Compositionality of empathy: a framework for decoding emotion expression and human communication

Empathy, language, and language’s principle of compositionality are foundational cognitive elements for human interaction, enabling us to communicate, express, and understand one another. Empathy helps interpret the emotions of others, language is the instrument to communicate them, while compositionality, a fundamental principle in language, refers to the way complex meanings arise from the combination of simpler elements, such as phonemes and their arrangements in words. Recent research shows that compositionality extends beyond linguistic structures to emotional displays – that is, facial and bodily features without a specific meaning combine to create specific emotions or emotion dimensions with complex meanings. This paper explores how empathy decodes compositional emotional expressions, offering a framework for understanding human communication. Using a feature-based approach, we investigate the relationship between emotional displays and empathetic responses. Results show face and body features conveying dominance (e.g., raised heads, smiling mouths) elicit empathy for positive emotions, while features expressive submissiveness (e.g., bowed heads, hands on the face) predict empathy for sadness. Additionally, combinations of dominant and submissive cues yield nuanced empathetic reactions, emphasizing the role of compositional signals in communication. Our findings reveal empathy’s role in decoding compositional emotional displays. Keywords: Empathy, Compositionality, Emotion expression, Emotion dimensions, Human communication.