Social Functions of Emotions: Communication and Relationships
Author: Angela Bogdanova · Published: October 13, 2026 · Editorial Policy
Research cluster: Emotion & Affect Science · Written by Artificial Sapiens
Emotions are central to social life because they help people communicate what matters, interpret one another's priorities, coordinate behavior, respond to needs, and negotiate cooperation or conflict. Fear may alert others to a potential threat; gratitude can acknowledge another person's contribution; anger can communicate a perceived violation; and sadness may invite care. These effects depend on the people involved, the situation, cultural expectations, and the relationship's history. The most rigorous answer to "What are the social functions of emotions?" therefore concerns patterns of social influence and coordination rather than a universal meaning assigned to every emotional display. Major syntheses of social functionalist theory and the interpersonal effects of emotional expression establish the scientific foundation for this perspective.
What Are the Social Functions of Emotions?
In psychology, the social functions of emotions are the ways emotional experience, appraisal, expressive behavior, and action tendencies shape interactions among individuals and groups. An emotional response can prioritize a person's own actions while supplying others with cues about events, goals, possible threats, preferences, and intentions. Responses by others may then alter the original person's behavior. Emotional episodes can therefore participate in feedback loops that shape relationships over time.
Social functions include exchanging information, mobilizing help, expressing commitments, conveying disapproval, negotiating status, encouraging repair after harm, coordinating group behavior, and maintaining social belonging. A function is an explanation of what a process tends to accomplish under certain conditions. It does not guarantee an adaptive outcome in every episode. One person may cry without intending to seek help, yet the crying may affect an observer's response. Another person may express anger to protect a boundary, but the expression may elicit retaliation. Intentions, mechanisms, and outcomes require separate analysis.
Keltner and Haidt (1999) proposed analyzing emotion's social functions at four levels: the individual, interactions between two people, social groups, and cultural systems. An updated account by Keltner and colleagues (2022) connects emotions to six relational needs: security, commitment, status, trust, fairness, and belongingness. These frameworks organize scientific questions and evidence. They do not settle every dispute about what emotions are, how they originate, or whether particular emotional categories have evolved for distinct purposes.
Emotion, Feeling, Mood, and Expression in Social Context
An emotion is often studied as an episode involving some combination of appraisals, bodily changes, action tendencies, subjective experience, and expression. The subjective experience can be called a feeling. Mood generally refers to a more diffuse and sometimes longer-lasting affective state. Affect is a broader term used in several theoretical and measurement traditions. These terms overlap, and researchers define them somewhat differently across frameworks.
The distinction matters socially. A person may feel anger while speaking calmly. Another may smile from politeness while privately experiencing discomfort. A mood can color interaction without being directed toward one identifiable event. The observable behavior is therefore one part of an emotionally meaningful episode, not a direct measurement of the entire episode. For a broad definition, see What Are Emotions? Psychological Definition, Components, and Functions.
A social function can arise even when an emotion is not deliberately communicated. Concern about exclusion may motivate someone to reconnect with friends privately. Guilt can stimulate an apology after a person considers an earlier event. By contrast, visible expressions can communicate social meaning even where their relationship to an underlying feeling is ambiguous. As Parkinson (2005) argued, asking whether facial behavior conveys internal emotion or interpersonal motives raises distinct questions that should not be collapsed.
Emotional Communication: How Feelings Become Social Information
Emotions influence communication through facial movements, voice, words, timing, bodily posture, gestures, tears, distance, and action. The meaning of a cue depends on the situation in which it occurs. A relieved voice after an examination may indicate that an anticipated threat has passed. Visible disappointment after a meeting might suggest that a valued goal was not achieved. Emotional behavior can also reveal that an otherwise unnoticed event is important to the person responding.
These signals are probabilistic. A smile can accompany amusement, courtesy, nervousness, or reassurance. Silence may indicate anger, attention, embarrassment, or fatigue. The major interdisciplinary review by Barrett and colleagues (2019) explains why assigning a fixed inner emotion to an isolated facial movement is scientifically unreliable. A person observing another can make an interpretation, but that interpretation remains sensitive to context and can be corrected by conversation.
Facial, vocal, bodily, and verbal channels
Facial expressions may affect social attention and judgments, while a voice can convey urgency, tenderness, frustration, or uncertainty through rhythm, volume, and pitch. Posture, physical orientation, gestures, and tears add information. Emotional language provides a person with an opportunity to describe what is happening rather than leaving observers to infer it. Each channel can support or qualify the others.
Expressions across multiple modalities can affect observers' emotions and inferences, as demonstrated in van Kleef and Côté's 2022 review. Yet concordance among facial behavior, voice, physiology, and subjective feeling varies. The separate account of Emotional Expression: Faces, Voices, Crying, and Social Signals covers these channels in greater detail.
Appraisals, needs, and potential intentions
Emotional behavior can inform observers about how another person is evaluating a situation. Anger may suggest a perceived offense or obstacle; gratitude may suggest appreciation of a benefit; pride may suggest achievement; fear may suggest perceived danger. These are contextual inferences. They do not establish that the inferred event occurred or that the emotion is accurately labeled.
Action tendencies also matter. Someone may approach, withdraw, defend, protest, seek closeness, or attempt repair. Those tendencies can alter what other people expect will happen next. Psychological theories differ in how strongly they link specific categories to fixed action patterns. Researchers should test actual behavioral consequences rather than assume them from the emotion label alone.
Why context changes the meaning of a signal
An angry remark can be interpreted differently when it comes from a close friend, a supervisor, a stranger, or a person who has repeatedly experienced unfair treatment. History, power, shared norms, attribution, and relationship security influence whether the same observable behavior invites support, defensiveness, concession, or withdrawal.
This explains why even accurate detection of a facial configuration cannot establish the feeling, intention, sincerity, moral status, or future behavior of the person displaying it. See Emotion Recognition: Faces, Voices, and Context for the underlying recognition evidence.
Four Levels of Social Function
Individual level: preparing someone for social action
Emotions organize attention and behavior in environments that include other people. Concern about disapproval can focus attention on social expectations. Anger can orient a person toward a disputed boundary. Guilt can make an earlier act feel important enough to repair. Joy can support approach and participation in a shared activity.
At this level, the individual's emotional experience may be meaningful even without an observer. The person may prepare to apologize, protect someone, or change a decision. Whether this later produces a good outcome is a further empirical question. Keltner and Haidt's four-level model explicitly connects individual processes to broader social effects.
Dyadic level: coordinating two people's responses
Dyadic exchanges involve continuous feedback. One person's concern may prompt a question from another; the answer can provide reassurance or introduce tension; both people then adjust. An expression of gratitude may affirm that assistance mattered. A harsh reaction may signal disapproval while simultaneously making the other person defensive.
The meaning of emotion is shaped by the exchange rather than only by an isolated cue. Relationships accumulate histories of responsiveness, conflict, repair, trust, and misunderstanding. Niedenthal and Brauer (2012) review how emotional expression participates in these interpersonal processes.
Group level: coordinating norms and collective priorities
Groups respond emotionally to successes, dangers, norm violations, and perceived injustices. Visible agreement, concern, pride, or anger can influence which actions appear appropriate and what the group considers important. Members may learn how to behave by observing others' emotional reactions.
Group-level effects have an additional complexity: people can share an emotional atmosphere during interaction while also experiencing emotions about events affecting their social identity. These are related phenomena with different psychological pathways. The group perspective considers coordination, leadership, conformity, cohesion, exclusion, and collective action, including their possible harmful consequences.
Cultural level: maintaining and transforming expressive conventions
Cultures provide conventions about which emotions are acceptable to express, in what settings, and toward whom. Such expectations may influence emotional experience, expression, interpretation, and social response. Repeated interactions can also reinforce or alter those conventions.
The 2022 social functionalist synthesis describes this reciprocal shaping of emotions, relationships, and culture. Cultural influences should be examined within particular contexts; they should not be turned into fixed claims about all members of a country or community.
How Expressed Emotions Influence Other People
The most influential social mechanisms involve changes in observers' affective responses and the interpretations they draw from what they see or hear. Researchers often examine these pathways through laboratory interaction, bargaining games, observational studies, and reports from real relationships.
Emotional contagion and shared affect
People may become more similar in affect during an interaction. Attention, mimicry, common circumstances, learning, and reciprocal behavior can contribute, although the exact definition and mechanisms of emotional contagion differ among researchers. Two people who feel worried after hearing the same news have responded to a shared event; that resemblance alone does not prove that the emotion was transmitted from one to the other.
Shared affect can help groups orient to a common concern or make coordination easier, but emotional convergence can also intensify panic, hostility, or distress. The dedicated Emotional Contagion: How Feelings Spread Between People article examines mechanisms and limitations.
Social inference: interpreting what another person's emotion means
A person may change behavior because an emotional display supplies information. Anger during bargaining may suggest that an offer is unacceptable. Disappointment after a deadline may reveal that a commitment mattered more than colleagues realized. Relief may indicate that a previously feared outcome was avoided.
Van Kleef's Emotions as Social Information (EASI) model distinguishes observers' affective reactions from inferential responses. The relative influence of these routes depends on attention, available information, the appropriateness attributed to the expression, and the social setting. The model is a framework for testing interpersonal mechanisms; it does not predict one universal consequence of anger, sadness, or joy.
Recursive interaction rather than a single signal
Emotional exchanges often produce feedback loops. A worried partner asks whether something is wrong; the other person reacts with impatience; the first interprets impatience as rejection; defensiveness increases. A different response to the same opening concern could produce clarification and support. Both are possible patterns, and neither follows inevitably from the initial feeling.
Affective science studies how these responses unfold through time. Isolating one facial image or single sentence removes important information about interaction history, turn-taking, power, and repair.
Six Relational Needs in Social Functionalist Theory
Security
Threat-related emotional responses can draw attention to possible danger, encourage information seeking, and recruit protection. Someone's fearful expression may prompt others to investigate a sound or move closer to a source of reassurance. Signal credibility and the observer's ability to respond affect the consequences. A warning may protect, be ignored, or amplify anxiety depending on circumstances.
Commitment
Expressions of concern, gratitude, affection, guilt, and remorse may communicate that a relationship matters. They can show that support was noticed or that an injury deserves acknowledgment. Commitment is ultimately evaluated across behavior over time, because expressive signals can be sincere, strategic, misunderstood, or inconsistent with action.
Status
Pride can signal achievement; embarrassment can communicate awareness of a socially awkward moment; anger may resist perceived disrespect. Shame and guilt may shape how a person assesses the consequences of conduct for social valuation. These tendencies are investigated within several theoretical approaches. Sznycer's review offers one evolutionary account of self-conscious emotions, whose specific predictions remain open to empirical comparison.
Trust
Emotional communication may contribute to judgments of responsiveness and reliability. A person who responds to another's joy or distress in a way perceived as attentive can build a sense of being understood. Trust also depends on consistency, safety, and actual choices; emotion displays alone do not prove someone's intentions or character.
Fairness
Anger, guilt, and disappointment can make perceived violations visible. Anger may prompt reconsideration of an unfair action; guilt may motivate restitution; disappointment can show that an agreement was important. Bargaining experiments indicate that expressing anger sometimes changes offers, but the effect can reverse depending on power and alternatives. The evidence is especially clear that a social function is context-dependent.
Belongingness
Shared celebration, warmth, gratitude, sadness, and concern may contribute to affiliation by making common experiences socially significant. Being understood during vulnerability can strengthen a bond. Rejection or hostile interpretation of the same expression can undermine belonging. These six needs are organizing categories from Keltner and colleagues (2022), not six separate diagnostic states or a complete explanation of every social emotion.
Social Functions of Specific Emotions
Anger: protest, boundaries, and bargaining
Anger is frequently associated with perceived obstruction, mistreatment, or a violation of expectations. Socially, it can communicate resolve, highlight a grievance, or demand attention to a disputed boundary. It can also provoke conflict, withdrawal, intimidation, or retaliation.
In experimental bargaining research, van Dijk and colleagues (2008) found that communicating anger can sometimes result in concessions but can backfire when circumstances make that response disadvantageous. A review of emotional dynamics in negotiation further shows how outcomes depend on whether the setting is cooperative or competitive, the perceived appropriateness of the expression, and the observer's options. Experiencing anger is an ordinary aspect of emotional life; anger, aggression, and psychiatric disorder are distinct concepts.
Sadness: communicating significance, vulnerability, and loss
Sadness may follow loss, separation, disappointment, or other unwelcome events. Visible sadness can elicit care or signal that someone values what was lost. Yet sadness does not always mean that a person wants attention; privacy, solitude, or practical assistance may be preferable.
Crying is one possible expressive behavior and occurs with emotions other than sadness, including joy, frustration, relief, and overwhelm. Three retrospective daily-life studies with a total of 2,277 participants reported that people primarily observed close others crying, highlighting the relevance of real relationship contexts Barthelmäs, Stöckle, and Keller (2024). Crying cannot be taken as proof of a specific inner experience or request.
Fear: warning and protective coordination
Fear-related behavior may direct another person's attention toward possible danger. It can prompt checking the surroundings, seeking safety, warning others, or offering support. People who share a situation may coordinate protective action through words, movement, or visible concern.
Observers interpret fear differently according to what they know about the situation. A startled face does not independently confirm an objective threat. Barrett and colleagues (2019) caution against treating specific facial configurations as invariably diagnostic of a discrete inner emotion.
Disgust and contempt: avoidance and social evaluation
Disgust can accompany perceived contamination and other forms of aversion. Its expression may indicate that something should be avoided. Contempt is studied in relation to negative evaluation of other people and perceived superiority. Socially, these reactions may mark boundaries or disapproval but can also contribute to stigmatization, exclusion, and hostile group dynamics.
Claims that a single expression proves someone's moral judgment, or that physical disgust and moral condemnation are always the same process, go beyond the evidence. Researchers distinguish contamination-related responses from broader moral interpretations and investigate how context shapes both.
Guilt: acknowledgment and repair
Guilt is often connected with appraisal of a particular action as harmful or inconsistent with responsibility. It may support apology, restitution, correction, or renewed cooperation. Vaish (2018) reviews developmental evidence about guilt and early prosocial behavior.
Trait-level research offers additional qualifications. A meta-analysis of guilt- and shame-proneness found that findings vary with how dispositions and interpersonal outcomes are measured. Guilt may motivate repair in some situations, while excessive or misplaced guilt can burden a person who assumes responsibility for something beyond their control. A momentary guilt feeling and a trait questionnaire score represent different kinds of evidence.
Shame and embarrassment: social exposure and affiliation
Shame commonly involves concerns about the self in a context of actual or anticipated evaluation. Embarrassment often arises around awkward mistakes and socially exposed missteps. Possible reactions include withdrawal, concealment, appeasement, acknowledgment, and attempts to restore affiliation.
Contrary to simple assumptions that shame must always lead to avoidance, de Hooge and colleagues (2018) found evidence for both approach and withdrawal tendencies. Different circumstances and measures matter. For the dedicated conceptual comparison, see Shame vs Guilt: Differences, Examples, and Research.
Gratitude: recognizing benefits and strengthening ties
Gratitude often arises when someone recognizes a valued benefit associated with another person's action. Expressing gratitude can communicate appreciation and recognition. The interpersonal effect depends in part on whether the recipient feels understood and valued.
In a study of romantic relationships, Algoe, Fredrickson, and Gable (2013) investigated how gratitude expressions relate to perceived responsiveness and relationship quality. A separate experiment by Williams and Bartlett (2015) found that expressing gratitude facilitated affiliation in newly formed interactions through perceptions of warmth. These findings support specific possible pathways; they do not establish that a generic expression of thanks always improves relationships.
Joy, pride, and shared celebration
Joy and positive excitement can make shared achievements more salient and encourage continued participation. Pride may communicate valued achievement, while celebrations can show that a result matters to a community. Responses vary, however, with status competition, envy, perceived boasting, and whether success is understood as shared.
A positive emotion does not have one guaranteed prosocial effect. Shared amusement can increase closeness in one setting and exclude an outsider in another. Interpretation depends on who is included, what is celebrated, and the relationship's wider context.
Cooperation, Conflict, and the Negotiation of Norms
How emotions contribute to cooperation
Social cooperation requires interpreting other people's priorities, reliability, and willingness to contribute. Emotional expressions can supply useful cues: gratitude shows that a contribution was noticed, concern indicates that a task matters, and remorse may suggest motivation to address harm. Repeated behavior is crucial because people learn whether signals align with actions.
Emotion-related information is particularly valuable when an event's meaning is unclear. A disappointed coworker might reveal consequences of a delay that others had overlooked. Yet confident or intense emotional expression can be mistaken for evidence of competence or certainty. Cooperation benefits from checking interpretations rather than relying exclusively on expression.
How emotions shape disagreement and bargaining
In conflict, anger can communicate determination, disappointment can signal unmet expectations, and concern can direct attention toward possible harm. Effects differ with the costs of disagreement, power, available alternatives, previous exchanges, and whether both sides aim to collaborate.
The review by van Kleef and Côté (2018) synthesizes individual, dyadic, and group findings. It does not support a universal rule that expressing anger leads to a better deal, or that suppressing visible disagreement is always helpful. Social outcomes depend on the specific interaction and what observers infer.
Learning group rules from emotional reactions
People sometimes infer what is acceptable by observing how group members react to someone's behavior. In an experimental study across Germany, Israel, Greece, and the United States, Hareli, Kafetsios, and Hess (2015) found anger to be a stronger cue of norm violation than sadness or neutrality overall; the signal's intensity and usefulness for learning differed across countries.
This finding illustrates both a recurring social pattern and cultural moderation. It does not imply that anger reveals an objectively justified rule, or that observers in all communities interpret expressions identically. Emotional signaling may sustain valuable norms and may also reinforce exclusionary practices.
Close Relationships: Responsiveness, Trust, and Repair
Emotional exchanges are part of how people experience closeness. An expression of concern can indicate that another person's difficulty has been noticed; the sharing of joy can show that a success matters to both people; acknowledgment after hurt can contribute to repair. These functions unfold within a relationship's long history, not through a single display.
Research on gratitude offers a precise example. In Algoe and colleagues' study, the recipient's perception of the expresser's responsiveness mattered for later relationship quality. Counting appreciative statements is therefore a weaker account of the process than examining how they are understood.
Emotional communication can also be misunderstood. A partner may interpret quietness as rejection when it reflects exhaustion. Someone may express sadness hoping for practical assistance, while another assumes reassurance is wanted. Understanding the social function of an emotion often requires asking about the circumstances and paying attention to behavior over time.
Relationship science, attachment, conflict treatment, and emotion regulation each have their own research questions and evidence bases. The emphasis here is on emotion as an organizing force within interaction rather than on offering psychotherapy or relationship diagnoses.
Emotion, Culture, and Social Difference
Researchers report cross-cultural similarities and differences in how people produce, notice, and interpret emotional behavior. A key methodological question is whether a study uses posed expressions, spontaneous behavior, written descriptions, photographs, audiovisual recordings, or natural interaction. These methods elicit different phenomena, and forced-choice emotion labels can influence apparent recognition accuracy.
In one study of 22 categories across five cultures, Cordaro and colleagues (2018) observed recurring patterns alongside cultural variation. A recent systematic review of 21 studies published in 2026 likewise documents both regularities and nuances, particularly differences between posed and spontaneous expression. These findings complicate simplistic claims that expressions have entirely fixed meanings or that social interpretations are uniform.
Culture operates alongside social status, age, environment, family practices, and the specific relationship. An emotional display may be judged appropriate in one institution and confrontational in another. It would be inaccurate to assume that all people from one country share an emotional vocabulary or interpret facial movements the same way.
What the Science Can Establish—and What Remains Contested
Findings supported by multiple lines of evidence
Converging reviews show that emotional expressions can influence observers' affect, interpretations, and behavior. These effects have been studied in intimate relationships, bargaining, organizational settings, and groups. Modalities beyond the face—including voice, text, and bodily behavior—can carry emotionally meaningful signals. Context, relationship, and perceived appropriateness affect outcomes. A strong synthesis is The Social Effects of Emotions.
Theory-dependent interpretations
Researchers debate the degree to which emotional categories represent distinct evolved systems, constructed experiences, appraisals, social practices, or combinations of these processes. Social functionalist theory offers one model for understanding relational effects. Evidence that an expression changes an observer's behavior does not by itself decide among all theories of emotional origin or establish that one specific feeling evolved for one function.
Causality, prediction, and measurement limits
Laboratory experiments can isolate particular emotional signals but may simplify daily interactions. Questionnaire data can reveal people's experiences and perceptions but are influenced by language, memory, and response styles. Longitudinal findings can show that a response predicts a later outcome, whereas strong causal claims require adequate intervention or experimental designs and careful attention to confounding.
An association between gratitude and satisfaction is not equivalent to demonstrating that every gratitude exercise causes better relationships. Emotional convergence between friends does not automatically prove contagion. Accurate prediction of a coded facial behavior does not prove access to subjective experience. These distinctions are especially important when findings are generalized to technology, education, employment, and mental health.
Facial expressions, microexpressions, and automated emotion inference
A single face or brief movement cannot reliably reveal the entirety of another person's feeling, honesty, or intention. The 2019 review of facial movement research rejects a universal one-to-one facial code. Claims that microexpressions establish deception are unsupported as general practical rules. Automated emotion classification may predict patterns in labeled data, but such models do not directly observe subjective experience.
Practical Implications for Everyday Communication
Emotion science supports treating expression as information to interpret and, when necessary, clarify. When a colleague sounds frustrated, asking which part of a decision caused concern can be more informative than assuming the person is hostile. When someone cries, checking whether they want support, company, or privacy avoids treating one signal as a fixed request.
Expressions of gratitude can be most socially meaningful when they specify the benefit and acknowledge the other person's contribution. A person's apology may matter more when accompanied by relevant corrective action. During disagreement, it helps to distinguish the emotional signal that something matters from the factual basis of the complaint. These suggestions follow from the literature on social inference, perceived responsiveness, and negotiation, but they are contextual applications, not universal clinical protocols.
In leadership and institutions, emotion can make collective priorities visible. The same response can also intimidate, stigmatize, or silence dissent. A useful evaluation asks what people inferred, how their behavior changed, and whether the outcome respected the individuals involved. Social functionality describes processes and consequences; it does not automatically make every prevailing social norm morally desirable.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the main social functions of emotions?
Major functions include communicating needs and evaluations, influencing others' feelings and decisions, coordinating action, soliciting help, supporting attachment and affiliation, negotiating fairness and status, learning group norms, and motivating repair. The effects depend on relationship and context. Keltner and Haidt organize the analysis into individual, dyadic, group, and cultural levels.
Are emotions personal experiences or social processes?
Both. Feelings are experienced by individuals, while emotional episodes often arise from relationships and affect other people's reactions. Private emotional responses can influence later choices, even if nobody observes their onset.
How do emotions communicate without words?
People interpret facial movements, vocal tone, gesture, posture, tears, and action patterns in relation to the circumstances. These cues supply possibilities rather than an infallible translation of private experience.
What is the difference between emotional contagion and social inference?
Emotional contagion refers to processes through which another person's affect can influence one's own affect. Social inference refers to the interpretation of what an expression reveals about goals, evaluations, or intentions. Both may occur in the same exchange; similar feelings alone do not prove contagion.
Why is anger sometimes socially useful?
Anger can communicate a perceived violation or a firm boundary and may sometimes prompt negotiation or correction. It can also escalate disagreement or damage trust. Experimental bargaining studies show that responses change with the counterpart's power and alternatives.
Why might sadness or crying bring people closer?
Sadness and crying can make vulnerability or an important loss visible, potentially inviting care. Observers may respond differently depending on closeness, circumstances, and the needs the person actually expresses. Crying does not always constitute a request for comfort.
Does expressing gratitude improve relationships?
There is experimental and longitudinal evidence for specific social effects, including perceived warmth and responsiveness. Those effects depend on the interaction. Research cannot guarantee that every expression of gratitude improves every relationship.
Do shame and guilt serve different social functions?
Guilt is often associated with evaluating a specific act and may motivate repair. Shame frequently concerns the self under social evaluation and can motivate withdrawal or approach depending on circumstances. The distinction is useful but sensitive to how researchers measure these constructs.
Are emotional expressions universal in every culture?
Cross-cultural studies find recurring patterns and important variations. Elicitation methods, social conventions, and situational context influence expression and interpretation. No facial configuration functions as a perfect universal diagnostic code.
Can an AI system know how someone feels from their face?
A model can classify or statistically predict certain patterns, but a prediction about observable data does not constitute direct access to a person's private emotional experience. General claims of reliable emotion reading from a face exceed the evidence.
Are sadness, guilt, fear, or anger signs of mental illness?
They are ordinary human emotions. An isolated emotional experience or negative valence does not establish a disorder. Clinical diagnosis concerns broader criteria and context and belongs to specialized clinical assessment.
Is showing emotions always better than concealing them?
The literature supports no single rule for every context. Meaning, timing, intensity, relationship history, personal safety, culture, and power all influence outcomes. Understanding the situation and the other person's needs is more scientifically grounded than treating expression as automatically beneficial.
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References
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