Introduction: Expression Of Emotion

Abstract If Charles Darwin were alive today, he would certainly have been pleased, and probably blushed, to witness the empirical and theoretical developments that his 1872 book, Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, generated. The first four chapters in this part pay homage to Darwin, reviewing literature on how emotion is expressed in the face (Keltner, Ekman, Gonzaga, & Beer), by voice (Scherer, Johnstone, & Klasmeyer), and in language (Reilly & Seibert) in humans, as well as in displays across various nonhuman species (Snowdon). These four chapters generally suggest, with the occasional qualifications that empirical study inevitably requires, that select emotions are communicated in distinct facial and vocal displays and in language, and that this is so across different cultures and in different species. The last two chapters of this part broaden the meaning of emotional expression and ask how emotion is expressed in different art forms, a question that dates back to Aristotle, and certainly earlier. Gabrielsson and Juslin apply methods used in the study of facial expression and voice (i.e., encoding and decoding studies) to address whether and how emotion is communicated in music. Oatley explores the thesis that emotion, and especially misunderstood emotion, inspires expression in pictorial arts, architecture, and literature. Much in these chapters would likely have been familiar to Darwin—in particular the interest in the evolutionary history of expression, culture and universality, the biological roots of expression, and the focus on discrete emotions. At the same time, the chapters consistently reveal how scholars are taking the study of expression in striking new directions. Scholars are exploring how emotion is communicated in new modalities (language, odor, music). They are exploring relations between expression and central nervous system activity. Careful, observational research is revealing new functions of emotion (e.g., see Snowdon on how expression regulates reproductive physiology). And there are now systematic studies of how emotion varies according to culture, personality, and development. In this chapter, we bring together the convergent insights offered by the different authors of this part. We summarize where the field stands on many of the questions that Darwin posed (e.g., How is emotion is expressed? Are these expressions universal?). At the same time, we highlight new developments in the field and suggest directions for future research. The field of emotional expression looked very different 20 years ago. Most of the literature focused on the face, and most of the research was judgment studies of a limited set of emotions. There was little examination of how emotion is expressed in the voice, body, or language. Scholars in the nonhuman literature were reluctant to ascribe emotion to displays of nonhuman species.