Facial expressions of emotions do not only signal emotional states, but also provide information about the expresser’s traits and the situation in which the emotion was elicited. These inferences from emotion expression in turn occur within a socio-cultural framework in which information about the situation as well as socio-cultural rules, norms and expectations feed back onto both the recognition of expressions and the inferences drawn from them. In this talk, I will present the basic elements of a theoretical framework as well as empirical examples demonstrating this process.