I am interested in emotion language, in metaphor, and in the interaction between the two. I use comparative cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approaches to study them. I have experience with surveys, corpus-based and experimental methodologies. You can read more about my interests and work in the research lines below.
Keywords:
language – emotion – metaphor – cross-cultural comparison – experimental methods
EMOTION WORDS. I am interested in the meaning of emotion words across languages and cultures. Most of my research in this area has been done in the framework of the GRID project, in collaboration with psychologists Klaus Scherer and Johnny Fontaine, and a large number of international collaborators throughout the years. We use a questionnaire based on component theories of emotion to ask native speakers of many languages around the world about the meaning of emotion words in their language. The first results of this big project were reported in our book Components of Emotional Meaning. Other analyses regarding specific emotion concepts (1, 2) or the dimensionality of the affective space (3, 4) have been published too. New tools have been developed (5) and spin-off studies about specific emotion types took place looking at the meaning of different types of anger (6), or emotion words in achievement contexts (i.e. contexts involving success or failure) (7, 8)
EMOTION METAPHORS. I study the metaphors we use to represent affective experience. This work fits within the area of conceptual metaphor research in cognitive linguistics. After a PhD on the metaphorical conceptualization of anger in English and Spanish (1, 2), I have continued to explore with my colleague Anna Ogarkova the representation of anger as a broad category and also of specific types of anger in English, Spanish and Russian (3, 4). Using corpus data, manual annotation, and statistical approaches we created quantitative metaphorical profiles for the various anger words investigated in those languages. Part of this research aims to build bridges with emotion psychology by triangulating results about emotion representation from linguistic and psycholinguistic studies using different types of methodologies and data types (5, 6, 7).
AFFECTIVE LANGUAGE. I am interested in the different ways in which languages can represent and express affect in sounds, morphemes, syntax (1, 2, 3) but specially in the lexicon (4, 5, 6), including topics such as how to assess emotional experience using linguistic categories (7).
CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR. Most of my work on metaphor focuses on conceptual metaphors (1), defined as mechanisms for the representation of a conceptual entity (typically abstract) in terms of another (typically more concrete). Many conceptual metaphors can be found cross-culturally, while their linguistic manifestations (the linguistic metaphors) are rather language-specific (2). Emotion concepts lend themselves particularly well to representation via metaphor (3), but I am interested in the use of metaphor in other domains too, like time, color, or negotiation (see below).
EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR. If conceptual metaphors are cognitive mechanisms, they should also be investigated through methods other than language use observation (1). Throughout the years I have collaborated with Javier Valenzuela and other colleagues to explore this topic with psychological experimental paradigms (2, 3, 4, 5) (see also below). In one of our recent studies, we look at the effect of different negotiation metaphors on collaboration decisions (6).
EMOTION AND TIME. Affective experience influences both our perception of time and how we talk about it. Anna Piata and I have documented an affective bias in the metaphorical way we talk about time, with “time-moving” linguistic metaphors being more likely than “ego-moving” ones to represent negatively valenced events in naturally occurring discourse (1). We currently collaborate with Javier Valenzuela and his team in a new project to further elucidate the interrelation between affect and the figurative representation of time.
EMOTION AND COLOR. In many languages of the world, colors are linguistically associated to affective experience (e.g., English tickled pink, feeling blue, black mood). These associations, observed in figurative expressions, may have different causes. Javier Valenzuela and I have explored whether some of the color-emotion associations in Spanish could be explained by an overlap in the affective dimensional profile of color and emotion concepts (1).
EMOTION, METAPHOR AND CREATIVITY. In a study currently underway, Jeanette Littlemore, Francesca Citron, Ana Werkmann-Horvat and I investigate the relationship between emotion and linguistic creativity, and more concretely the impact of affective valence on the use of metaphor (especially creative metaphor) in the description of personal affective experiences in a native and foreign language.
