The Expression of Emotion Philosophical, Psychological and Legal Perspectives

The Expression of Emotion collects cutting-edge essays on emotional expression written by leading philosophers, psychologists, and legal theorists. It highlights areas of interdisciplinary research interest, including facial expression, expressive action, and the role of both normativity and context in emotion perception. Whilst philosophical discussion of emotional expression has addressed the nature of expression and its relation to action theory, psychological work on the topic has focused on the specific mechanisms underpinning different facial expressions and their recognition. Further, work in both legal and political theory has had much to say about the normative role of emotional expressions, but would benefit from greater engagement with both psychological and philosophical research. In combining philosophical, psychological, and legal work on emotional expression, the present volume brings these distinct approaches into a productive conversation.

Introduction: emotional expression Joel Smith and Catharine Abell; Part I. Philosophical Perspectives: 1. Expressing, showing and representing Mitchell Green; 2. Emotions and their expressions James Sias and Dorit Bar-On; 3. Expressive actions Christopher Bennett; 4. Emotional expression, commitment, and joint value Bennett W. Helm; 5. Collective emotion and the function of expressive behaviour Carolyn Price; Part II. Psychological Perspectives: 6. Emotional expression Hyisung C. Hwang and David Matsumoto; 7. A skeptical look at faces as emotion signals James A. Russell; 8. Cultural specificities in the transmission and decoding of facial expressions of emotion Rachael E. Jack; 9. The impact of context on the perception of emotions Ursula Hess and Shlomo Hareli; 10. The truth is written all over your face! Involuntary aspects of emotional facial expressions Alysha Baker, Pamela J. Black and Stephen Porter; Part III. Legal Perspectives: 11. Regulating the expression of remorse and the building of moral communities Richard Weisman; 12. Share your grief but not your anger: victims and the expression of emotion in criminal justice Susan A. Bandes; 13. Performing anger to signal injustice: the expression of anger in victim impact statements Sarah Sorial; Index.

Catharine Abell is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Manchester. Her main research interests are in aesthetics, including the expression of emotion in art, depiction, fiction, genre and the nature of art. She was Co-Investigator on the AHRC Knowledge of Emotion project (2012–15).
Joel Smith is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Manchester. His main research interests are the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of psychology, and phenomenology, especially self-consciousness and the perception of others. He was the Principal Investigator of the AHRC Knowledge of Emotion project (2012–15), and is the author of Experiencing Phenomenology (2016).