Multimodality, facial expression, and emotional language

Individuals convey emotional information using verbal as well as nonverbal channels (e.g., language, emotional expressions, posture, intonation, etc.). There is growing awareness among emotion researchers that understanding emotions expressed by others involves embodied processes. For instance, seeing somebody smiling elicits in the observer the automatic and unconscious tendency to smile (i.e., facial mimicry). Such spontaneous bodily processes are thought to facilitate, by means of the embodied experience, the access to other people’s emotions and, thus, emphatic understanding that in turn promotes a more positive social interaction. I will first review literature on mimicry processes. Then, I will review evidence showing the involvement of embodied processes in emotional language processing and provide evidence demonstrating that similar bodily reactions are also at play when emotions are conveyed by other nonverbal means such as posture and tone of voice. Taking an integrative approach, I will propose the commensurability between different modalities when processing emotional information focusing on verbal and nonverbal channels. Subsequently, I will discuss the relevance of these embodied processes in different aspects of cognition and interactions. Finally, I will draw some conclusions based on recent research on the possible relevance of this framework for bilingualism and discuss the potential implications for emotion communication in multilingual and multicultural contexts.

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