Individual ability to communicate emotional states through nonverbal movements and gestures.
Emotional expressiveness can be defined as individual ability to communicate emotional states through nonverbal movements and gestures, including through the face (Friedman et al. 1980a; R. E. Riggio 1986). Emotional expressiveness has been a construct of interest to natural scientists since Charles Darwin and to psychology since at least William James. Capturing the essence and meaning of human emotions, and our communication of emotions to each other, has been a challenge to scholars for hundreds of years. Nonverbal emotional expressiveness has been considered extensively by psychologists, biologists, animal behaviorists, communications scholars, anthropologists, philosophers, artists, and scholars from a variety of other disciplines. Social scientists and others have attempted to.
