness in expres-
sions of women (Hess and Hareli 2017). US participants are more likely to perceive anger
13
in the emotional expressions of African Americans (Hugenberg and Bodenhausen 2003).

Also relevant are what other behaviors expressers might be engaging in. For example,
Aviezer et al. (2008) presented a photograph of a prototypical facial expression of disgust
in one of four stimulus contexts, with the person expressing disgust engaged in different
actions. Participants labeled the expression as disgust 91% of the time when the individual
was holding a soiled article of clothing, 59% of the time when the person displayed fear-
ful hand and arm movements, 33% of the time when the same person was clasping his or
her hands sadly to the chest, and 11% of the time when the person was poised with fists
clenched to punch. These results suggest that people do not see and perceive faces in a
vacuum; rather, they are one very important predictor of emotion perceptions, which are
used in combination with other contextual information to form judgments. Recent findings
also highlight that a person’s previous emotional expressions can influence how a current
emotional expression is perceived (Fang et al. 2018). Clearly, the many dimensions of con-
text—the nature of the expresser, the surrounding people, the formality or informality of
the setting—all influence emotion perception.
A third kind of context is perceptual context (Barrett et al. 2011). Perceptual context
refers to the mental states within the perceiver’s mind that shape his or her inferences upon
observing expressive behavior. A person’s current feelings, goals, intentions, values, and
physical state give rise to context-specific interpretations of social expressive behavior. For
example, recent studies find that the likelihood that participants will label a disgust expres-
sion as “disgust” rises when an anger expression precedes the presentation of the disgust
expression, but drops when no anger expression precedes the target disgust expression
(Pochedly et al. 2012).
Emotional Expression and the Coordination of Social Interaction
Based on his years of intensive observation of pre-industrial peoples, Eibl-Eibesfeldt pos-

ited that emotional expressions are the “grammar of social interaction” (1989). Facial
expressions, vocalizations, patterns of bodily movement, gaze, gestures, and touch bind
people into dyadic and group-based interactions—the soothing of a distressed child, flirta-
tion between potential suitors, sexual interaction, the play of young siblings, the aggressive
encounters of rivals, or status conflicts in groups.
A corollary to this analysis is that emotional expressions trigger systematic inferences
and behavioral responses in others. This thinking requires that we shift a level of analysis,
and look from individuals’ expressions of emotion to the dyadic and group level (Keltner
and Haidt 1999), as has been done in the study of emotional mimicry (Hess and Fischer
2013). In other words, perceivers do not merely recognize emotions from nonverbal dis-
plays—they also respond to them with their own emotion-guided behaviors, ranging from
mimicry, coordination, and tenderness to antagonism and avoidance.
Consider the recent theorizing of Paula Niedenthal and her colleagues concerning how
different smiles and laughs evoke different inferences and responses in others (Niedenthal
et al. 2010). Within 500 ms, this theorizing posits, people respond to smiles with mimetic
behavior and physiological reactions. For example, a warm smile of enjoyment triggers
neural processes that lead the perceiver to seek more information about the smiler through
eye contact, which in turn evokes feelings of pleasure, mimetic behavior, and the experi-
ence of positive emotion and approach behavior. A proud, dominant smile, by contrast,
13
triggers the same automatic search for information about the smiler, along with neural acti-
vation that leads to a sense of threat and avoidant behavior.
So how do emotional expressions coordinate social interactions? Three ideas have
emerged (Keltner and Kring 1998; van Kleef 2009). A first is that emotional expressions
rapidly provide important information relevant to perceivers, useful in guiding subsequent
behavior. For example, emotional expressions can signal trait-like tendencies of individu-
als. Individuals looking angry are perceived as dominant (Knutson 1996) and those show-
ing embarrassment are seen as being of upstanding character (Feinberg et al. 2012). Pride
displays promote automatic, cross-cultural judgments of high status in the displayer—judg-
ments that are strong enough to counter contextual information indicating that the displayer
in fact merits low status (Shariff and Tracy 2009; Shariff et al. 2012; Tracy et al. 2013).
Emotional expressions also signal the trustworthiness of the sender (Fang et al. in
press). In one study, Krumhuber and colleagues found that people trust interaction part-
ners more, and will give more resources to those partners, if the partners display authentic
smiles (which have longer onset and offset times) compared to fake smiles, which have
shorter onset and offset (Krumhuber et al. 2013). Social perceivers also infer trustworthy
intentions from people who spontaneously display intense embarrassment, and are more
likely to cooperate with individuals who express embarrassment than other emotions
(Feinberg et al. 2012). Pride displays direct social learning by providing information to
others; individuals motivated to attain the correct answer to a difficult trivia question were
found to selectively copy the answer provided by others showing pride, more so than others
showing happiness or a neutral display, suggesting that pride displays communicate exper-
tise or knowledge (Martens and Tracy 2013).
Emotional expressions also convey essential information about the environment (e.g.,
Klinnert et al. 1986). For example, parents use touch and voice to signal to their young
children as to whether other people and objects in the environment are safe or dangerous
(Hertenstein 2002), using vocal cues that are consistent across cultures (Bryant and Barrett
2007).
Emotional displays coordinate social interactions in a second way, by evoking specific
responses in social perceivers. Early studies in this tradition found that some emotional
expressions trigger complementary emotions in social perceivers: facial displays of anger
enhance fear conditioning in observers, even when the anger displays are not consciously
perceived (Ohman and Dimberg 1978); expressions of distress can evoke sympathy in
observers (e.g., Eisenberg et al. 1989); displays of dominance trigger more submissive
expressive behavior (Tiedens and Fragale 2003). More recently, van Dijk et al. (2009) have
documented that the blush is an involuntary, costly way in which people signal their aware-
ness and regret for the mistake they have made: social observers responded with more pos-
itive emotion to individuals who blushed after they made mistakes than if they showed
other display behavior.
Finally, emotional expressions structure social interactions by serving as incentives for
others’ actions, by rewarding specific patterns of behavior in perceivers. Early studies on
this notion focused on how parents use warm smiles and touches to increase the likelihood
of certain behaviors in their children (e.g., Tronick 1989) and the incentive value of laugh-
ter, and how it triggers cooperative interactions between friends (Owren and Bachorowski
2001).
This analysis of the rewarding properties of emotional expression likewise sheds light
on some of the direct effects of emotional touch upon recipients of touch (for review, see
Keltner 2009). Gentle, pleasing touch triggers activation in the orbitofrontal cortex, a brain
region involved in the representation of secondary rewards. Given the rewarding quality
13
of being touched, it has been claimed that touch motivates sharing behavior in others (De
Waal 1996). This may help explain why warm touch increases compliance to requests
(Willis and Hamm 1980) and cooperation toward strangers in economic games.
Clearly, the study of how expressions coordinate social interactions are in their infancy.
Many of the studies of the informative, evocative, and incentive functions of expressions
have largely focused on the face; it will be important to extend this line of reasoning to
studies of the voice, touch, gaze, and other modalities. With a few exceptions, this work
has focused on a fairly limited set of emotional displays—smiles, anger displays, disgust
expressions, and fear expressions. It will be important to examine how less studied expres-
sions of emotion, for example of interest (in the voice), gratitude (in touch), sympathy (in
the voice or touch), or awe (in the voice), coordinate social interactions.
Studies of the social functions of emotional expressions have set the stage for new
theorizing. One recent line of argument has outlined how emotional expressions evolved
to serve these informative, evocative, and incentive signaling functions, perhaps in the
“second stage” of their evolution (see Shariff and Tracy 2011). This account dates back
to Darwin (1872), and argues that internal physiological regulation was likely the origi-
nal adaptive function of emotion expressions, which later evolved to serve communicative
functions (e.g., Eibl-Eibsfeldt 1989; Ekman 1992; Shariff and Tracy 2011).
To take the classic example of fear, the facial muscle movements that constitute a fear
expression likely originally emerged as part of a functional response to threatening stimuli;
widened eyes increase the scope of one’s visual field and the speed of eye movements,
allowing expressers to better identify (potentially threatening) objects in their periphery
(Susskind et al. 2008). In contrast, the ‘scrunched’ nose and mouth of the disgust expres-
sion results in constriction of these orifices, thereby reducing air intake (Chapman et al.
2009). Given that disgust functions to alert expressers of the potentially noxious nature of
the eliciting stimulus, and thereby disincline them from ingesting it (Rozin et al. 2004),
the reduced inhalation of airborne chemicals can well be considered part of the same
adaptive response. In more recent work, these authors have shown that the opposing eye
movements involved in fear and disgust expressions (i.e., widening versus narrowing) func-
tion to increase visual sensitivity (localizing an object) and acuity (determining what the
object is), respectively—further supporting the argument that these two expressions ini-
tially evolved to serve opposing yet equally important functions for the expresser (Lee et al.
2013).
However, many of these original physiological benefits experienced by expressers even-
tually became transformed into communicative signals, which benefit both expressers and
observers by virtue of allowing for more efficient communication and coordinated interac-
tions. Over time, the facial and bodily behavioral components of certain emotions came
to signal those emotional states to observers, through processes of ritualization, wherein
mammalian nonverbal displays become exaggerated, more visible, distinctive and/or pro-
totypic, and ultimately, more recognizable (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989; Shariff and Tracy 2011).
Looking Forward to Future Advances in the Study of Emotional Expression
In this review, we have summarized recent advances in the study of emotional expression
inspired by Basic Emotion Theory. This literature reveals that there are upwards of 20
emotions with distinct, multimodal expressions. Intriguing discoveries highlight how this
increasingly rich array of states with multimodal expressions might have a deeper struc-
ture that speaks to the potential evolutionary origins of emotional expression. And work
13
is revealing how emotional expressions coordinate social interactions; they are indeed a
grammar of social living.
These advances in the study of emotional expression are already proving to be genera-
tive in advancing other core hypotheses of Basic Emotions Theory. As one example, within
this theoretical framework it is assumed that emotions involve emotion-specific physiol-
ogy, which enable specific behaviors in response to eliciting stimuli—flight, skin-to-skin
contact, the widening of the eyes to take in more information, clasping and striking. The
literature we have reviewed here has begun to illuminate how distinct emotions covary
with distinct physiological response. For example, brief nonverbal displays of love (Duch-
enne smile, head tilt, open handed gestures) correlate with oxytocin release, whereas cues
of sexual desire (lip licks, lip puckers) do not (Gonzaga et al. 2006). Sympathy-related
oblique eyebrow movements relate to increased activation in the vagus nerve, a branch
of the parasympathetic autonomic nervous system that supports care-giving in mammals
(Eisenberg et al. 1989; Stellar et al. 2015). Recent work finds that fear-related vocaliza-
tions, but not those of other emotions, covary with cortisol release (Anderson et al. 2018).
This work suggests that more precise measurement of emotional expression may yield new
insights into emotion-related physiology.
Critical to Basic Emotions Theory is the notion that human emotional expression arose
during the process of mammalian evolution, and, by implication, that there should be com-
pelling homologies between human and non-human behavior. Careful cross-species com-
parisons between human and nonhuman expressive behavior have revealed functional ori-
gins of laughter, smiling, embarrassment, affiliative cues involved in love, sexual signaling,
threat displays, and dominance (for review see Keltner et al. 2016). Careful analyses of
nonhuman vocal displays find distinct displays for sex, food, affiliation, care-giving, and
threat (e.g., Briefer 2012; Morton 1977; Snowdon 2003).
In moving beyond the basic six, new studies of emotional expression guided by Basic
Emotion Theory are generating important advances in understanding what emotions are,
and how they shape human social life.
Acknowledgements This research was supported in part by a Grant from the John Templeton Foundation
(88210).
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Journal of Nonverbal Behavior

Emotional Expression: Advances in Basic Emotion Theory

Dacher Keltner1 · Disa Sauter2 · Jessica Tracy3 · Alan Cowen1

© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019

Keywords Emotional expression · Physiology · Contextual influences · Basic Emotion

mechanisms of emotion-related appraisal, language, development, and central and periph-

Advances in Understanding the Nature of Emotional Expression

Emotional Expressions are Multimodal, Dynamic Patterns of Behavior

40 emotional states (Keltner 2009), as illustrated in Table 1 (focusing specifically on posi-

Table 1 Darwin’s descriptions of the expressive behavior of positive emotions

There are Expressions of More Emotions than the “Basic” Six

in stories, or emotion terms—to different emotion-expressions. Based on the advances in

Within Category Prototypes, Variations, and Cultural Dialects

Confusion 4 + 7+56 Brows furrowed, eyelids narrowed, head tilted

Contentment 12 + 43 Smile, eyelids drooping

Desire 19 + 25 + 26 + 43 Tongue show, lips parted, jaw dropped, eyelids drooping

Happiness 6 + 7+12 + 25 + 26 Duchenne display

Interest 1 + 2+12 Eyebrows raised, slight smile

Pride 53 + 64 Head up, eyes down

Shame 54 + 64 Head down, eyes down

Table 3 Evidence related to Emotion Facial, head, or Voice Touch Music

Process, Structure, and Contextual Shaping of Emotion Perception

The first wave of science on emotional expression—largely focused on the face—involved

The Process of Emotion Perception

Clearly, when an individual encounters emotional expression in others, he or she is likely

The Structure of Emotion Perception

similar in meaning to “embarrassment”, this would reveal a potentially important cultural

The Contextual Shaping of Emotion Perception

incorporate contextual information into their judgments of expressive behavior to a greater

in the emotional expressions of African Americans (Hugenberg and Bodenhausen 2003).

Emotional Expression and the Coordination of Social Interaction

Based on his years of intensive observation of pre-industrial peoples, Eibl-Eibesfeldt pos-

Looking Forward to Future Advances in the Study of Emotional Expression

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