Metaphor and Emotion - Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling

This book challenges the simplistic division between the body and culture by showing how human emotions are to a large extent 'constructed' from individuals' embodied experiences in different cultural settings. Kovecses illustrates through detailed cross-linguistic analyses how many emotion concepts reflect wide-spread metaphorical patterns of thought. These emotion metaphors arise from recurring embodied experiences, one reason why human emotions across many cultures conform to certain basic biological-physiological processes in the human body and of the body interacting with the external world. The view proposed here demonstrates how cultural aspects of emotions, metaphorical language about the emotions, and human physiology in emotion are all part of an integrated system. Kovecses convincingly shows how this integrated system points to the reconciliation of the seemingly contradictory views of biological reductionism and social constructionism in contemporary debates about human emotion.

List of contents

1. Language and emotion concepts; 2. Metaphor of emotion; 3. Emotion metaphors: are they unique to the emotions?; 4. Events and emotions: the subcategorization of emotions; 5. The force of emotion; 6. Emotions and relationships; 7. Folk versus expert theories of emotion; 8. Universality in the conceptualization of emotion; 9. Cultural variation in the conceptualization of emotion; 10. Emotion language: a new synthesis.

Summary

Many researchers claim that emotions arise either from human biology (i.e., biological reductionism) or as products of culture (i.e., social constructionism). This book challenges this division between the body and culture by showing how human emotions are to a large extent 'constructed' from individuals' embodied experiences in different cultural settings.

Product details

• Authors: Zolt N. K. Vecses, Zoltan Kovecses, Zoltán Kövecses, Zoltn Kvecses
• Assisted by: Antony Manstead (Editor), Keith Oatley (Editor)
• Publisher: Cambridge Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 28.02.2000
• EAN: 9780521641630
• ISBN: 978-0-521-64163-0
• Dimensions: 161 mm x 236 mm x 22 mm
• Weight: 530 g
• Series: Studies in Emotion and Social; Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction
• Subjects: Guides > Self-help, everyday life > Lifestyle, personal development; Humanities, art, music > Psychology > Theoretical psychology; Psychology, PSYCHOLOGY / Developmental / Child, PSYCHOLOGY / Neuropsychology, Psycholinguistics, Child, developmental and lifespan psychology, Physiological and neuro-psychology, biopsychology, Psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics, PSYCHOLOGY / Cultural Psychology