Human Emotions: Conceptualization, Categorization, and Linguistic Manifestation

Abstract

This paper focuses on human emotions, in view of how human emotions are conceptualized, categorized, and manifested in natural language, from the perspective of the componential appraisal theory of emotion in the first place. The nature of emotion is discussed; the components and functions of emotion are examined. Scientific literature is reviewed on the issue of differentiating emotion from the other types of affect. Feeling as one of the components of emotion proper is individuated in terms of qualia, bearing on phenomenology of human emotions. Certain ways of distributing emotion concepts into emotion categories are shown, based on the linguistic manifestations of these concepts; the key role that language plays in the formation of emotion concepts is emphasized. Basic emotions are characterized in terms of their universal biological nature that is independent of the variety of human languages and cultures. Verbal report on emotions is shown to rely on the cognitive mechanism of awareness and on linguistic naming; virtues and vices of this report are discussed. Emotion qualia are shown to emerge or transform with the emergence or transformation of the words that denote respective emotions, as a unique testimony of the dynamics of emotions in synchrony and in diachrony.