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.

• Communicative scope of emotion expressions
• Emotion-based inferences in context
• Theory of Affective Pragmatics
• Speech act theory
• Linguistic communication
• Non-linguistic communication
• Drawing inferences from emotion expressions
• Social referencing
• Modes of communication
• Reverse engineering of emotions
• Emotional states and roles as signals of moral character
• Adult crying in social contexts
• Social meaning of crying
• Social consequences of smiles
• Emotion and inferences of power
• Approach/Inhibition Theory of Power
• Using emotions to infer norms and standards
• Using facial expressions to deceive

• Department of Psychology, Humboldt-University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

  Ursula Hess

• Department of Business Administration, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

  Shlomo Hareli

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.

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