Locus of emotions

[chris_notts]

I saw this while browsing, and it made me think of where speakers of different languages think that different emotions are located:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/ ... l.pdf+html

One interesting question is whether the areas from the survey for different emotions correspond meaningfully with linguistic expressions. For example, if someone says "my stomach sank", it is easy to imagine them talking about worry or disappointment, but hard to imagine them talking about happiness. I'm going to look at this later, although to be honest most of the pictures look a bit similar so I'm not sure how much can be really concluded.

Does anyone have any other interesting information about metaphorical links between emotions and the body in different languages?

[linguoboy]

In Goidelic emotions are "on" you rather than "in" you. And this is true of both positive and negative emotions even though ar "on" generally has adversative connotations.

E.g. (Irish):

Tá áthas agus áthas air. "He's jumping for joy" (lit. "There-is joy and joy on-him")
Tá brón orm "I'm sorry". ("There is sorrow on-me".)

[chris_notts]

Does this usage reflect a difference in conception, or is it only skin deep? What kind of metaphorical language for emotion is there?

For example, can someone explode with anger in Goidelic?

[Salmoneus]

I'd avoid getting too carried away with 'metaphorical language', which is often conflicting and semi-random. For instance, we generally talk about emotions, in English, as internal, and certainly our folk-philosophy considers them internal... and yet we also use lots of metaphors about being weighed down, even crushed, by certain emotions, of emotions as burdens, as well as of emotions being attackers or weapons that strike us (and now more recently of emotions as things below us that we can 'suppress', 'submerge', 'keep pushed down' and so on, as well as of emotions as weak people (or animals) we can 'lock up' or 'hold in check').
So I don't think the presence or absence of one particular 'metaphor' (and we also shouldn't forget that these aren't actually metaphors anymore, they're just idioms, or in some cases just polysemy) really says anything at all about what people actually think. [Perhaps what people think makes some metaphors and idioms and polysemies more or less likely, but I don't think you can reason in reverse]

[chris_notts]

You're right of course that that one example wouldn't tell us much, and that there is no stock set of consistent metaphors that can't be expanded at will by speakers of any given language.

I wasn't intending to get only a yes no answer to that - it was an example of the type of emotional metaphor I was talking about. You're right that overall frequency is more useful - what basic assumptions do the most frequent and commonly used metaphors involve? But I doubt linguoboy has done a detailed study of emotional metaphors in Goidelic, so just getting some examples of common emotional metaphors used by native speakers would at least be interesting, if not conclusive.

[Salmoneus]

Along those lines, one thing that thing you linked to didn't consider* was the idea of emotions not being located in the person's own body at all. It's entirely possible for people to believe that emotions take place in an abstract private place, an abstract public place**, the air, the ground, inanimate objects, other people (just as we go from "I feel heat touching it" to "there is heat in it", we could go from "I feel anger looking at him" to "there is anger in him"), or collectively in groups of people.


*Two other things jumped out at me: when they say 'Western' and 'East Asian', do they actually just mean 'English-speaking' and 'Mandarin-speaking'? Maybe that was in the fine print. And: where people believe an emotion 'is' can be different from which parts of the body they think an emotion activates, though that's not so much a problem in the study and more just a caveat in interpreting it.

**Although the Greeks and Romans in most cases believed that thoughts were in the mind, there was disagreement over what the mind was. One popular assumption was that there was only one mind, a public mind that everybody shared, where everybody's thoughts were, presumably with some sort of nametages attached. This mind, or rather Mind, was in turn often conflated with the body of the god Zeus/Jupiter - so a lot of very intelligent Greeks did actually believe that their thoughts only existed inside the body of a god. [I don't know whether that also applied to emotions. It's worth noting here that "emotion" is itself a category that can't be simply taken for granted, and that different cultures draw the lines between thought, emotion, perception, and physical sensation in different places from us].

[Radagast revived]

There is quite good evidence from cognitive linguistics and anthropology that emotion metaphors are not simply random. There is an overwhelming cross-linguistic tendency for emotion metaphors to be based on bodily states and related to local cultural ideologies about the body. It is of course correct that emotional categories in different language do not necessarily correspond one to one, nor do they necessarily see the same bodyparts as the loci of the same emotions. Nonetheless the are clear patterns. I would like for example to see a list of languages that describe anger metaphorically as being related to heat and the head (off the top of my head I can mention that it exists in English, Danish, Nahuatl, Spanish). And I would like to see a list of languages that do the opposite (either cold, or a body part other than the head). I think it is to be expected that emotion metaphors are compatible with the physical state of ones body during an emotion experience - this of course doesnt determine the metaphor, but it creates a probable range of metaphors that can be exploited by language (as well as an improbable one).


I think emotion metaphors and body metaphors in general is one of the best ways we can come closer to understanding the origin of universals of human conceptualization. I also disagree with the notion that these are not metaphors anymore but just idioms or polysemy. I think that depends entirely on the degree to which conceptualizations of body and emotions are correlated and embedded in cultural and discursive patterns in a given language/culture.

[Salmoneus]

I was talking there about English today - although pretty much by definition you're not going to be talking about metaphors if you're looking for things that occur frequently at a societal level. You can't really standardise things without demetaphoricalising them.

What's the English head-related expression for anger, btw? I can only think of 'lost his head', but that's defined negatively (not 'being angry', but 'not acting prudently and with due consideration') and I don't think it's specific to anger (rather, any emotional 'rush').
It's true we do associate burning with anger, but then we also associate coldness, and particularly iciness, with anger. And anger's certainly associated with other body-parts - the hands, the heart, the digestive system.

[linguoboy]

Does this usage reflect a difference in conception, or is it only skin deep? What kind of metaphorical language for emotion is there?

For example, can someone explode with anger in Goidelic?

I don't think I've come across that. One can, however, "rise towards" anger. (For "They flew into a rage" Ó Dónaill gives D'éirigh siad chun feirge.) You can sample some other idioms with fearg "anger" here: http://breis.focloir.ie/en/fgb/fearg.

[Radagast revived]

Hot-head, keep cool, boiling with rage, a fiery temper... And I dont subscribe to your definition of metaphor, which is based on poetic theory that only considers an expression to be metaphor if it is used creatively, neither do most cognitive linguists who have written about metaphor since Lakoff. Thats why cognitive linguists tend to talk about conceptual metaphors, there is an underlying conceptualization of a category such as e.g. anger, which then can be used to produce new metaphors that are instantly intelligible. For example I can say "his face was glowing with rage" or "she was flaming with anger" without having heard those expressions before and others are likely to understand them without even blinking, but if I say the anger "ran freezing through her bones" that draws on a different and perhaps novel conceptualization, and produces a different kind of meaning (I would say that in this case it forces the listener to imagine what that kind of anger would be like, because it is a new metaphor).

[Salmoneus]

Hot-head, keep cool, boiling with rage, a fiery temper...

Oh, anger and heat, sure. It was anger and head I wasn't sure about - and again, 'hotheaded' doesn't mean angry, or even specifically quick to anger, but simply impetuous - which, yes, includes being susceptible to anger, but not just that.

And I dont subscribe to your definition of metaphor, which is based on poetic theory that only considers an expression to be metaphor if it is used creatively, neither do most cognitive linguists who have written about metaphor since Lakoff. Thats why cognitive linguists tend to talk about conceptual metaphors, there is an underlying conceptualization of a category such as e.g. anger, which then can be used to produce new metaphors that are instantly intelligible. For example I can say "his face was glowing with rage" or "she was flaming with anger" without having heard those expressions before and others are likely to understand them without even blinking, but if I say the anger "ran freezing through her bones" that draws on a different and perhaps novel conceptualization, and produces a different kind of meaning (I would say that in this case it forces the listener to imagine what that kind of anger would be like, because it is a new metaphor).

Actually, I think the relevant definition would be that a metaphor's sense is not truth-functional (or, in some theories, is truth-functional only in a problematic way) but yes, that does flow from the traditional meaning.
For instance, "Juliet is the sun" is clearly false taken in one way, but in another way it is not false. Crucially, this second way is not a way that is itself amenable to a direct propositional interpretation. Metaphors are directions toward seeing as, as Davidson puts it, not seeing that. [Metaphors can also be prima facie true, they're just a little harder to spot then. So when Juliet says 'a rose by any other name would smell as sweet', taken literally this is true, but the real meaning is metaphorical, expressing how she sees the issue of conflict between objective (social) and subjective identity, and that's not something that can straightforwardly be 'false').
We can contrast this with something like "his face was glowing with rage". In one sense this is false, and in another it may be true. But the sense in which it is true is not any qualitatively different from the sense in which it is false: it's just that "to glow" has two meanings "to emit light" and "(of human skin, particularly of the face) to redden". Somebody who is glowing with anger literally is glowing with anger - their face turns red and they are angry. Similarly, 'flaming', a more extreme equivalent ('flaming' also has a meaning regarding behaviour). There's nothing more meaningful or metaphorical here than when we say someone is 'glowering', it's just that in that case the light-emitting meaning is no longer used (or was never borrowed). Sometimes these polysemies originate in metaphor - other times the two meanings have 'always' co-existed, and sometimes the the 'metaphor' explanation is just a folk etymology for a naturally-derived homophony.
So when we talk about peoples moods or tempers or thoughts or minds being 'hot', or 'cold'/'cool', that's not a metaphor - that's just polysemy. 'Hot' and 'cold' happen to be the words we use to label two contrasting types of mental states (and 'hot headed' vs 'cool headed' is just a metonymy replacing 'mind' or 'mental state' (etc) with 'head', where those things are believed to be located.
So if I tell you that X is cool-headed, that Y is burning with rage, that Z is itching for a fight, you can tell me whether those things are true or not. Whereas if I tell you that A's rage is running freezing through his bones... you can't tell me whether that's true or not, because you don't know what it means. Because at the moment, until you and I and everyone else fixes a new meaning on those words (polysemy) or on that particular fossilised expression as a whole, that expression doesn't have a propositional meaning at all. Instead, it just provokes, or suggests, or inspires - it encourages you to see things in a particular way. It's a metaphor. Similarly, if Romeo tells you that Juliet is the sun, you can't say that he's wrong - he's not giving you a fact, he's trying to show you how the facts appear to him, how he is experiencing them. Whereas if Romeo tells you that Juliet is burning with lust for him, we damn well can tell him that he's wrong (not that we know for sure ourselves, of course, but we can deduce from the evidence). Because whether Juliet is burning with lust is, even if that sense of 'burning' isn't the first one in the dictionaries, a very straightforward question with a clear meaning and a fact of the matter that we can work to discover.

I'm not saying that Lakoff doesn't have a point (though he's not exactly intellectually robust in how he expresses it!), that some patterns of polysemy may be different in different languages. But by co-opting the language of metaphor, he tries to sneak in psychological and conceptual baggage through the back door (that's not a metaphor - in meta-argument, 'the back door' is just a common name for the pathway of an unexamined belief) - and in the process he confuses the far more important and interesting distinction between depiction-that and depiction-as.
(And, indeed, what would be an interesting question, to what extent patterns of metaphor are influenced by either language or culture).

EDIT: but this is all at a tangent to the OP, and in any case we've had this argument before and clearly neither of us is going to change our mind.

I should also add that as well as polysemy and metaphor, we also have two other things in this issue: perception and perceptual classification (i.e. the belief that people actually feel particular things in parts of their body either alongside or as part of feeling an emotion), and then folk philosophy of mind (i.e. the belief that certain mental states have certain physical locations), both of which are interesting topics that may, at least in theory (if probably not in practice), be independent of both vocabulary issues and patterns of metaphor.

[Radagast revived]

Yeah, what I was trying to tell you is that I don't subscribe to that theory of meaning. Truth conditions have nothing to do with whether something is metaphorical or not, and very little to do at all with how meaning works in language all together. But given your training that is hardly something that we are going to ever agree about as you note.

I had seen the original post last week and I was happy to see it as an actual attempt to link physical states to emotions. I think this lends a lot of credence to the pragmatic semiotic theory of emotions, which holds that an emotion is really an post-facto interpretation of a bodily state. As William James said, you don't run from the bear because you are afraid, but you are afraid because you run. The body instinctively reacts to some aspects of our physical and social environment, and we then interpret those changes in our physical state in relation to concepts that we have acquired culturally. Naturally those concepts will be based on aspects of the physical states that we interpret.