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JIMINY SELF-HELP HANDBOOK 13

Bodily expressions

There is evidence to suggest that numerous emotions, including pride, shame, anger, fear, and disgust
(e.g., de Gelder & van den Stock, 2011; Keltner, 1995; Tracy, Robins, & Schriber, 2009) can be
accurately deciphered from nonverbal bodily displays. Pride, for instance, is typically signaled by an
expanded chest, upward head tilt, and arms akimbo—either spread out from the body with hands on
hips or raised above the head with hands in fists (Tracy & Matsumoto, 2008; Tracy & Robins, 2004).
Past research has identified consistent bodily expressions for the emotions, joy and happiness, pride,
shame and embarrassment, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness (see Witkower & Tracy, 2018 for a
review). It is likely that bodily expressions of emotions are universal, as studies have shown
generalization across race and disparate cultures (Edelmann et al., 1989; Haidt & Keltner, 1999;Tracy
& Robins, 2008)

Speech

People use hundreds, if not thousands, of terms to express emotional states. In some cases, the words
that are used point directly to the emotion one is experiencing. For instance, the experience of fear
may be expressed by saying “I am afraid”. In other cases, figurative expressions are used, so that rather
than literally naming the emotional state one is in, one relies on metaphors or analogies to express his
or her subjective experience. In the English language, there are hundreds of linguistic expressions
commonly used to talk about emotions. For example, “trembling like a leaf”, “feeling trapped” and
“hitting rock bottom”. Obviously, in order to accurately decode emotion from language, one must
know the meaning of the words or expressions used to communicate an emotion. Obviously,
deciphering emotions in a non-native language is harder than doing so in one’s own language. In
addition to the verbal information in speech, emotions are also expressed by the non-verbal qualities
of speech, such as pitch, volume, and rate of speech.

These three characteristics of emotional expression (facial, bodily and verbal) operate together rather
than in isolation. For instance, focusing only on words to decode the emotion of another person is
unlikely to be accurate, given nonverbal cues modify, augment, illustrate, accentuate, and contradict
the words they accompany. The following table shows two examples of the integration of facial and
bodily expressions required to capture the full essence of an emotion.