Within the study of human facial displays, there has been considerable interest in their relationship to emotion. There is, however, an emerging view that emphasizes the social nature and communicative functions of facial displays. This approach begins with the assumption that facial displays are expressive to another person rather than expressive of an underlying state. Instead of examining facial displays as a route into psychological processes, they are followed outward into the social interaction. In this approach, facial displays are analyzed in terms of the messages they convey to others in communicative situations. The display may convey a message by itself (e.g., a smile) or work in conjunction with other communicative acts (e.g., words, gestures, intonation) to convey a more complex message.

In this chapter, I have attempted to bring together the models and empirical data for a social communicative view of human facial displays. In the first section, the differences between the Emotional Expression Approach and the Social Communicative Approach are presented. In the next two sections, empirical studies that approached the study of facial displays from the Social Communicative Perspective are discussed. Although we are far from fully understanding how facial displays function as communicative acts, there are two themes that have received considerable attention: (1) the influence of sender–receiver variables (e.g., eye contact), and (2) the communicative functions of facial displays. In the final section, the implications of this approach are addressed and directions for future investigations are suggested. Readers who are interested in how facial movement conveys meaning in dialogue are referred to chapter 15, by Bavelas and Chovil, this volume.