Emotional expression

Emotional expressions in psychology are observable verbal and nonverbal behaviors that communicate an internal emotional or affective state. Examples of emotional expression are facial movements such as smiling or scowling, or behaviors like crying or laughing. Emotional expressions can occur with or without self-awareness. Presumably, individuals have conscious control of their emotional expressions; however, they need not have conscious awareness of their emotional or affective state in order to express emotion.
Over the last 200 years, researchers have proposed different and often competing models explaining emotion and emotional expression, going all the way back to Charles Darwin. However, all theorists in emotion agree that all normal, functioning humans experience and express emotions with their voices, faces, and bodies. The expression of romantic feelings are shaped by cultural and social factors.

There are many different theories about the nature of emotion and the way that it is represented in the brain and body. Of the elements that distinguish between the theories of emotion, perhaps the most salient is differing perspectives on emotional expression. Some theories about emotion consider emotions to be biologically basic and stable across people and cultures. These are often called "basic emotion" perspectives because they view emotion as biologically basic. From this perspective, an individual's emotional expressions are sufficient to determine a person's internal, emotional state. If a person is smiling, he or she is happy. If a person is crying, he or she is sad. Each emotion has a consistent and specific pattern of expressions, and that pattern of responses is only expressed during that emotion and not during other emotions. Facial emotional expressions are particularly salient stimuli for transferring important nonverbal signals to others. For that reason, emotional expressions are the best direct indicators of affective attitudes and dispositions. There is growing evidence that brain regions generally engaged in the processing of emotional information are also activated during the processing of facial emotions.

Some theories of emotion take the stance that emotional expression is more flexible, and that there is a cognitive component to emotion. These theories account for the malleability in emotion by proposing that humans appraise situations and, depending on the result of their appraisal, different emotions and the corresponding expressions of emotion are triggered. The tendency to appraise certain situations as one emotion or another can vary by person and culture; however, appraisal models still maintain that there are basic responses that are specific and consistent to each emotion that humans feel.

...
Wikipedia