in communicating emotions. The roles of gestures and proximal behaviours are also significant. You must have seen how in Indian classical dances like Bharatanatyam, Odissi, Kuchipudi, Kathak and others, emotions are expressed with the help of movements of eyes, legs, and fingers. The dancers are trained rigorously in the grammar of body movement and non-verbal communication to express joy, sorrow, love, anger, and various other forms of emotional states.
The processes involved in emotions have been known to be influenced by culture. Current research has dealt more specifically with the issue of universality or culture specificity of emotions. Most of this research has been carried out on the facial expression of emotions as the face is open to easy observation, is relatively free from complexity and provides a link between subjective experience and overt expression of an emotion. Still it must be emphasised that emotions are conveyed not only via face.
A felt emotion may be communicated through other non-verbal channels as well, for example, gaze behaviour, gestures, paralanguage, and proximal behaviour. The emotional meaning conveyed via gestures (body language) varies from culture to culture. For example, in China, a handclap is an expression of worry or disappointment, and anger is expressed with laughter. Silence has also been found to convey different meanings for different cultures.
For example, in India, deep emotions are sometimes communicated via silence. This Fig. . : Sketches of Facial Expressions of Emotions Fear Anger Happy Sad freely, the North American subjects produced different responses for the facial expression of anger and different responses for the facial expression of contempt.
The Japanese produced varied emotional labels for facial expressions of happiness ( labels), anger ( labels), and disgust ( labels). Ancient Chinese literature cites seven emotions, namely, joy, anger, sadness, fear, love, dislike, and liking. Ancient Indian literature identifies eight such emotions, namely, love, mirth , energy , wonder , anger, grief , disgust, and fear. In Western literature, certain emotions like happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust are uniformly treated as basic to human beings.
Emotions like surprise, contempt, shame, and guilt are