Abstract
I first distinguish between five ways to express emotions: through involuntary muskoskeletal displays, through involuntary autonomic displays, through intentional bodily displays, through instrumental actions and through displaced actions. I then summarize my Theory of Affective Pragmatics (TAP), introduced in Scarantino (Psychol Inq 28(2–3):165–185, 2017a), and explain how it applies to these five domains of emotional expressions. The take-home message of my chapter is that emotional expressions, whether they are involuntarily expressed by means of bodily movements or intentionally expressed through speech acts, are a means of manifesting what’s inside, representing what the world is like, directing other people’s behavior, and committing to future courses of action. Since these are the main illocutionary acts made possible by language, TAP draws a key analogy between what can be said about the world and what can be shown about the world.
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Notes
- 1.
As I discuss later in the chapter, conventions are not strictly necessary for the production of non-natural meaning, although they are commonly used to convey it.
- 2.
- 3.
Note how this approach turns Ekman’s approach on its head by suggesting that manifesting an emotion counts as an emotional expression only if it is an intentional act (Ekman assumed that an emotional expression must be involuntary).
- 4.
I want to thank Shlomo Hareli and Ursula Hess for raising the issue of perceived emotion intensity as a factor that contributes to determining the effects of perceiving emotional expressions.
- 5.
I would argue this is also true of showing – e.g. one can show disappointment without being disappointed, for instance to gain the upper hand in a negotiation – but I won’t make the case for it here.
- 6.
Green (2007) considers the case of expressions that are “allowed without being willed.” These would be expressions that I could inhibit from the get-go if I wanted to, but decide not to inhibit, thereby allowing them. In practical terms, it is very hard to distinguish this case from that of expressions that occur involuntarily and can be inhibited within milliseconds. For the purposes of this chapter, I consider these “allowed but not willed” expressions to be involuntary, understanding involuntary emotional expressions broadly enough to include all emotional expressions that are not willed.
- 7.
This category includes some of what Fridlund (1994, p. 100) has called facial reflexes, which include “superficial reflexes…of the skin and mucous membranes” (e.g. sneezing), “visceral reflexes…of the eyes and eyelids…and facial-cardiac reflexes (e.g. pupillary dilation) and “myotatic reflexes…of the bony joints” (e.g. jaw closure). When such facial reflexes carry information about emotions, they express them on my account.
- 8.
Ekman (1999b) has argued that natural expressions and their posed counterparts manifest subtle morphological differences. He has suggested that the best example of such differences concerns Duchenne smiles, which are involuntary expressions of happiness different in kind from the polite smiles one voluntarily produces to convey friendliness. The jury is still out on whether these subtle morphological differences actually exist and, if they do, how common they are (see Martin et al. 2017).
- 9.
On the view I am proposing, striking an opponent is an expression of anger in the same sense in which frowning is an expression of anger: it provides information that the agent is angry. But since frowning comes before striking, its communicative effects can be different (e.g. the recipient may change its behavior upon noticing a frown so as to prevent an actual strike).
- 10.
Ekman referred to some of these “flavoring” features not as expressions, which he assumed must be involuntary, but as conversational signals , namely, movements that “accent, underline, or provide syntax” for linguistic utterances, such as conversation regulators (e.g., nodding to signal understanding) and conversation illustrators (e.g., raising one’s brow to emphasize the word “Where?” as we keep searching for something our partner keeps telling us is nearby; Ekman and Friesen 1969). Fridlund (1994) has discussed some of these bodily changes under the heading of paralanguage, a category including all bodily changes “accompanying and supplementing speech.”
- 11.
Searle’s term of choice for what I propose to label Proclamatives is Declarations. I have rejected this terminology for reasons I explain in Scarantino (2017a).
- 12.
In a previous manuscript circulated among several readers and cited by some (Glazer 2016), I used a different Austin-inspired terminology, speaking of expressive acts, illemotional acts and peremotional acts. I find the current terminology more felicitous.
- 13.
EE stands for Emotional Expression.
- 14.
I will not discuss whether there exist analogs of linguistic Proclamatives (“You are now husband and wife”), which are the hardest illocutionary acts to find analogs for among emotional expressions due to the lack of extra-linguistic institutions that allow for “doing by showing” the way they allow for “doing by saying”.
- 15.
There is debate concerning the definition of speech act. On some ways to understand speech acts, what I call acts of overt communication like making a posed “anger face” in order to make a recipient infer that one is afraid while making one’s intention also manifest still qualify as speech acts (see Green 2007, Wharton 2009 for further discussion).
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Acknowledgements
I want to thank Ursula Hess, Shlomo Hareli, and Eddy Nahmias for useful feedback on a previous draft, and Richard Moore for discussions on Grice’s requirements for communication.
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Scarantino, A. (2019). Affective Pragmatics Extended: From Natural to Overt Expressions of Emotions. In: Hess, U., Hareli, S. (eds) The Social Nature of Emotion Expression . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32968-6_4
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