Abstract
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.
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Introduction
The experience of emotion is a form of meaning-making. Instances of disappointment, frustration, relief, and other emotion categories are mental events that reflect one’s relationship to the circumstances1. This relationship entails a particular focus or locus of attention, a particular perspective on the event, and a particular set of goals and values against which it is assessed. Disappointment, for an English speaker in North America, might imply that hopes were high, effort was great, or outcomes important. The focus would be on the expectation that was not met. Frustration, carrying similar implications, would focus instead on the thwarted intentions. Experiencing one emotion as opposed to another (or as opposed to none) is meaningful because each indicates a different position with respect to a given context2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. Emotional meaning is positional in nature. It foregrounds certain concerns and backgrounds the rest.
Experiences of emotion are multidimensional and inherently situated. These experiences are typically described in terms of subjective feelings, yet they also encompass a wide array of contextual features—thoughts and desires; sensations and movements; surroundings and interactions; past and future events—all of which have bearing on the meaning-making process10,11,12,13,14. An instance of disappointment does not happen in a vacuum, but with reference to a constellation of expectations, behaviors, and social repercussions. These features vary in their identity and in their saliency. No two instances of disappointment are identical, not even within the same person15,16,17,18,19,20. ‘Dinner not going to plan’ is different when the meal is a reception for dozens versus an experiment for one; in one case, there are observers and potential threats to reputation, in the other there are not. And both cases are different from the disappointment of ‘passed over for a much-anticipated promotion.’ The meaning of emotion is made in each moment.
This meaning can be articulated in language. Psychology has a long history of using language to study emotional meaning-making (for recent reviews, see21,22,23). Often, the emphasis is on the emotions explicitly named (e.g., “I am disappointed”) or on the primary dimensions of affect (in)directly conveyed24 (e.g., disappointment is an unpleasant experience). These approaches have yielded valuable insights into the words that individuals and cultural groups use for emotions25,26,27,28,29,30,31, and how language relates to subjective experience, well-being and health32,33,34 (for a review, see ref. 35). Yet language is more than a collection of labels or a vehicle for subjective feeling36,37,38. The contextual features that comprise the experience of emotion can also be gleaned from language, expanding the dimensionality of situated meaning-making.
In this perspective, we argue that psychology should use a broader set of tools to study the construction of 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 in turn 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. These questions are ideally answered using natural language—the words, sentences, and stories organically generated by people as they speak and write, constrained only by the pragmatics of where, with whom, and about what they are communicating. These characteristics make natural language a rich and ubiquitous source of information about psychological processes, without requiring these processes to be introspected or reported upon directly39,40,41. We hypothesize that the patterns of attention, construal, and appraisal revealed by language will correspond with momentary fluctuations in emotion as well as with differences in how experiences of emotion play out over time for individuals and groups (Figs. 1 and 2). Our approach to emotional meaning-making is constructionist and profoundly interdisciplinary. We conclude by considering its implications and next steps.
a Potential attentional foci during an example event (blue circles): The woman notices the warmth from the sun (a), the hunger pangs in her stomach (b), the sounds of the baby in the stroller (c), and the smell of grass and flowers (d). b How the event could be conceptualized by the speaker along six possible dimensions (purple dots): dynamism (entities vs processes; 1), distance (proximal vs distal; 2), boundedness (ongoing vs finite; 3), reality status (real vs hypothetical; 4), speaker agency (subject vs object; 5), and location of emotion (self vs world; 6). c How the event could be holistically evaluated along three possible dimensions (orange dots): valence (i), intensity (ii), and certainty (iii). ‘Park graphic black white city landscape sketch illustration vector’ by Aluna1 is licensed under the iStock standard license.
Attention, construal, and appraisal are dynamic processes, such that foci, conceptualizations, and evaluations will change from moment to moment.
Language features that capture emotional meaning-making
Attention
An analysis of natural language can be used to examine what people talk about when they talk about emotion—beyond the emotion, per se. Among the rich tapestry of features that comprise emotional experience, not all are equally dominant. Content, as well as style and structure, can say something about which features of experience have been picked out. Speakers may attend to bodily sensations, cognitive processes, or the actions and perspectives of others, and these attentional shifts can be captured by the types of words used21. One description of frustration may anchor on repressing the urge to yell or be cross, while another may anchor on the (in)actions of another. Patterns of word use can also represent the activities and contexts encountered42, or the motifs that structure people’s understanding of events43. Frustration could occur during a game night with friends, a political conversation with family, or a project meeting with coworkers, and might be interpreted along the same lines in each (e.g., ‘no one ever listens to me’). These broad dimensions of meaning can be said to represent attentional themes. Themes are salient and/or recurrent relationships between words in texts. These relationships do not have to be between contiguous words (e.g., collocations); they can be distributions that emerge from a collection of texts, or key words or phrases that reappear throughout a single text. We outline three approaches to identifying attentional themes in language with bearing on emotion.
One way of uncovering the salient dimensions of meaning in natural language is to look for words falling into pre-specified categories or dictionaries. In this approach, researchers define, a priori, the words and dictionaries of interest, and count the percentage of dictionary words that appear in text. Commonly, this is accomplished using the software program Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC)44. There are default LIWC dictionaries that capture content about aspects of experience relevant to emotion. For example, in English-speaking Americans, family-related words (e.g., “mom,” “dad,” “parent”) have been associated with more pleasant experiences, whereas work-related words (e.g., “class,” “work”, “school”) have been associated with less pleasant experiences45. In African and East Asian cultural contexts, emotional events are described using more embodied (e.g., “dizzy”) and/or more social (e.g., “friends”) words than in other cultural contexts, such as the US46,47,48. Use of first-person singular (“I”) versus other types of pronouns varies across languages, too49; it also varies across persons50 and within persons over time51,52, suggesting that it indexes, at each level of analysis, the extent to which the individual self receives the focus of attention (e.g., as an agent or experiencer), or whether this attention is directed elsewhere or more broadly distributed53. The use of standardized dictionaries facilitates comparison of attentional themes across texts, samples, and even languages54. At the same time, dictionary-based methods are limited to sets of words that are fixed top-down and selected to meet theoretical assumptions55.
An alternative approach is to work bottom-up, using discovery-oriented methods of generating attentional themes based on the co-occurrences of words and phrases56. This approach, broadly referred to as topic modeling57,58,59, captures the distributions that naturally occur in spontaneous language use, offering flexible descriptions of the themes that emerge in context. Themes extracted from the everyday speech of English-speaking university students in the US showed, for instance, that talking about entertainment (e.g., “game,” “play,” “watching”) coincided with more pleasant experiences, while talking about assignments (e.g., “test,” “study,” “class”) coincided with less pleasant experiences45. At the between-persons level, an analysis of daily diaries from US English speakers and Belgian Dutch speakers showed that people who reported more differentiated negative emotions also referred to a greater variety of attentional themes, suggesting more experiential diversity in their everyday lives42. Topic modeling avoids imposing expectations of how meaning is made, making it useful for cross-cultural or cross-linguistic research60,61,62. For example, both US English speakers and Belgian Dutch speakers attend to social relationships, communication, and professional/scholastic concerns when describing emotional events, but diverge in their focus on personal achievement (US English speakers) versus collaboration (Belgian Dutch speakers)54. Topic modeling is data-driven, rather than hypothesis-driven; this also means that attentional themes are subject to interpretation and may not generalize. These characteristics make topic modeling most appealing for exploratory or descriptive aims.
Another, distinct approach to uncovering attentional foci is to examine the themes or motifs that emerge across a text or set of texts. By motifs, we mean the central ideas or linguistic devices (e.g., phrases, structures) that guide and reflect conceptualization and communication43. Stories, for instance, may progress through a sequence of stages63, or traverse established narrative arcs64, in conveying thoughts and experiences to others. Motifs may be used at various junctures to tie points together, attract the listener’s attention, or reinforce key aspects65,66. For example, coming back to the idea of “there’s no way” to resolve an issue is a way of highlighting perceived futility and emotional fatigue43. Themes and motifs that recur over time, then, highlight habitual patterns of attention and thought, and can be predictive of psychological functioning67. These may not assume consistent forms or occur frequently enough to be studied using the word-counting and topic-modeling approaches described above, however, and so are often better identified using inductive techniques such as thematic, discourse, and narrative analysis68,69,70,71. Pre-established themes or motifs can also be manually annotated36,67. Both methods yield insights into how people navigate longer-form meaning-making (whether in writing or transcribed speech) and can provide a basis for further, automated analyses (e.g., via key words or phrases, or using machine learning algorithms trained on human-coded data72,73).
Construal
Construal refers to the situated way in which a speaker conceptualizes an event and represents that conceptualization in language74,75. If attention is, roughly, the “what,” construal is the “how.” It is, in short, perspective: from what physical or temporal vantage point is the event mentally viewed, what relationships hold between actors and the environment, or how the action unfolds8,76,77,78. A speaker may describe a past event as if it were currently in progress, highlight their own agency versus what was done to them by others, or consider what might have been. These phenomena have long been the subject of psychological research on construal level theory79,80,81,82 and are fundamental to a cognitive linguistic approach to language, in which construal is intrinsic to the process of meaning-making83,84. One does not understand oneself in relation to others and the world—just as one does not see—without adopting a point of view. The richness and inherent subjectivity of experience means that there is no single way to represent a situation, and each representation goes beyond the set of observable and non-observable features to make meaning in context85. Because of this, construal is expressed by a wide variety of lexical and grammatical resources. Here, we cover six dimensions of construal, their relevance to emotional meaning-making, and how they may be inferred from natural language.
First, events vary in the degree to which their constituents are framed as entities versus processes. Entities are static, conceptually autonomous ‘things,’ whereas processes are dynamic, unfolding in time. Examining emotional events along this dimension of construal may indicate when people perceive their experience as abstract and rigid versus embodied and flexible. In language, the distinction between entities and processes is conveyed by the word class used for the emotion76. Nouns (e.g., “anger”) and adjectives (e.g., “angry”) designate entities and their properties; verbs (e.g., “to anger”) and adverbs (e.g., “angrily”) designate processes and their properties. Consider the love in “his love for her is great” compared to the love in “he loves her greatly.” The difference goes beyond mere poetics86. Nouns are associated with categorical and essentialist thinking in US English87,88, while verbs are associated with a sense of bodily involvement and greater sensorimotor activation in Netherlandic Dutch and Metropolitan French89,90. Moreover, languages differ on which word classes are used to describe emotions and emotional experiences. Speakers of Hindustani spontaneously generate more verbs (e.g., “pyar karnar” [“to love”]) and fewer nouns (e.g., “pyar” [“love”]) than Dutch speakers91. Russian speakers prefer verbal constructions (e.g., “perezhivat” [“to suffer things through”]), whereas English prefers an adjectival construction (e.g., “upset”)92,93,94,95. The use of word classes is just now beginning to be systematically investigated across and within individuals96, suggesting implications for emotion regulation, mindfulness, and more97,98. For example, the use of verbs for emotion may be associated with beliefs about emotion malleability99, whereas the use of nouns may track with beliefs about immutability100,101.
The second and third dimensions of construal are closely related to each other. Namely, events can be conceptualized as temporally proximal versus distal and as actively unfolding versus complete. Each of these dimensions says something about events’ psychological immediacy or embeddedness102,103,104,105 and so may have bearing on emotional processing. Linguistically, these dimensions are indexed by the tense and aspect of verbs used to describe experiences of emotion. Verb tense locates the event before (i.e., past tense; e.g., “I loved”), concurrent with (i.e., present tense; e.g., “I love”), or after (i.e., future tense; e.g., “I will love”) the time of speaking. The use of past versus present verb tense, among other language features (e.g., first-person singular pronouns)—known as ‘linguistic distancing’—is associated with healthy emotion regulation strategies and better self-reported well-being in US English speakers52,73,106,107. Verb aspect, in turn, describes the event in terms of its parts and bounding108,109: as ongoing (i.e., imperfective aspect; e.g., “I love[d]”) or as finite (i.e., perfective aspect; e.g., “I have/had loved”). Imperfective aspect is associated with first- (versus third-) person perspective in US English and German110,111, resulting in heightened subjective awareness and emotional intensity112,113,114. Future work can examine the relative contributions of tense and aspect to emotional meaning-making and their adaptiveness in context. For instance, verb aspect may help to explain some apparent discrepancies in the therapeutic utility of linguistic distancing in US English (e.g., 107, vs115.) because it signals whether prior events are being construed as ongoing versus completed, regardless of tense (see also evidence from Chilean Spanish116).
Fourth, the emotional events represented by speakers can have multiple possible ‘reality’ statuses. They can be real or known, as when describing present or past experiences. They can also be hypothetical, unknown, or inconsistent with reality, as when describing wishes, desires, or imaginary situations. One form of this latter ‘reality’ status is counterfactuals, which reconstruct past events by revisiting what might or could have been117,118. Counterfactual thinking involves mentally simulating possible explanations119, facilitating conceptual integration120 and goal-directed behaviors121. For these reasons, it has been linked in US English speakers to successful emotion regulation and life satisfaction122,123. In language, counterfactual thinking can be identified by the use of verbs in the subjunctive mood (e.g., “if I were to see you, I would be happier”; a mood that is more common in other languages [e.g., Spanish, French] than in English) or by other modal or conditional constructions (e.g., “I would be happier if I saw you,” “I would be happier if I could see you”). A full examination of situated and (mal)adaptive meaning-making, we hypothesize, will involve looking at the types of counterfactual statements used and the contexts in which they occur. For example, temporal distance (as indexed by verb tense or aspect) may moderate the relationship between counterfactual thinking and rumination123. Counterfactuals may be used to explain contemporary or retrospective emotional events, providing insight into the complexity of mental representation5 and how the self is perceived over time and in relation to social others36,124.
A fifth dimension of construal with relevance to emotional meaning-making is the extent to which speakers see themselves as agentic or the locus of control as internal. Does someone say, “I fear dogs” or do they say, “dogs frighten me”? Evidence from US English and German shows that each phrasing carries a different attentional focus and perception of causality125,126, with implications for the volition and responsibility of the participants involved124,127. Speakers’ positioning of themselves and others on this dimension is driven by regulatory and rhetorical goals70,106, yet may be adaptive or maladaptive given the circumstances. For example, although constructions that convey diminished agency may be used by speakers of US English to preserve a sense of self-efficacy after the loss of a partner128, they are also associated with greater grief-related disturbances36 (see also refs. 129,130). Over time, these momentary conceptualizations may come to reflect more stable individual or cultural differences in self-construal131 or identity132. There are many features of language that convey agency (for a review, see ref. 36; see also ref. 71). One feature is the grammatical relation or semantic role played by the speaker: in the examples above, “I” is the subject or agent, whereas “me” is the [direct] object, patient, or recipient133,134. Another feature is the voice of the dominant verb. In passive voice constructions (e.g., “I was frightened by the dogs”), the grammatical object (“I”) is more salient due to its initial position, biasing readers of US English to see it as the primary actor135,136. Accounting for syntactic structure, then, can provide critical insight into how speakers understand and communicate their role in an emotional event4,37,78,93,137,138.
The sixth and final dimension of construal advanced in this perspective is where the emotion is located in relation to the speaker. Emotions can be experienced as a property of the self (e.g., “I’m annoyed”) and as a property of the world (e.g., “this is annoying”)139. These construals, like those of agency and control, may have implications for behavior and coping, and there may be individual and cultural differences in the tendency for these construals that lead to or interact with putative effects36,140. For instance, ‘owning’ one’s annoyance by locating it in the self, rather than in an interaction partner, may facilitate healthy communication strategies and reduce implications of blame in cultural contexts that value individual autonomy and self-assertion141. In cultural contexts where social functioning is foregrounded, such as when ‘honor’ should be maintained, emotions are located in the world142. The extent to which the experiencer versus the ‘stimulus’ is foregrounded corresponds with a continuum of syntactic structures143,144,145, with the poles of this continuum mapping onto the examples above. These syntactic structures could be the focus of future research into how speakers understand themselves as experiencers of emotion, and how this may vary systematically across cultures.
Appraisal
The term “appraisal” is used by theories of emotion2,3,9 and language4,146 to refer to dimensional evaluations that are thought to be central to emotional meaning-making, and indeed to meaning-making in general147. In psychological research, appraisals include dimensions of affect such as (un)pleasantness (i.e., valence) and intensity, and situational evaluations such as certainty and goal congruence148. They can also refer to higher-order assessments such as threat or loss9. In linguistic research, appraisals are the dispositions that speakers routinely (if not inherently) adopt toward the content of their own message and its context (i.e., the [emotional] event). This disposition—a stance or attitude149—is an evaluation of ongoing speech and circumstances that also serves an intersubjective function by signaling to the listener what to be regarded as important, obvious, unreliable, etc.150. For example, a speaker might indicate that they are more or less enthusiastic about what is currently happening, or that they are not sure about what they are saying. With both psychological and linguistic meanings of “appraisal” in mind, our recommendations focus on the dimensions most feasibly assessed through natural language: valence, intensity, and certainty. As reviewed below, there is much work on estimating valence from natural language and its variation across situations, individuals, and cultures. Considerably less work has examined intensity and certainty. While lexicometric (word-based) approaches can be used to estimate each of these appraisals, they also show up in lower-level (e.g., punctuation) and higher-level (e.g., phrasing) features of language. These represent underutilized resources for psychological science. The general approaches we outline for estimating intensity and certainty can also by applied toward other lower- (e.g., goal congruence) and higher-order (e.g., threat) appraisals in text.
Valence is a primary dimension of evaluation in many theories of appraisal and affect151,152,153,154. One common way of estimating valence in language is using dictionary-based methods such as LIWC that count the percentage of pleasantly- and unpleasantly-valenced words (for similar dictionaries, see155,156,157), or collections of words that have been assigned continuous valence ratings or weights158,159,160,161,162. Valence is also conveyed through punctuation (e.g., exclamation points)163, abbreviations (LMFO) emoji ☺, and emoticons :)—indeed, these features are leveraged by contemporary sentiment analysis algorithms to classify the attitude expressed in texts as positive or negative159,164. In US English and Belgian Dutch, use of valenced language can track with momentary self-reports165,166,167,168 (but see45,169,170). In English, valenced language has also been associated across persons with personality dimensions such as neuroticism (i.e., emotional [in]stability)171,172,173,174 and with mental and physical health outcomes such as happiness175, longevity176, and depression177,178,179. These relationships may not be universal, however, as there are notable cultural differences in the use of valenced language, for example between western (e.g., US) and non-western (e.g., India) English users60,180, or between White and Black English speakers in the United States181.
The intensity applied to a message or an event is a way of positioning that message or event relative to others of its kind. To be “not very disappointed” situates the current emotional experience as weaker than other past or hypothetical disappointments, beyond the simple label. For this reason, functional theories of language4,146 see intensity as a marker of qualified appraisal. In psychological studies, emotion is most often assessed by asking people to rate the intensity of their experience on a set of provided terms. This information can also be recovered from natural language by accounting for adverbs (e.g., “very”) or other modifying phrases (e.g., “kind of”), as they are used either throughout entire texts or in combination with emotion labels. Some emotion labels may be perceived as more intense than others (e.g., “furious” versus “annoyed”182), and this distinction could also be captured by dictionary-based methods. Orthographic features such as punctuation (!) and writing in ALL CAPS, corollaries of prosodic features (e.g., intonation, stress) in text, additionally impact perceived emotional intensity159,183. The advantage of assessing intensity in natural language is that its presence represents an expression on the part of the speaker, rather than a requirement of a rating scale (for discussion, see184,185).
Certainty, as a dimension of (linguistic) appraisal, refers to the confidence or conviction with which a speaker adopts a particular stance or attitude. Consider the distinction between “I’m clearly disappointed” and “I guess I’m disappointed,” or between “I’m always disappointed” and “I might be disappointed.” Looking at the emotion word alone fails to capture the full meaning of these statements and might even assume something that is not true (e.g., that the speaker is disappointed). Appraisals of high or low certainty are therefore foundational to emotional meaning-making. Like appraisals of intensity, these can be captured using dictionary-based methods; for example, both “clearly” and “always” are considered ‘certain’ language by LIWC, whereas “guess” and “might” are ‘tentative.’ Question marks and repeating letters to deliberately mimic spoken inflections (e.g., “weeeeell”) can likewise influence the degree of emotional certainty perceived in texts186. Appraisals can also manifest across longer stretches of text or speech, in ways that cannot be accounted for by word choice or orthography alone. Compare “I might feel bad about it” (i.e., I feel bad but do not want to say it directly) and “I might have felt bad about it” (i.e., I did not feel bad but could have if circumstances were different). Not only does the received valence flip (bad vs. not bad), but the type of thinking also shifts (factual vs. counterfactual). For this reason, appraisals of certainty (and other dimensions) are often manually annotated across phrases or sentences187,188. Recent work in linguistics demonstrates methods of increasing the transparency, reliability, and replicability of this high-value but high-effort task189,190,191.
Outlook
To fully understand the construction of emotional meaning, psychological language analysis must move beyond the simple act of labeling or the communication of feeling. There is so much more to learn about how speakers represent their experience in each moment and the role that language plays. Speakers—and scientists—have more than emotion words and sentiment at their disposal, so why do we not look at the larger repertoire in use? The continuous advancement of text-analytic techniques and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities makes this ever easier. In this perspective, we have focused on attention, construal, and appraisal as core processes of meaning-making in action. We illustrated the documented or potential relevance of each process for the science of emotion and then put forward sets of language features that have been shown, across other areas of psychology and linguistics, to capture it (summarized in Table 1). As we discuss next, these processes and features can help reframe our understanding of what emotions are, as well as our understanding of what language does. This reframing is consistent with a constructionist perspective on emotion and language and offers an interdisciplinary path forward for the study of emotion in context. We conclude by highlighting additional avenues for exploration and possibilities for the future study of emotion.
An approach to emotional meaning-making that accounts for the interrelated processes of attention, construal, and appraisal, and how these manifest in language, can reveal how the beliefs and interpretations that constitute emotional experience are assembled. Emotion and language are both systems of meaning. They transduce heterogeneous and continuous features into established formats, chunking and binning the raw experience of individuals according to categories and symbols agreed upon by a group. They are communicative in the sense that they are used to convey meaning to others192,193, but also in the sense that they are used to structure reality for oneself194,195,196. Practically, this means that the details matter. Variation in specific aspects—noting your bodily sensations rather than your social milieu, conveying the items on your to-do list as boring vs. yourself as bored, clarifying that you are not completely sure how you feel—is revealing because each option carries a different implication for experience and behavior. This approach is constructionist at its core because it holds that meaning (of any kind) is built from a complex and dynamic set of features that plays out against personal and sociocultural backgrounds124,197,198,199,200,201,202,203. Neither language nor emotion is a read-out of static and received meanings204,205,206,207. Instead, meanings are actively molded and negotiated in real time, as people accomplish situation-specific and interactional goals. It is at the level of these specific (interpersonal) events that meaning must be studied. Only at this level can we observe what utterances and emotions achieve208 for the people who construct them209.
Considering emotion and language in this light has the potential to contribute to theoretical frameworks for emotion and address key knowledge gaps. A central goal of many prominent emotion theories is the development of emotion typologies, according to which specific categories should be reliably distinguished on the basis of their concomitant behaviors, situations, appraisals, and more148,210,211,212,213,214. These typologies abstract away from the expansive variation and situated nuance of lived experiences by classifying them via labels25,26. Recent updates to typological theories describe a larger number of emotions with fuzzy rather than discrete boundaries, underscoring the high dimensionality of the semantic space of emotion215. Our approach is consistent with this emphasis on complexity yet departs from its inherent focus on categories. Instead of centering the emotion words people use (or categories that might otherwise be inferred from natural language), we propose an examination, via language, of the processes that support emotional meaning and experience. Rather than abstracting away from the details of lived experiences, attention, construal, and appraisal unfold over time and are deeply rooted in context. These characteristics expand our capacity for capturing the situational, personal, and cultural shaping of emotion and meaning that is too often neglected in emotion science11,216,217.
Achieving this goal entails the integration of concepts and methods from socio-, cognitive, and computational linguistics with discursive, cognitive, and emotion psychology. The empirical approach we have laid out in this perspective does this by targeting specific features of language and testing their relation to psychological mechanisms that give rise to emotion. In most cases, these language features can be identified automatically in text using existing software programs (e.g., LIWC) or NLP scripts in widely-used programming languages (e.g., Python, R). Manual annotation may still prove necessary for features corresponding with attentional motifs and appraisal dimensions, although automated tools are rapidly becoming available64,218. More generally, the kind of bottom-up, feature-based research that we have proposed is not the only way to approach psychological language analysis. It is also possible to work top-down, by first identifying a set of psychological features in data (i.e., through manual annotation) and then characterizing the consistent language features. This approach has a long history and is gaining traction through recent advances in explainable AI, where feature inputs are assessed for their contributions to otherwise opaque models (e.g., transformer-based neural networks like BERT219,220), and in generative AI, which enables computers to do qualitative labeling instead of humans221,222. Computer annotation of emotion, for example, is mostly of similar quality to human annotation223,224, with the major caveat that models are primarily trained on US English texts, and so give annotations consistent with an average American225,226. As such, both bottom-up and top-down approaches to psychological language analysis can contribute to explanations of process.
There are many potential expansions on the present recommendations, as well. A complete picture of emotion and language as systems of meaning requires situating them in context. This context can be physical, such as when emotion and language vary as a function of location227,228,229,230. This context can be social, based on who is communicating with whom, and their individual and relational characteristics—how old, extraverted, or close are they56,231,232,233; what power dynamics govern their interaction234,235,236,237, etc. Context can also be cultural, described in terms of the social and psychological patterns that organize shared reality238,239,240. The context of emotion and language becomes more multifaceted still when we examine them across different styles or registers187,241, in conversation70,242,243, or with reference to paralinguistic cues or channels of communication such as vocal intonation, facial movements, or gestures244,245,246,247. Truly dialogic and embedded research on how emotional meaning is made in language opens new horizons for future work, leading toward answers for basic and applied questions alike. If emotional meaning is assembled through continuous engagement with the physical, social, and linguistic environment, then shedding light on the assembly process can reveal patterns that confer vulnerability or resilience to disorders67,179,216,248 and may even enable us to intervene on (or bolster) these patterns. In this way, the present approach could ultimately inform clinical and translational aims to promote health and well-being.
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This work was supported by funding from the European Commission (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship 892379 to K.H.) and the European Research Council (Advanced Grant 83458 to B.M.) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. This work was also supported by funding from the Research Foundation—Flanders (FWO 12A3923N to K.H.). This paper reflects only the authors’ views; the funders had no role in the preparation of the manuscript or decision to publish; the European Commission and European Research Council are not liable for any use that may be made of the contained information.
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K.H., Y.L. and È.D. reviewed the literature and drafted the manuscript. S.D., L.U., D.G. and B.M. reviewed the manuscript and revised it together with K.H. All authors approved the final version.
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Hoemann, K., Lee, Y., Dussault, È. et al. The construction of emotional meaning in language. Commun Psychol 3, 99 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-025-00255-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-025-00255-0
