Multi-disciplinary research on the embodied conceptualization of emotions is characterized by a tension between emphasizing the common aspects of emotional experience across cultures, underpinned by universal human physiology, and the more specific aspects of that experience due to the constraining or amplifying influences of culture. The present paper explores this issue from a cognitive linguistic perspective, and, more specifically, from the theoretical standpoint of Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Looking at the ways in which three European languages (English, Russian, and Spanish) exploit THE BODY IS A CONTAINER
FOR ANGER metaphor, and drawing our conclusions from the statistical analysis of twenty thousand contexts of use of anger words from large general corpora, our study provides empirical support to the embodied cultural prototype view (Kövecses 2000a; Maalej 2004), according to which emotion conceptualization derives from both universal embodied experiences and more specific socio-cultural constructs. On the one hand, some aspects of the exploitation of the BODY IS A CONTAINER FOR ANGER metaphor are strikingly similar in the three languages studied. For example, in all three languages the BODY-CONTAINER metaphor is one of the central mappings in the general ANGER metaphorical system, enjoying no privileged status on any of them compared to the others. Furthermore, in all three languages the degree of exploitation of specific metaphorical CONTAINERS,like the EYES and the VOICE, contributes (along with other metaphors) to the internal organization of the entire
ANGER category, which comprises two very comparable clusters in the three languages.
Finally, our results also suggest that cross-lingual similarity in the exploitation of the BODY-CONTAINER metaphor applies not only to the general category of ANGER, but also to the translation pairs within.
On the other hand, our results highlight several meaningful patterns of cross-lingual variation, highly interpretable in the context of past work. Here, the findings emphasize the importance of culturally salient concepts for specific emotion localizations (such as Russian duša and English head/mind) and cross-lingual variance in the general tendency to represent emotions in specific bodily parts or more generically. Russian ANGER is more robustly exploited in metaphorical expressions with specific body-part localizations, as compared to English ANGER, which prefers a more general bodily representation. Finally, our results suggest that the exploitation across languages of the BODY-CONTAINER metaphor for ANGER correlates with specific cultural differences in social attitudes towards the outward manifestation of other-directed negative affect. In agreement with previously attested features of our lingual groups concerning individualistic vs collectivistic ‗cultural syndromes‘ (cf.
Triandis 1993), we find a stronger association with ‗external body parts‖ (promoting the visibility of anger) in English, and a stronger link with the ‗internal body parts‘ (promoting the internalized, non-perceptible aspects of anger) in Russian and Spanish.
The significance of the ‗metaphorical profile‘ approach advocated in the present paper is apparent in a number of domains. Firstly, the quantitative, bottom-up, data-driven methodology advanced in our study enriches the current palette of methodologies employed in Conceptual Metaphor Theory to investigate the embodied conceptualization of emotions.
More specifically, our method contributes to overcoming the observational, introspection-based approach that has traditionally characterized emotion metaphor studies and it illustrates the interdisciplinary potential of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (and cognitive linguistics, more generally) to provide insights comparable to those obtained in cross-cultural emotion psychology, cultural semantics, psychiatry, and psycholinguistics.
But our results do not merely converge with the findings in several of the affective sciences. More than that, they open up a platform for further research in those disciplines.
Firstly, our findings are relevant for psycho-physiological research on the facial and vocal expression of emotion. Our corpora data suggest that the most intense varieties of ANGER (such as English fury, rage, Spanish furia, or Russian jarost‟) are more profusely coded in metaphorical expressions associated to the EYES, as compared to other anger varieties more associated to the VOICE. Therefore, it would be of interdisciplinary interest to experimentally explore whether the facial recognition of ‗hot‘ anger (cf. Banse & Scherer 1996) is more
accurate than the recognition in the face of less aroused versions of the emotion, whereas
‗cold‘ anger varieties would be more accurately recognized in the vocal expression modality.
An experimental study involving German-speaking participants (Bänziger & et al. 2009) provides preliminary support to this possibility: in this study, ‗hot‘ anger was indeed found to be more accurately recognized in the visual channel than ‗cold‘ anger. Although the same held true for the vocal channel (i.e., ‗hot‘ anger was recognized better than ‗cold‘ anger in the voice as well), ‗cold‘ anger depictions were slightly better recognized from the voice than from the face (Bänziger et al. 2009: 697).
Our findings are also relevant for cross-cultural emotion psychology. The linguistic data highlight the possibility that the tendency to inhibit outward anger manifestation in collectivistic (as opposed to individualistic) societies might not necessarily concern all anger experiences, but be particularly relevant for the most virulent, socially-threatening, or poorly-controlled ones, like fury. By contrast, our findings on ‗indignation‘ and ‗justified anger‘
words in Spanish and Russian show that the cultural urge to regulate anger expression may be less pronounced when it comes to socially sanctioned, morally justified forms of anger—i.e., those that arise in response to serious violations of social, cultural, or moral prescriptions.
While anger in general is consensually viewed as more discouraged in collectivistic (compared to individualistic) societies (e.g., Briggs 1970; Bender et al. 2007; Kitayama et al.
2006; Myers 1979), there is hardly any research in current cross-cultural psychology exploring whether this general inhibiting tendency applies to all varieties of anger, or to the same extent (cf. Ogarkova in press). The results of our study suggest that these finer intra-categorical distinctions are worth attending to, and considering them in future studies could reasonably be expected to provide us with a more realistic and complete picture of the socially maintained practices regarding anger expression across cultures.
Thirdly and finally, our results offer interesting insights for the psycholinguistic research on emotion somatization. It has been shown by many relevant studies that salience in somatization has a clear quantitative dimension, being reflected in large numbers of somatic words in semi-structured interviews on emotional topics (Tsai et al. 2004) and the overpowering reference to body-parts in the discursive responses to emotional stimuli (Pavlenko 2002). As a complement, our results suggest that the qualitative aspects of the embodied codification of emotions, such as the use of more vs less specific designations in the bodily references to affective states, can be a legitimate aspect to look at in the study of somatization at large.
The findings of the present study emphatically highlight the idea that a meaningful investigation of emotion is best undertaken in a cross-disciplinary, mutually-informative, and cooperative fashion, combining insights from the many disciplines involved in the study of human affect. As the present study has hopefully demonstrated, cognitive linguistics is one of the most valuable disciplines in this enterprise and modern methods in conceptual metaphor analysis allow for the fruitful comparison of findings across disciplinary domains.
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