The construction of emotional meaning in language

The experience of emotion is a form of meaning-making: it reveals one's relationship to the circumstances. Often, the emphasis is on the emotions explicitly named or subjective feelings conveyed. In this perspective, we argue that psychology should use a broader set of tools to study emotional meaning in language. We put forward three sets of language features that capture: the contextual features or aspects of experience salient at each moment (attention); the conceptual vantage point which from events are viewed (construal); the evaluation of events along relevant dimensions (appraisal). We explain how each of these language features can be used to answer specific questions about emotional meaning-making and how it varies based on situation, person, and culture. Our interdisciplinary approach-grounded in socio-, cognitive, and computational linguistics as well as discursive, cognitive, and emotion psychology-seeks to move the field to a higher-dimensional, dynamical account of emotional meaning.