Affective Pragmatics Extended: From Natural to Overt Expressions of Emotions

I first distinguish between five ways to express emotions: through involuntary muskoskeletal displays, through involuntary autonomic displays, through intentional bodily displays, through instrumental actions and through displaced actions. I then summarize my Theory of Affective Pragmatics (TAP), introduced in Scarantino (Psychol Inq 28(2–3):165–185, 2017a), and explain how it applies to these five domains of emotional expressions. The take-home message of my chapter is that emotional expressions, whether they are involuntarily expressed by means of bodily movements or intentionally expressed through speech acts, are a means of manifesting what’s inside, representing what the world is like, directing other people’s behavior, and committing to future courses of action. Since these are the main illocutionary acts made possible by language, TAP draws a key analogy between what can be said about the world and what can be shown about the world.