There is a range of emotional states that lies in the hidden recesses of our psyche. These states are both spontaneously and strategically expressed through body language and facial expression. Though the rules governing emotional displays and the situations that elicit them vary from place to place, these displays themselves have been found to be remarkably similar around the world. Masks frequently are designed to convey and exaggerate these emotional displays, accommodating every shade of human emotion, however appealing or grotesque. Love and hate, anger and fury, joy and sadness, fear and disgust, feelings of ebullience and heroism, sublime beatitude and peace – and transitional expressions that combine such primary emotional displays – have all been vividly represented through masks. Although the whole body language changes and transforms during intense emotional experience, the face is the prime locus of involuntary responses and mirrors the intensity of our experience. Thus, drooping eyelids and mouth give a vulnerable look of sadness; steaming anger and fury is expressed by a glaring eyes, a flushed face, and crinkled brow; a smiling countenance and wide gaping mouth are signs of joy and ebullience; meditative eyes and an unperturbed mouth may indicate a state of equanimity. Masks stylize these emotional displays, and, in the process, aid in the creation of characters and typologies.

Emotive masks tend to reveal the other face of our hidden identity. It has often been observed that donning such masks affects the wearer’s inner nature; both the wearer and the viewer are encouraged to empathetically meet the overtly represented emotion with a corresponding internal state.

Theatrical performances work subtly upon the emotional state of the viewers. It is said that the heart of the viewer is like a “dry wood charged by latent fire of emotions,” it only needs to be kindled by the performance. Bharatamuni’s Natyashastra (perhaps written around the 1st Century CE) is perhaps the only known ancient treatise that attempts a categorization of bhava, or emotional displays and the categories presented there have by and large been confirmed by recent researchers, often without knowledge of this work. The eight “stable” emotional states named are: love (rati), mirth (hasa), sorrow (shoka), anger (krodha), energy (utsaha), fear (bhaya), disgust (jugupsa), and wonderment (vismaya). Any of these emotional displays, working through association with the viewer’s own awakened memories of being caught up in such an emotional state, may elicit the taste (rasa) of that remembrance. Thus, the emotional state of love has its correspondence in the erotic sentiment (shringara-rasa); mirth in the comic sentiment (hasya-rasa); sorrow in the pathetic sentiment (karuna-rasa); anger in the furious sentiment (rudra-rasa); energy in the heroic sentiment (vira-rasa); fear in the terrified sentiment (bhayanaka-rasa); disgust in the odious sentiment (bhibhatsa-rasa); astonishment and wonder in the sense of the marvelous (adbhuta-rasa). Several centuries late, a commentator named Abhinavagupta added a 9th sentiment, peaceful equanimity (shanta-rasa), to this list, affirming it to be the ultimate goal of a theatrical presentation. Many masks representing human beings – and not a few representing gods and animals – may be productively viewed in relation to this schema, the masks of Seraikella Chhau of northeast India providing one excellent set of examples.