Reaction

Emotions are gestures used by both the player and non-playable characters, mainly villagers. The purpose of various emotions are to display or emphasize various moods or feelings of the user without the use of words or text.

Villagers' Emotions
Aside from expressing emotions when in conversation, villagers may also show an emotion when walking about town.
 * A dark purple cloud with a swirl means the villager is either sad, or is sick (indoors only).
 * An exclamation mark above a villager's head appears either when they are realizing something, or if not talking to anyone, wanting to talk to the player.
 * If steam is coming out of a villager's head, they're angry.
 * When they're singing, that means the villager is happy.
 * Villagers may also clap when a Player catches a rare fish or insect, or sometimes when fireworks go off in Wild World and City Folk. They react in shock if the Player catches a piece of trash instead.
 * Only in New Leaf sometimes villagers may show the 'thought' emotion and stop in place requesting they are not spoken to as they are too deep in thought.

Conversations with villagers and players sometime cause a villager's emotion to change from normal to happy, sad, or angry. Conversations can't be started if a villager is angry or sad - they will tell the player they don't feel like talking. In, Peppy villagers will sometimes cheer themselves up if they are feeling sad when you talk to them.

Learning Emotions
In Wild World, the player can get emotions from Dr. Shrunk in a random encounter with him when he is walking around their village.

In City Folk, Dr. Shrunk is found in the city's theater, where emotions can be learned for 800 Bells. He is sometimes replaced by Frillard, who teaches emotions unknown to Dr. Shrunk. A player can retain up to four emotions at a time. If a fifth emotion is to be learned, one of the previous four must be forgotten.

In New Leaf, Dr. Shrunk can be found in Club LOL every day, however, if the player visits him before the club's opening at 8 PM, he will offer to perform for the player in exchange for a Food item. Being a former stage comedian, Dr. Shrunk's performances consist of him telling a joke and demonstrating the related emotion for the player to learn. Upon learning an emotion, the player can access it for use from their joke book, which is given to them by Dr. Shrunk after his first performance.

Emotions
This is a list of emotions that can be learned and what they look like in-game.

Trivia

 * In word origin and usage, the word aggravation as an emotion is incorrect. "To aggravate" is to worsen, and it should not used as a substitution for "to annoy".