The Social Nature of Emotion Expression: What Emotions Can Tell Us About the World

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.

About the Author

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.