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 ŁÓDŹ
Studies in Language
Edited by
Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk

Editorial Board
Anthony McEnery (Lancaster University, England)
John Newman (University of Alberta, Canada)
Peter Roach (Reading University, England)
Hans Sauer (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany)
Gideon Toury (Tel Aviv University, Israel)

Vol. 27

PETER LANG
Frankfurt am Main · Berlin · Bern · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Warszawa · Wien
 Paul A. Wilson (ed.)

Dynamicity
in Emotion Concepts

PETER LANG
Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften
Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche
Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the
Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is
available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

ISSN 1437-5281
ISBN 978-3-631-63692-3 (Print)
ISBN 978-3-653-01466-2 (E-Book)
DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-01466-2

© Peter Lang GmbH

Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften
Frankfurt am Main 2012
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Table of Contents

Paul A. Wilson:
A Multi-disciplinary Approach to Emotion Research .......................................... 7

Theoretical Perspectives on Emotion

Paul A. Wilson and Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk:

The Nature of Emotions ...................................................................................... 13

Rainer Reisenzein and Martin Junge:

Language and Emotion from the Perspective of the Computational
Belief-Desire Theory of Emotion........................................................................ 37

Eva-Maria Engelen:
Meaning and Emotion ......................................................................................... 61

Larry A. Herzberg:
To Blend or to Compose: a Debate about Emotion Structure............................. 73

Heli Tissari:
Integrating Naming, Claiming and Story-Telling: Towards a Broader
Cognitive Linguistic Understanding of Emotion ................................................ 95

Svend Brinkmann and Peter Musaeus:

Emotions and the Moral Order .......................................................................... 123

Liam C. Kavanagh, Paula M. Niedenthal and Piotr Winkielman:

Embodied Simulation as Grounds for Emotion Concepts ................................ 139

Metaphor and Emotion

Zoltán Kövecses:
Emotion Concepts in Cultural Context: the Case of Happiness ....................... 159

Ayako Omori:
Conventional Metaphors for Antonymous Emotion Concepts ......................... 183

Mohammed S. Al-Hadlaq and Zouheir A. Maalej:

Conceptualization of Anger in Saudi and Tunisian Arabic Dialects ................ 205
6 Table of Contents

Cross-linguistic and Cross-cultural Influences on Emotion

Christie Napa Scollon and William Tov:

Cultural Similarities and Differences in the Conceptualization of Emotion .... 235

Anna Ogarkova, Cristina Soriano and Caroline Lehr:

Naming Feeling: Exploring the Equivalence of Emotion Terms in Five
European Languages ......................................................................................... 253

Mustafa Aksan and Yeşim Aksan:

To Emote a Feeling or to Feel an Emotion: a View from Turkish ................... 285

Cristina Casado-Lumbreras:
The Meaning of Emotions: a Cross-cultural Study of the Spanish, English,
Arabic and Japanese Languages ........................................................................ 305

Agnieszka Mikołajczuk:
A Cross-Linguistic Perspective (Polish versus English) on the Conceptuali-
zation of ‘Zadowolenie’ (Satisfaction / Being Glad, Contentment, Pleasure).. 333

Bilingual and Second Language Learning Perspectives on Emotion

W. Q. Elaine Perunovic and Mihailo Perunovic:

Language and Emotion: the Case of Bicultural Individuals ............................. 359

C. L. Caldwell-Harris, M. Staroselsky, S. Smashnaya and N. Vasilyeva:

Emotional Resonances of Bilinguals’ Two Languages Vary with Age of
Arrival: the Russian-English Bilingual Experience in the U.S. ........................ 373

New Directions

Paul A. Wilson:
Emotion, Approach-Avoidance Motivation, and Breadth of
Conceptual Scope ............................................................................................. 399

Contributors ....................................................................................................... 415

Index of Terms ................................................................................................. 421

A Multi-disciplinary Approach to Emotion Research

What is emotion? On the one hand this seems to be a very simple question, as
we all know what it means to feel anger, fear or happiness and react in ways that
typically correspond to these and a multitude of other emotions. However,
despite the great strides that have been made in our scientific understanding of
the various facets pertaining to the processes and structures associated with
emotional experience, a full understanding of the nature of emotion remains
elusive. It is clear that such an understanding requires a multi-disciplinary
approach covering a wide range of diverse perspectives. The broad, general aim
of this book is to present such perspectives in an attempt to address some of the
fundamental issues that have both theoretical and applied relevance to current
emotion research in the fields of psychology, philosophy and linguistics,
including the conceptual structure of emotion; the relationship between language
and emotion; cross-linguistic and cross-cultural influences on emotion; the
relationship between emotion and the philogenetic and ontogenetic development
of language; the role of emotions in the moral order of sociocultural systems;
embodiment and emotion concepts; emotion and conceptual integration or
blending; emotion and metaphor; emotion and bilingualism; and emotion and
second language learning. The volume includes eighteen chapters that have been
arranged into the following five thematic sections: “Theoretical Perspectives on
Emotion”, “Metaphor and Emotion”, “Cross-linguistic and Cross-cultural
Influences on Emotion”, “Bilingual and Second Language Learning
Perspectives on Emotion”, and “New Directions”. However, it is important to
bear in mind that for some of the chapters such demarcation is somewhat
misleading as it fails to acknowledge the diverse content that encompasses a
number of multi-disciplinary perspectives. In such cases it was the main
overriding topic that dictated inclusion in a certain section.
The first chapter in the theoretical section by Wilson and Lewandowska-
Tomaszczyk offers a broad overview of a number of issues that are central to
some of the most important areas of contemporary emotion research. It
comprises content that pertains to many of the issues that are addressed by other
chapters in the volume and in this sense serves as an introductory chapter. In the
next chapter, Reisenzein and Junge assess the relationship between language and
emotion on the basis of CBDTE, a computational (C) explication of the belief-
desire theory of emotion (BDTE). Engelen addresses two issues pertaining to
meaning and emotion: how a child learns emotion words and how these are
shaped over time into mature emotion concepts; and the personal significance of
emotions. Herzberg assesses whether the affective aspect of an object combines
with the object-identifying aspect (i.e., what the emotion is about or directed
towards) as “blenderists” claim, or if these two components, as
“componentialists” posit, are separable. Tissari applies the theories of mental
8 Paul A. Wilson

spaces and conceptual integration or blending (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002) to

the events, bodily and mental states, and actions of the main character
Moomintroll in the novel Mooominland Midwinter to illustrate the coherence in
people’s linguistic understanding of emotions. Brinkmann and Musaeus argue
for the importance of moral emotions (e.g., shame, guilt, sympathy, and
empathy), which become orientation guides in our local, moral worlds. In the
final chapter of the section, Kavanagh, Niedenthal and Winkielman provide a
comprehensive review of the evidence supporting an embodied simulation
account of emotion concepts.
In the first chapter of the metaphor and emotion section, Kövecses
demonstrates how the concept of happiness is shaped by different historical and
cultural contexts (“happiness as an immediate response”; “happiness as a value”;
happiness in the United States Declaration of Independence; and happiness in
the New Testament). Omori analyses the properties of antonymous emotion
concepts on the basis of metaphors retrieved from the British National Corpus.
The section closes with an analysis by Al-Hadlaq and Maalej of instances of
physiological and cultural embodiment in Saudi Arabic and Tunisian Arabic
expressions of anger.
The cross-linguistic and cross-cultural section opens with a comprehensive
review by Scollon and Tov of research revealing a wide range of cross-cultural
effects on emotion. Ogarkova, Soriano, and Lehr report on a situation-labelling
task that investigated how people of different linguistic and cultural
backgrounds (English, German, French, Spanish, and Russian) label different
emotional experiences pertaining to four emotion categories (anger, shame,
guilt, and pride). Aksan and Aksan investigate the extent to which Turkish
distinguishes between feeling (his) and emotion (duygu). Casado-Lumbreras
assesses the correspondence between the emotional experiences associated with
the Spanish concept emocionado and equivalents in English, Arabic and
Japanese. In the last chapter of the section, Mikołajczuk provides an analysis of
Polish zadowolenie and possible equivalents in English.
The bilingual and language learning section includes two papers. The first
contribution, by Perunovic and Perunovic, provides a comprehensive review of
the flexibility demonstrated by bilingual individuals as they switch their
emotional functioning between their respective languages and cultures. In the
second paper, Caldwell-Harris, Staroselsky, Smashnaya and Vasilyeva
investigate the effect of Age of Arrival (AoAr) on the perceived emotionality of
English (L2) in Russian immigrants in the United States.
In the final chapter I develop a further assessment of the issue that I raise in
Wilson and Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (this volume) regarding the relative
influence of emotion and approach-avoidance motivation on the strengthening
of associations between distant concepts.
 A Multi-disciplinary Approach to Emotion Research 9

By offering a multidisciplinary perspective we hope that the reader will

gain some measure of the complexity of the issues confronting contemporary
researchers in the field. In fact, the diverse range of disciplines represented in
the book reflects the complex nature of emotions. It is precisely such diversity
that needs to embraced if a full understanding is ever to be achieved. We hope
that our book will both provide an in-depth appreciation of how the various
issues that are addressed cohere and interact, and stimulate an interdisciplinary
exchange of thoughts, ideas, and methodologies. However, we do not claim that
our coverage is exhaustive - notable omissions include neurophysiology, and
cognition and emotion (including perception, attention, memory, and
categorisation). Nevertheless, we ultimately hope that the reader will gain a
greater understanding of emotions and how we conceptualise them.

Paul A. Wilson
University of Łódź

References

Fauconnier, G. and M. Turner (2002). The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the
Mind's Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.
THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
ON
EMOTION
The Nature of Emotions

Paul A. Wilson and Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk

Abstract:

The focus of this chapter is to introduce the concept of emotions and illuminate
it from philosophical and psychological (cognitive) perspectives. Secondly, we
will present the impact of cultural conditioning on the conceptualisation of
emotion. Thirdly, we will discuss the role of emotions in the rise of
metaphorical thinking. Our assessment of the role of emotion in the facilitation
of not only metaphor production but also blending extends this research to a
more fundamental level as the latter has been linked with the origin of language
(Fauconnier and Turner, 2008). Finally, an interrelationship between emotions
and language in the framework of the universalist-relativist debate will be
reconsidered and an operational definition of the concept of emotion put
forward.

Keywords:

Affect, approach-avoidance motivation, bilingualism, concepts, conceptuali-

sation, conceptual blending, conceptual integration, cross-cultural, cross-
linguistic, culture, emotion, Event Scenario, language, metaphor, relativism,
universalism.

1. Introduction

The picture that emerges from current research, including many chapters in the
present volume, is that emotion concepts are not fixed entities, but rather
dynamic structures that are moulded by contextual influences, such as culture,
language, socialisation and experience. To gain an understanding of the features
and operations that underpin this flexibility one needs to assess the key
characteristics of emotion concepts. Given the multi-faceted nature of emotion
concepts we attempt to shed light on some of these characteristics from a
number of theoretical perspectives. First, we assess the extent to which emotions
are conscious and the related issue of the degree to which emotions can be
controlled. We then present evidence showing the influence of language and
culture on emotion and speculate on whether certain emotions (e.g., moral
emotions (Brinkmann and Musaeus, this volume)) are influenced more than
14 Paul A. Wilson and Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk

those that have been identified as basic emotions (e.g., fear, anger, surprise,
sadness, and happiness). Our discussion of bilinguals centres on their ability to
switch emotional functioning between their respective cultures and languages,
which is a particularly clear demonstration of the dynamic nature of emotion
concepts. In the context of the universalist vs. relativist debate we identify
elements that comprise a common reference point, or terium comparationis,
between emotion concepts in various languages (cf. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk,
1998; Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, 1999). We then proceed to an assessment of
the role played by affective state in emotion concepts. More specifically, does
affective state facilitate the formation of an emotional experience? Also, does
emotional state facilitate the strengthening of associative links that are made
between distant concepts, blending, and metaphor production? We also highlight
the role of approach vs. avoidance motivation in this regard. This latter question
concerning blending is fundamental to the philogenetic development of
language as blending has been identified as a key ingredient in the origin of
language (Fauconnier and Turner, 2008). Next, we turn to a comparison between
emotion talk and emotional language. We then consider whether emotion
concepts should be classified as a type of abstract concept, or if they should be
viewed as a third separate class of concepts, in addition to abstract and concrete
concepts. Finally, we present a Prototypical Emotion Event Scenario of emotion
concepts.

2. The position of emotions in philosophy

Emotions were not the focus of philosophical attention in the early times of
antiquity. Philosophy has always been considered the study of reason. Since the
times Plato proposed his ideas concerning the tripartite soul, which consisted of
reason, spirit, and appetite, no separate compartment for emotion has been
acknowledged. Emotion was present in Plato’s model not as one of the main
components but rather as a link between the main parts. Aristotle’s master and
slave metaphor also views reason (master) as a dominant, controlling element
over emotion (slave). The inferior role of emotion, as “more primitive, less
intelligent, more bestial, less dependable, and more dangerous than reason” (de
Sousa, 2010: 100) put emotion in need of constant control by reason (see de
Sousa (2010: 100-105) for a discussion).

3. Consciousness, beliefs and emotions

Are emotions conscious? If we assume a phenomenological stance (see Dennet

(2007) for a discussion of the role of phenomenology in cognitive sciences), we
 The Nature of Emotions 15

would need to accept the assumption that introspection can give us reliable
access to our own meanings, i.e., mental states and dispositions. De Sousa
(2010) however argues that, in addition to the problems we have accessing
future (and past) events, we do not have adequate access to the meanings of our
current dispositions and beliefs, which is consistent with Putnam’s externalism
(1975), relegating meanings from one’s head. Putnam argues convincingly that
some parts of meanings are simply outside the referential knowledge of the
language user. Jackendoff (2010) reports findings which support the hypothesis
that much of our intelligence and sophisticated thought is not conscious.
Cognitive Linguistics tries to remedy the point Putnam makes by assuming a
‘folk’ or ‘naïve’ approach to one’s own mental representations, which seems to
correspond to – clearly cognitively-based – hierarchical knowledge structure
with its prototypical and peripheral category exemplars. However, contrary to
Putnam’s and other objectivist philosophical models, Cognitive Linguistics puts
forward a theory that meanings are mental entities and, in response to real world
stimuli, combine in larger conceptualisations. Conceptualisations are not static
entities, given and accepted. Rather, they are dynamic and subject to change,
conditioned by context that is largely conceived, and embrace new referential
knowledge and facts.
Cultural scripts also play a role in meaning conceptualisation. Cultural
scripts are conventions shared by the majority of the members of one culture
and, notwithstanding the fact as to whether these scripts are fully or only
partially activated in the language user’s mind, they impose a top-down frame of
reference in meaning conceptualisations as well as in emotion behaviour.
This can mean that what are considered conceptualisations of emotions are
partly approximations towards both conscious and subconscious mental states
and dispositions, cultural scripts and brain states. We can therefore endorse de
Souza’s (2010) proposal that “what emotions feel like cannot give us full access
to their nature. Emotions are also characteristically the most obviously
embodied of our mental states. Their manifestations are both mental and
physical…” and their form is shaped not only by the person’s individual
judgment but by philogenetic and ontogenetic histories of mankind and the
individual (p. 7).
If emotions are not fully subject to conscious thought, and, additionally, we
cannot make ourselves want something at will, ‘free-will’ cannot therefore be
considered synonymous with ‘unconstrained will’ (Wegner, 2002). Furthermore,
as instances of so-called voluntary behaviour show that some mental activity
concerning an execution of an action precedes consciousness (Haggard, 2005),
emotions cannot be fully controllable. Emotions can thus be controlled up to a
degree. The conditioning parameters are type of emotion (contentment seems
more readily controllable than love or hate), culture type (pride is felt differently
in different cultures), contextual parameters (prior experiences, expectations,