LAWRENCE — A new paper from a psychologist at the University of Kansas examines how language shapes our emotional experience of the world. Katie Hoemann, assistant professor of psychology at KU, recently published her findings in the peer-reviewed journal Communications Psychology.
“We know from research that different languages have different vocabularies for emotion,” Hoemann said. “A lot of that research focuses on individual words — emotion vocabularies — or whether you can tell how good or bad someone feels from the language they use. What we haven’t looked at in depth is how we can see other aspects of people’s emotional experience beyond just which emotion they’re feeling or how good or bad they feel. What kinds of things are people paying attention to? What kinds of evaluations are they making about their environment? How do they see themselves situated with regard to the unfolding events?”
Hoemann's co-authors include Yeasle Lee, Batja Mesquita, Èvelyne Dussault and Dirk Geeraerts, all from KU Leuven in Belgium; Simon Devylder from UiT, the Arctic University of Norway; and Lyle Ungar from the University of Pennsylvania.
Their paper surveyed existing research on language and emotion from a range of academic fields and suggests a framework for further study.
“It’s a set of proposals for the scientific community, a kind of synthesis across different areas of research,” Hoemann said. “A lot of the work we cite comes from psychology, linguistics and computer science. The idea is to take what we know about language as a system for scaffolding and communicating our experience and apply that to new directions in emotion science.”
Based on their deep dive into research on language and emotion, Hoemann and her colleagues propose a new paradigm for future investigations: distributing the experience of language and emotion into three aspects — “attention,” “construal” and “appraisal.”
“We wanted to structure it around three dimensions because it made sense to us,” Hoemann said. “The first is attention — what people are paying attention to. If I talk about the weather versus what I ate for lunch, that tells you what’s on my mind.”
The researchers define the second feature, construal, as “the conceptual vantage point which from events are viewed.”
“Construal is more about the perspective you take,” said the KU researcher. “If attention is what you’re looking at, construal is how you’re looking at it. Are you bringing something close, distancing yourself from it, speaking in the present or past tense, or referring to yourself in the second or third person?”
Last, the team of researchers said the experience of language and emotion should be assessed via “appraisal,” or the judging of events.
“Appraisals are the dimensional evaluations people make about their experience, especially how pleasant or unpleasant it is,” Hoemann said. “These are foundational to emotion theory and also present in language. They help us infer how people are experiencing themselves or their circumstances.”
Through study of these three facets, Hoemann and her co-authors argue a more productive understanding of language and emotion is possible.
“I don’t think anyone has a definitive answer to whether language reveals or creates our mindset,” Hoemann said. “It’s both. Language provisions us with a set of tools we can use, and those tools shape our attentional patterns over time. But we don’t just choose tools randomly. We use language in ways that help us affiliate with others and accomplish our goals.”
Hoemann has a research interest in emotions that defy easy description with language.
“There’s certainly a way in which having a word for a feeling makes it a kind of common currency,” she said. “But we can also recognize feelings that don’t have words. We might say, ‘Have you ever felt like this?’ and then describe a situation. Still, having a single word or phrase makes that much more efficient.”
Indeed, for years the KU researcher maintained a database of foreign words communicating “untranslatable emotions.”
“These are emotions that don’t have direct equivalents in English,” Hoemann said. “Of course that’s a limited perspective, because you could do that with any source and target language. People have written books cataloging invented words, historical emotion terms or culturally specific emotion vocabulary. The existence of those words shows how powerful labeling is in shaping how we talk about — and maybe how we experience — emotion.”
The authors use the term “meaning making” to describe how people construct their experiences of the world, including emotion.
“Meaning-making is about categorizing experience — taking in all the sensory and psychological information available and organizing it into something you can describe or recognize,” Hoemann said. “Our experiential space isn’t evenly distributed. Some experiences happen more frequently or tend to co-occur with certain features. These patterns act like magnets, pulling experiences into familiar categories.”
Hoemann joined KU’s social-psychology faculty a year ago, having previously studied anthropology and linguistics. She said her academic niche could be dubbed “emotional psychology.”
“Emotion and language are both social tools,” she said. “The work I do is mostly fundamental science about what emotion is, how to define and measure it, and what it can tell us about the human mind.”
Journal
Communications Psychology