Knowledge of Emotion: Expression and Social Cognition

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It is important to know the emotional state of those around us. We need to know how others are feeling to assess their sincerity and to act rightly with respect to them. Attributions of emotional states to others play a crucial role in our social lives. Consequently, it is crucial to be able to distinguish those emotion attributions that qualify as knowledge from those that do not. We usually attribute emotions to others on the basis of their expressions of emotion. The overarching aim of this project is to explain how emotional expression can enable us to know the emotions of others. This will require an understanding of the nature both of emotional expression and of the various emotional phenomena that can be expressed. Consequently, we will identify the variety of different expressible emotional phenomena (such as feelings, emotional dispositions, moods, and emotional character traits), and the variety of means by which they can be expressed (for example, through facial expressions, vocalisations and other actions and bodily movements). We will then determine the rational grounds in virtue of which expression-based attributions of emotion constitute knowledge. In doing so, we will distinguish emotion attributions based on 'in the flesh' perception of emotional expressions from emotion attributions based on the perception of both static and dynamic images and audio recordings of emotional expressions. We will investigate whether, and how, the rational grounds of expression-based emotion attributions vary across different representational media and 'in the flesh' perception. The project will bring together researchers in a number of fields (social cognition, the emotions, expression) and across disciplines (philosophy, psychology, law). It will benefit academic research in philosophy, most notably in the areas of social cognition and epistemology, which have tended to focus on the rational grounds of belief attributions, by elucidating the rational grounds of emotion attributions, thus broadening our understanding of how we can come to know the mental states of others. It also has potential implications for experimental design in psychology. By elucidating the differences between the rational grounds for emotion attributions based on 'in the flesh' perception of emotional expressions, and the rational grounds of emotion attributions based on the perception of images, it will illuminate the broader implications of experiments about emotion attribution conducted using images representing emotional expressions. Beyond academia, the project has important implications for legal practice. Legal decisions are frequently influenced by judgments about the emotions of others. For example, knowledge of defendants' emotional states can be crucial to determining both whether or not they have committed a crime - as with hate crimes - and to determining the extent of their responsibility for crimes they have committed - as with crimes of passion. By elucidating the requirements for knowledge of the emotions of others, the project has the capacity to affect how legal decisions are made. Furthermore, by clarifying when, and how, we know what emotion another is expressing, the project will assist our understanding of the expression of emotion in different artistic media, and is thus of potential value to both practitioners and consumers of the visual arts.