As a reader, I like both. As a writer, I also like both. In real life, I like expressive people more, but that's largely because I'm from the South so emotionally expressive people are what I grew up with. We do not do the poker-faced thing here unless something is very, very, very wrong.
Which is, I think, one part of what's making me feel this question is... hmm, not quite a false dichotomy, but something of the wrong question? Emotional expression is a culturally loaded thing. In contemporary Western culture, for example -- and by this I mean particularly North American and British culture -- it is culturally taboo for men to publicly display any emotion save anger, and culturally allowed for women to express any emotion
except anger. Emotional display is coded as a feminine trait, weakness, a lack of control -- thus the frequent complaint that women are "too emotional" for this job or that -- except anger, which is masculine and therefore a show of strength, a way to
assert control. In other cultures this is
not true. We've had several Latino guys working for us, for example, who would voluntarily watch "chick flicks" and blubber unashamedly over the emotional bits. They were a little puzzled why the men of my family wouldn't. And I've seen that used to dismiss those cultures as lesser than British/American cultures, as irrational, unreasonable, illogical -- you know,
girly. Call it the Spock fallacy. "Too emotional" = weak.
Another problem is that it lumps all emotions together: the expressive character who's constantly throwing temper tantrums is a very different beast than the expressive character who's always happy and upbeat, or the passionate enthusiast, or the grief-stricken survivor. And... there's this assumption, which again has some culture background, that the expressive character has less self-control: that displaying emotion takes less effort than not displaying it. Sometimes that's true, but sometimes, not so much. There are a lot of women out there making themselves smile because a smiling woman is invisible, but a blank face is an uncomfortable threat.
So as a writer the interesting question isn't, for me, whether a character is emotive or stoic. It's
which emotions they'll show publicly and which privately and which they'd rather be dragged over hot coals than admit to having at all, and
why, and when, and how different that makes them from their peers.
In the end they're just different tools in the kit, different ways I can -- as Lakey said, way back there in the depths of 2019 -- draw out the attention and emotion from the reader that I want. A stoic character giving way to an emotional outburst or a loudly expressive character going quiet: either one is an equally powerful moment, handled correctly. It's the handling it correctly that's the
fun trick.