Emotional Meaning and Expression in Animated Faces

Abstract

This paper shows that emotional information conveyed by facial expression is often contained not only in the expression of emotions per se, but also in other communicative signals, namely the performatives of communicative acts. An analysis is provided of the performatives of suggesting, warning, ordering, imploring, approving and praising, both on the side of their cognitive structure and on the side of their facial expression, and it is shown that the meaning and the expression of emotions like sadness, anger, worrying, uncertainty, happiness and surprise are contained in them. We also show that a common core of meaning is present in an emotion (surprise) as well as in other kinds of communicative signals (emphasis, back channel of doubt, adversative signals). We then argue on how the cognitive and expressive analyses of these communicative acts may be applied in the construction of expressive animated faces.