One of the most emotionally powerful photographs in recent years is of a firefighter carrying the bleeding body of a toddler from the wreckage of the bombed federal building in Oklahoma City. Through the photo, we felt the anguish and despair of the people who loved that child, of the firefighter and other rescue workers who were carrying out the victims, and of all our fellow human beings who were affected by the tragedy. And we wanted to do something about it - to rush to the aid of the victims (as many people did), to find and punish the bomber, and to make sure that this sort of tragedy could never happen again. Our emotions tell us that the world is not as it should be and that we should do something about it. Imagine another image of children dancing and playing on a beach. We feel their exuberance, their joy, their sense of being alive, their connections with one another. We know through our feelings that the world is as it should be, that we should appreciate the perfection of that moment, and that we should try to sustain the kind of world that produces such joy and love.

When we sift through the complexities, we find that messages loaded with emotion have two essential meanings: a judgment of good or bad and an imperative to keep things as they are or to change things. This is the core of emotional theory, as described earlier. The two key components of the emotional process are appraising the situation (and the most basic appraisal is good/bad) and a tendency to act or refrain from action (Frijda et al., 1989). Anger stems from the judgment that something is wrong (often unjust) and that action should be taken to fix it. Love stems from the judgment that something is right and that action should be taken to sustain it. In two words: emotion orients us to the good and to the should: to things that we value and to things that we feel we ought to do.

The mere fact that we communicate emotion implies that emotion itself is both personal and social. If our feelings were entirely personal, with no shared meaning and no implications for others, there would be no need to communicate them. Emotions might help us as individuals to orient to important concerns and guide our actions, but they would not interest anybody else. At the opposite extreme, there would also be no need to communicate emotions if they were entirely social. If members of a community felt in unison, emotions would serve to orient the group to common concerns and to coordinate behavior, but there would be no individual variation from one member to another. But emotions are neither purely personal nor purely social; they are both. Through communication, our personal emotional experiences are made available to others in society, and at the same time, social expectations about emotion are made known to us as individuals. Communication is a way of bridging the gap between the personal and the social sides of emotion.

The process of communicating emotions is deeply personal in several senses of the word. It is personal in the sense that the emotions define us as individuals with configurations of feelings that are unique – like fingerprints. Emotional communication is also commonly expressed physically and thus is closely linked to the body, the ultimate locus of the personal self. Emotion is also personal in the sense of being private. Often our feelings are difficult, if not impossible, to communicate fully and may be too sensitive to expose to anyone else. And emotional communication is personal in the sense that revealing our deepest feelings to others is considered an intimate act.

When we experience a strong emotion such as overwhelming joy, sadness, or anger, we often feel an urge to “let it out” or communicate it to others. Just the opposite may be the case with shame, regret, or the overwhelming flood of emotions that result from traumas. Then it may be too painful or futile to communicate our feelings with others. The question then arises: Is it better to let it out or to keep it to yourself? Which will make you feel and function better, both in the short run and in the long run? If you do decide to communicate your feelings, what are helpful and unhelpful ways to do it? And even if it is helpful for you to unburden yourself, does it benefit the person who takes on your burden or improve your relationship with each other?

To appeal again to the weaving metaphor used throughout this book, we might ask whether the act of weaving a fabric colored with feelings is in itself therapeutic. Beyond that, does the therapeutic value of weaving an emotional message depend on what is woven, how, and under what conditions? Is it important to construct a coherent pattern or is merely communicating enough? Does the therapeutic value of weaving also depend on how others respond to your weaving and their contributions to the process?

Emotional Meaning Influences Physical Health

One reason we may be inclined to express our emotions is that suppressing them seems to take a physical and psychological toll. There is evidence that people who have not come to terms with trauma and the intense emotions that often accompany it are at risk for physical and mental problems, and conversely, that people who communicate about their emotions reduce that risk. Two programs of research in particular are striking examples.

Few people want to take the audacious step of speculating on what our emotional lives will be like in the future, and justifiably so. For one thing, you have to admit your social constructionist tendencies to believe that our emotional futures will vary one whit from the past. If emotion is predetermined in our genes, our emotional tomorrows will be very much like our emotional yesterdays, with change measured not over centuries or millennia but over centuries of millennia. Research on the history of emotion has convinced me, however, that this just isn't so. Earlier time periods, even measured in decades, show emotional profiles different from the ones we have now, and we have no reason to believe ours will hold still for the next generation.

Nevertheless, believing that emotional meaning will change tells us nothing about how it will change. The truth of the matter is – nobody knows. Historians, I believe, give us better-informed speculations than others, but they are inclined to limit their speculations to changes that can be glimpsed now. They are also very clear that the one thing we know with certainty from the history of emotion is that we cannot predict anything with certainty. All manner of unforeseen events, technological and cultural developments, changes in demographic patterns, and sheer human serendipity influence the course of history in unpredictable ways. The history of emotion is no exception (Stearns, 1994).

I still believe that knowing that we are probably wrong in our speculation is no reason to refrain from speculating, if for no other reason than that it makes us examine the here-and-now more closely and more critically. Perhaps the trends we see now will be magnified in the future or perhaps they will disappear; we cannot know. We do know, however, that now is the only time we can do anything about them, and if we have learned anything from this book (both you and I), it is that we can do something about them both individually and collectively. We can be emotionally creative by paying attention to our feelings, by cultivating certain habits of thought, and by encouraging desired emotional stances in others as well as ourselves.

In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872, Darwin opened a dialogue among scholars about the dual nature of emotional expression and communication that continues to this day. Darwin wrote about the expression of emotion, which captures the sense of emotion “pressing out” through the face, voice, and body. Expression is an integral part of emotion itself and happens whether we like it or not, whether we are alone or with others. It reveals our genuine or real feelings and gives others a transparent window into our hearts. Expression is founded in our genes and is directly available to others of the same species.

It took over a century for another scholar to write a book called The Communication of Emotion. Buck (1984) argued that not only do we express emotion spontaneously, but we also communicate emotion to others symbolically and strategically. Communication, as opposed to expression, is separable from the feelings themselves, happens if we intend it to happen, and is sensitive to audiences and situations. Communication can reveal either genuine or false feelings and can be a clear or distorted window into other people's hearts. Communication is founded in individual intention and in society, and communicating emotion is goal-oriented and strategic.

In this chapter, we look at emotion messages both as expression and as communication, blurring the distinction and exploring the vast gray area between them. In earlier chapters, we used the metaphor of weaving a fabric for the process of communicating emotion. Social life was the fabric, communication was the act of weaving, and emotions were the colors that enlivened it and created meaning.

Are we all humans who can understand each other's hearts in ways that transcend our differences, or are our emotions so strongly shaped by our personal, cultural, and historical circumstances that we can never grasp the feelings of strangers? Stated in everyday terms, can a North American understand the liget that the Ilongot (of the Philippines) feel, and can an Ilongot understand North American anger? Can we read The Odyssey and understand the Homeric “spirit of battle” or look at the sorrow on the faces in a 14th-century Flemish painting and grasp the meaning of those expressions for the painter and for all the people who have looked at it over the centuries? Do people from different cultures have the same repertoire of emotions? These are profound questions because they address our ability to transcend our own limited life experiences and to learn from others who are different from ourselves, as the chapter-opening quotation implies.

Cross-cultural and transhistorical emotional understanding also has significant practical consequences. These days we find ourselves communicating with a much wider range of people than we did before the mass media, the Internet, and the jet plane connected people in a global web of messages. In the past (and still in many places now), you could live your entire life communicating almost exclusively with people like yourself. You had no access to and probably no interest in writings from long ago (except for holy texts that were interpreted for you). Now that situation has changed dramatically for many people. You may find yourself trying to make a joke during a lecture in Spain, only to have it embarrass everyone (Iglesias, 1996).

What role does emotion play in everyday talk? One view is this: You're having a perfectly normal conversation, and everything goes along just fine until some emotion disrupts things. You're talking about work with a friend and you happen to mention a sensitive topic (such as how he just lost his job), and he gets upset. He says something insulting to you (such as how you don't really deserve yours), and you have a hard time maintaining your composure. Another person enters the room and tells you that he has been offered a job (though one you know is not very good). He is thrilled. Talk to him? Forget it. There is no way you can carry on a rational conversation now. He is too emotional.

As Cochran and Claspell (1987: 2) say: “Emotion lurks about upsetting well-ordered lives, disrupting rationality, and dividing a person with paltry and degenerate demands.… An emotion is a commotion.” Most of the time we are free of emotion; it rarely occurs in everyday conversation, and blessedly so. When an emotion does occur such as when one person yells at another, someone “breaks down” in tears, or laughs “hysterically,” it is a BIG DEAL! “Tears are stupid, tears are childish, tears are a sign of weakness, important people don't cry, clever people don't cry” (Carmichael, 1991: 186). Normal patterns of interaction stop when emotion erupts, and everyone responds one way or another. We may confront the feelings, try to cope with them, or try to pretend that they didn't happen (as we do with many social disruptions). What we are unlikely to do, however, is to take the emotion into account and continue to talk, make decisions, and go about our business.

Yet there is another view of the role that emotion plays in everyday conversation. Emotion is what gives communication life. A conversation between emotionally involved partners is bright and lively, but a meeting without feeling is deadly dull.

With a burst of new interest, scholars in the social sciences and the humanities are talking about emotion, and the public is joining in. There are several reasons. Sheer intellectual curiosity compels us to try to understand whatever is mysterious, and emotions are mysterious to most people. They are complicated physical, mental, social, moral, and cultural phenomena that provide new frontiers for human understanding. Feelings may be especially mysterious to many middle-class European Americans (academics in particular) because suppression has become something of a way of life (Stearns, 1994). Emotions have been ignored, denigrated, and cut off from the rest of social experience in much of the Western philosophical tradition (Solomon, 1993). They are viewed as beastly, infantile, crazy things that must be controlled for society to operate smoothly and rationally, or so everyday talk and practices suggest. Academic investigation, however, is all about challenging accepted truths and opening up new possibilities. As Woodward (1996: 774) puts it: “Scholars in the humanities and social sciences have been working assiduously to rescue the emotions from cultural contempt.”

The world is also forcing us to come to terms with emotion. Carmichael (1991: 185-186) writes that “This century, more than any other in human history, has brought us a terrifying awareness of the dark and evil capacities of human nature.– It has been the realization that rationality and reason have failed that shocked us.” Today's papers have news about massacres in Mexico and Algeria; not long ago they were in Bosnia, Rwanda, and El Salvador. Emotional problems surround us – road rage, epidemic levels of depression, homicidal jealousy, suicidal love, and genocidal hatred and fear. Rationality does not seem to be an effective antidote, so perhaps the solution lies in understanding emotion on its own terms.

Emotions need to be recognized and respected in everyday talk and interaction because emotion is meaningful and meaning is emotional, whether we like it or not. By emotional meaning, I do not mean the kind of abstract, derived meaning that we find in dictionaries, but the meaning by which people live their lives.

At first glance, communicating emotion seems easy. Foreigners, small children, and dogs seem to have no trouble picking up on fear or sadness (Plutchik, 1987; Thompson, 1987). Sometimes it takes only a quick look, a few words, or a subtle quality of the voice. But not all emotions are that simple or easy to communicate. How do you convey the emotions of the experience of childbirth or of being a prisoner of war? Simple words, tears, or screams fail. Even poetry does not quite seem to capture it. Even someone who has been through the same experience cannot fully understand yours. So emotion appears to be both easily expressed and inexpressible.

When you express your anger, I know what anger is, you know what anger is, and we communicate in ways that are standardized enough for me to know that you're expressing anger and not, for example, fear. Yet at the same time, your anger draws on your lifetime of experience, on your concerns, and on your goals, in ways that I cannot understand fully because I am not you. Thus the paradox. Notice that in setting up the paradox, I have introduced two theoretical perspectives on communication. The first is what we will call here communication as exchanging messages, and the second is communication as coordinating meaning.

Communication as Exchanging Messages

“If we could only communicate” is often heard, as if communication itself could fix all manner of problems. Or ''We have a breakdown in communication' as if a telephone line were down and all that is needed is for the line to be spliced back together again. This sort of everyday talk reflects a message exchange perspective on communication, or, put more crudely, a boxcar theory (Shannon & Weaver, 1949). According to this type of theory, information is loaded into a boxcar (encoded), sent on its way on some track (channel), and unloaded at the other end (decoded). If someone takes the trouble to send a message, things go fine so long as the track remains undamaged and free of obstructions (noise).