Psychology of emotions: an integrative proposal to understand emotional expression

This study conducted a literature review of the main theories about emotional functioning: jamesian, psychoevolutionary, cognitive and social. Aiming on integrating the proposals, a model was developed, consisting of cognitive aspects in the evaluation of the eliciting event leading to possible reactions (subjective impression, expressed behavior and/or physiological changes) and feedback to appraisal. This model was used as the basis for presenting characteristics of emotional expressions, and six basic emotions were discussed (joy, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust and anger) focusing on their facial and cognitive expressive aspects. It concluded that an integrative approach to the emotional phenomenon could provide important information for psychologists' work.