Face It! Your Body's Telling Tales

Our faces and bodies are powerful storytellers, constantly broadcasting our inner world to those around us. A furrowed brow speaks volumes of concern, just as a beaming smile radiates joy. These nonverbal cues are fundamental for connection, allowing us to understand each other's feelings beyond spoken words. While some fundamental facial expressions of emotion like happiness, sadness, anger or fear are recognized across cultures, the intensity, frequency, and context of their display vary significantly. Cultural display rules dictate when, how, and to whom certain emotions can be shown. Furthermore, the interpretation of certain nonverbal cues, such as eye contact, physical touch, and even smiling, differs widely. The Organizational and Social Psychology group (Ursula Hess) discussed how emotions are expressed through the face and the body, focusing on cross-cultural similarities and differences in emotion expression and the research methods used to study them. They identified three main research approaches: the reporter approach , the enactor approach and the judge approach . For each approach, the authors evaluate the methodology, discuss findings, and offer best practice recommendations. If you want to know more about emotional expressions on face and body, read their book chapter.

Abstract

The face and body are two central channels by which human beings communicate emotions to one another. Across cultural contexts, scholars have investigated facial and bodily expressions of emotion, both at the levels of production (i.e., how people express themselves when they experience emotions) and perception (i.e., how people make sense of others’ emotional expressions). In this chapter, we provide an overview of recent advances on cross-cultural similarities and differences in emotion expression, organized around specific research methods. We highlight three main ways through which emotional expressions have been investigated cross-culturally: (1) the people as reporters approach, where respondents indicate their emotional expressions via a medium, (2) the people as enactors approach, where expressors’ facial and bodily actions are directly recorded, and (3) the people as judges approach, where participants observe others’ expressions and match them to emotion terms. This chapter seeks to provide a resource for researchers aiming to understand how emotional expressions are typically studied across cultures, what the general findings in this area point to, and which open questions remain.