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At the Neural Intersection Between Language and Emotion

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Abstract

What role does language play in emotion? Behavioral research shows that emotion words such as “anger” and “fear” alter emotion experience, but questions still remain about mechanism. Here, we review the neuroscience literature to examine whether neural processes associated with semantics are also involved in emotion. Our review suggests that brain regions involved in the semantic processing of words: (i) are engaged during experiences of emotion, (ii) coordinate with brain regions involved in affect to create emotions, (iii) hold representational content for emotion, and (iv) may be necessary for constructing emotional experience. We relate these findings with respect to four theoretical relationships between language and emotion, which we refer to as “non-interactive,” “interactive,” “constitutive,” and “deterministic.” We conclude that findings are most consistent with the interactive and constitutive views with initial evidence suggestive of a constitutive view, in particular. We close with several future directions that may help test hypotheses of the constitutive view.

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Notes

  1. Notably, the distinction we draw between interactive and constitutive roles parallels Aristotelian efficient and material causality, respectively. This distinction is a common theme in emotion research. When considering the relationship between emotion and appraisal, Ellsworth (2013) points out that the question of whether appraisals “cause” emotion is vague. Appraisals can be viewed as causing emotion in the sense that they are separate from emotion and trigger emotions (e.g., as one pool ball causes another to move; an interactive view) or—as she proposes—in the sense that they are part of the emotion (i.e., appraisals are an ingredient of the emotion; a constitutive view). The same ambiguity arises when considering the relationship between emotion and cognition more broadly. For instance, Pessoa (2008) advocates for a constitutive relationship—that the same underlying and overlapping processes compose emotion and cognition and thus the same domain-general ingredients make emotions and cognitions (also see Barrett & Satpute, 2013; Wager et al., 2015). And yet a more commonplace assumption is that emotion “interacts with” cognition in the sense that one exerts an influence upon the other or vice versa. This distinction is usefully applied to areas outside of emotion as well. For instance, in cognitive psychology, ongoing debates examine whether concepts are represented apart from sensory-motor representations but may interact with them (i.e., an interactive view), or whether concepts are constituted from these sensory-motor representations themselves (i.e., a constitutive view, see Barsalou, 2008; Binder, 2016; Deacon, 1998; Fernandino et al., 2016; Leshinskaya & Caramazza, 2016). And parallel arguments have occurred in language and thought, in which many researchers may agree with the more general claim that “language shapes thought,” but the disagreement and potential for theoretical advances lies in whether language is constitutive of thought (indeed is the vehicle for thought), or whether language merely interacts with thought (Boroditsky, 2001; Kay & Kempton, 1984). In general, whether psychological constructs relate with one another interactively or constitutively is a difficult, yet important theme in psychology and neuroscience.

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Acknowledgments

Research reported in this publication was supported by the Department of Graduate Education of the National Science Foundation (1835309), by the Division of Brain and Cognitive Sciences of the National Science Foundation (1947972), and by the Division of Brain and Cognitive Sciences of the National Science Foundation (1551688).

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  1. Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Ave, 125 NI, Boston, MA, 02115, USA

    Ajay B. Satpute

  2. Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Kristen A. Lindquist

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Satpute, A.B., Lindquist, K.A. At the Neural Intersection Between Language and Emotion. Affec Sci 2, 207–220 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-021-00032-2

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