Emotional Expression
Emotional expression refers to the outward display of one's emotions through facial expressions, body language, tone of voice, and gestures. It is a fundamental aspect of human communication and plays a crucial role in conveying feelings, intentions, and social cues. Understanding emotional expression is important in psychology as it provides insight into an individual's emotional state and interpersonal interactions.
6 Key excerpts on "Emotional Expression"
eBook - ePubThe Student EQ Edge
Emotional Intelligence and Your Academic and Personal Success: Student Workbook
- Korrel Kanoy, Howard E. Book, Steven J. Stein(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Jossey-Bass(Publisher)
...Chapter 6 Emotional Expression Emotional Expression involves openly expressing feelings both verbally and nonverbally. . . People who exhibit effective Emotional Expression are open and congruent in emotional messages they send to others. —Stein and Book, 2011, p. 89 What is Emotional Expression? Even if you believe you don’t express your emotions, you do! Nonverbal communication typically reveals more about what you’re feeling than your words do. Frowning, crossing your arms, leaning back, or not looking at someone when they are talking all give cues to your emotions. And your emotions are contagious. If you smile, you are more likely to create a positive mood in others. If you frown, you can equally influence their mood in negative ways. This is called emotional contagion —and you’ve experienced it whether you realized it or not. You learned your “rules” for Emotional Expression from family members. Perhaps your family yelled when angry—or withdrew silently. Perhaps expressions of anger weren’t tolerated in any form, including withdrawal. Maybe you could tell family members if you were happy or excited, but if you happened to feel sad or anxious, you kept your feelings to yourself. Unfortunately, “stuffing” your emotions inside doesn’t make them go away. In fact, that makes your emotions more powerful because they build up in intensity. That often results in a verbal or behavioral outburst with serious consequences. WHY STUDY Emotional Expression? Others will detect your inconsistencies if you give off mixed messages in your Emotional Expression. If you verbally indicate nothing is wrong, but nonverbally express anxiety, anger, or sadness, then others will key into the nonverbal expressions and react accordingly. Have you ever asked someone, “What’s wrong?” and they say “Nothing?” But they said “nothing” using an irritated voice and with their arms folded. Chances are you didn’t appreciate that mixed message...
eBook - ePubTranslation and Emotion
A Psychological Perspective
- Séverine Hubscher-Davidson(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Kennedy-Moore and Watson (2001a, 4) define Emotional Expression as observable verbal and nonverbal behaviours that communicate emotional experience. Both expression and non-expression (i.e. the lack of expression) are considered to be overt manifestations of emotional experience. According to these authors, Emotional Expression is somewhat controllable and does not always correspond to the actual emotional experience (Kennedy-Moore and Watson 2001a, 4). For example, someone might be experiencing a lot of emotion but would not necessarily express it in an observable way. 1 In the psychological literature, expressive behaviour is considered to be a component part of the emotional reaction—and not something added on later—in order to communicate our feelings to others (Collier 2014, viii). Expression and non-expression can take various forms and have either positive or negative consequences, and what is or is not expressed will affect individuals’ own emotional experience and their relationships with others (Kennedy-Moore and Watson 2001a, 7). In order to understand how expression and non-expression unfold, Kennedy-Moore, Greenburg, and Wortman (1991) created a process model to represent how emotional experience is translated into Emotional Expression. Figure 4.1 illustrates the model and its different phases. In essence, the model is similar to Gross and Thompson’s 2007 process model of emotion regulation discussed in Chapter 3, in the sense that the steps in the model reflect the process taking place between the occurrence of an emotion-eliciting event and overt expressive behaviour...
eBook - ePub- John D. DeLamater, Jessica L. Collett(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...These practices can range from elaborate wailing episodes to the suicide of a widow or widower. Individualistic societies view these kinds of practices as extremely strange and instead carry a belief that although mourning and grief after a death is normal, there are limits. Mourners who cannot get over a death are considered unstable and may end up being isolated until they can recover. These cultural differences in the experience and expression of emotions complicate theories about the universality of basic emotions. For the most part, social psychologists agree that some emotions are universal and that they are physiologically connected to distinctive facial expressions, and yet the expression of even the most primary emotions is heavily influenced by cultural norms and can vary a great deal from place to place. If people are to communicate emotions effectively in everyday interaction, they must learn and use the display rules of their own culture. In addition, some emotions are far more conditioned on social processes than others. Social psychologists who study emotion are much more focused on these kinds of social-emotional processes than on the biological links. The Social Psychology of Emotions A social psychological approach to emotions moves beyond the notion that emotions are simply natural reactions to things that happen in the world around us. The above discussions demonstrate that although some aspects of emotion may be biologically hardwired, others are influenced by cultural norms and experiences. Social psychologists also argue that much of our emotional experience is a matter of interpretation. When we experience a physiological reaction that is part of an emotion, before we can decide which emotion is involved, we have to interpret the physical sensation in its social context. Consider the feeling of being slightly nauseous and having sweaty palms...
eBook - ePub- Paula M. Niedenthal, François Ric(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...As you can see, the context of the body changes your interpretation of the extreme facial expression. From Aviezer, Trope, & Todorov (2012). Summary Emotion expressions are probably the most important stimuli in social life. They attract attention, and they do so automatically (Lundqvist & Öhman, 2005). Facial expressions impart an enormous amount of information about the emotional state of the expresser, as well as his or her motives and needs. Certain facial expressions have functional origins, and similar facial movements are observed in other mammals. Many facial expressions occur in all humans, although culture and socialization do influence how and when emotions are expressed. Expressions reflect both underlying emotion states and the social intentions of the expresser. Research on the facial feedback hypothesis has shown that these facial expressions not only express, but also influence, the subjective state of the expresser. Indeed, because individuals imitate others’ facial expressions, and because expressions can feed back on subjective states, they are useful pieces of information for better understanding and even empathizing with another individual (Zajonc et al., 1987). Although faces have received the most attention in emotion expression research, the body and voice are also important for the experience and expression of emotion. Future research on emotion expression will likely involve more whole-person (rather than just face or voice) analyses, as well as dynamic, moving people within environmental contexts as stimuli (e.g., Bänziger, Grandjean, & Scherer, 2009; these stimuli may even occur in immersive virtual reality paradigms, see Gutiérrez-Maldonado, Rus-Calafell, & González-Conde, 2014)...
eBook - ePubCompanion Encyclopedia of Psychology
Volume One
- Andrew M. Colman, Andrew M. Colman(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The face is the most important channel of Emotional Expression, partly because it is capable of a wide variety of subtly patterned movements. In addition, emotion may be expressed through tone of voice, bodily posture, and gestures. Since Darwin (1872), it has been commonly believed that at least some facial expressions are genetically programmed in humans. Evidence for this idea has come from studies that show that a small set of facial expressions are consistently identified by people coming from a large variety of cultures including some which have had little contact with westerners (Ekman & Friesen, 1971). For example, four facial expressions (anger, disgust, happiness, and sadness) posed by members of a pre-literate culture were recognized at better than chance level by American students. The evidence relating to other Emotional Expressions is less convincing. Furthermore, real-life emotional states are accompanied by continually changing facial expressions which are rarely as clearcut as those used in the studies mentioned. Emotional meaning can also be conveyed by body posture, limb movements, and so on. In fact, facial expressions are often part of more general action patterns which include postural changes and integrated movements of the whole body. Finally, emotion may be expressed vocally, in speech intonation and pitch and so on (Scherer, 1986). Research evidence suggests that the emotional meaning of contentless speech is recognized about as well as that of facial expression. Motivated action The fourth and final component of emotion is motivated action. Emotions often seem to contain the impulse to act in certain ways appropriate to the particular emotion...
eBook - ePubEmotional Development and Families
Socialization across the lifespan
- Julie Hakim-Larson(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...Viewing your own facial expressions in a mirror as you think about an angry, sad, fearful, disgusting or happy event can sometimes aid in the process of increasing self-awareness (Ekman, 2003/2007). As described in the facial feedback hypothesis (Tomkins & McCarter, 1964), we have an underlying biological predisposition that links our bodily physiological sensations with feedback from the movements of facial muscles; thus, voluntary practice in making the expressions and feeling the accompanying muscle movements in the face and bodily sensations can be helpful in improving emotional self-awareness. Some people have great difficulty in describing their own emotional states of arousal and their own emotional facial expressions; thus, they have difficulty in conveying how they feel both non-verbally and verbally to others. This maladaptive tendency in the extreme has been called alexithymia ; it is characterized by an externally oriented person who has trouble describing his or her own feelings and distinguishing feelings from bodily sensations of arousal (e.g., Taylor, Bagby & Luminet, 2000). In families, parents can teach their children about non-verbal facial expressions by accurately labelling emotions for them and interpreting the emotional situations they observe in the child and in others when the child is a bystander. Such learning may be either direct or vicarious as the child may model what is observed. In addition, there are many other everyday contexts in which parents can teach their children about the meaning behind non-verbal expressions. These include parental interpretations of story character facial expressions while interacting with their children during storytelling; in such cases, a wordless picture storybook that depicts emotionally expressive story characters interacting with each other allows parents to freely convey their interpretations and emotional evaluations (e.g., Harkins, 1993)...
