Emotional expressions play an important role in coordinating social interaction. We review research on two critical processes that underlie such coordination: (1) perceiving emotions from emotion expressions and (2) drawing inferences from perceived emotions. Broad evidence indicates that (a) observers can accurately perceive emotions from a person's facial, bodily, vocal, verbal, and symbolic expressions and that such emotion perception is further informed by contextual information. Moreover, (b) observers draw consequential and contextualized inferences from these perceived emotions about the expresser, the situation, and the self. Thus, emotion expressions enable coordinated action by providing information that facilitates adaptive behavioral responses. We recommend that future studies investigate how people integrate information from different expressive modalities and how this affects consequential inferences.

情绪表达在协调社会交往中起着重要作用。我们回顾了对构成这种协调的两个关键过程的研究：（1）从情绪表达中感知情绪和（2）从感知情绪中得出推论。广泛的证据表明 (a) 观察者可以准确地从一个人的面部、身体、声音、语言和符号表达中感知情绪，并且这种情绪感知是由上下文信息进一步告知的。此外，（b）观察者从这些感知到的关于表达者、情境和自我的情绪中得出相应的和情境化的推论。因此，情绪表达通过提供促进适应性行为反应的信息来实现协调行动。