English Emotion Research Articles

Similar, not universal: the cognitive dimensions of conceptual prototypes of basic emotions in English and in Polish.

The current study explores the differences in conceptualisation of the prototypical basic emotion lexicalisations (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise) in English and in Polish. Measures of concreteness, imageability and context availability were collected and analysed across the six semantic categories of basic emotions, across different parts of speech and between the self-determined genders of the study participants. The initial results indicate that within these cognitive dimensions the conceptualisations of basic emotions in English and in Polish are only similar on the more general but not the higher levels of conceptualisation. The folk-psychological division between positive and negative emotions and the grammatical parts of speech reveal similar patterns in basic emotion concepts in both Polish and in English. However, on the higher levels of conceptualisations that include specific basic emotion semantic categories and self-identified gender, marked language-specific differences become apparent. Different negative emotions drive the statistical differences in Polish and in English, and the gender effects on the measures of concreteness, imageability and context availability are opposite from one language to the other. In other words, basic emotions may be broadly mutually intelligible, but not exactly the same when communicated across languages and cultures.

Acculturation, Perceptions about Seeking Mental Health Care, and Utilization of Mental Health Services among US-based South Asians.

To examine the relationship between acculturation, cultural perceptions surrounding mental health (MH) burden and utilization of MH services among South Asian (SA) adults in the United States. Cross-sectional study. Online survey. Four hundred five SA adults (≥18 years old) residing in the United States. Cross-sectional study of acculturation, attitudes toward MH burden, and MH service utilization was conducted via online survey. Multivariate logistic regression models were employed to understand how these factors were associated with MH service utilization. Utilization of MH services. Among the 405 participants, 49.0% identified as immigrants (75.1% Indian, 8% Bangladeshi, 5.5% Pakistani, and 3.8% from other SA countries). Current utilization of MH services was associated with comfort conversing in English (odds ration [OR]=5.99; 95% confidence interval [CI]=1.63, 27.02), having English-speaking peers (OR=3.80; 95% CI=1.12, 12.93), and having family (OR=2.37; 95% CI=1.21, 4.64) and peers (OR=5.64; 95% CI=1.71, 18.66) who used MH services. Participants with mostly SA peers (OR=0.48; 95% CI=0.23, 0.97) reported lower lifetime MH service utilization, and those with positive perceptions about MH burden reported higher lifetime utilization (OR=1.04; 95% CI=1.01, 1.09). Comfort expressing emotions in English, knowledge of family/peer MH service use, and type of social connections were associated with MH service utilization among SA immigrants. Interventions should aim to increase SA languages in which MH services are offered and to engage with SA communities to increase acceptance of MH service utilization.

Integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) and Deep Representations of Emotional Features for the Recognition and Evaluation of Emotions in Spoken English

This study is dedicated to developing an innovative method for evaluating spoken English by integrating large language models (LLMs) with effective space learning, focusing on the analysis and evaluation of emotional features in spoken language. Addressing the limitation of current spoken English evaluation software that primarily focuses on acoustic features of speech (such as pronunciation, frequency, and prosody) while neglecting emotional expression, this paper proposes a method capable of deeply recognizing and evaluating emotional features in speech. The core of the method comprises three main parts: (1) the creation of a comprehensive spoken English emotion evaluation dataset combining emotionally rich speech data synthesized using LLMs with the IEMOCAP dataset and student spoken audio; (2) an emotion feature encoding network based on transformer architecture, dedicated to extracting effective spatial features from audio; (3) an emotion evaluation network for the spoken English language that accurately identifies emotions expressed by Chinese students by analyzing different audio characteristics. By decoupling emotional features from other sound characteristics in spoken English, this study achieves automated emotional evaluation. This method not only provides Chinese students with the opportunity to improve their ability to express emotions in spoken English but also opens new research directions in the fields of spoken English teaching and emotional expression evaluation.

Exploring Chinese College Students’ Emotions in EFL Speaking Classrooms

This paper aims to report on Chinese college students’ emotions in English as a foreign language (EFL) speaking classrooms, including the trajectory of their emotions, and their perceived impacts of these emotions on their performances in class. Through conducting a case study among 12 Chinese college students and qualitatively analyzing the reflections and interview data collected over a semester, the present research, adopting the Positive Psychology perspective, reveals diverse emotions experienced by students in their EFL speaking classrooms. The emotions students felt were both complex and dynamic throughout the semester, and were found to interact with the changing internal and external factors, displaying a transition from the mixed emotions of excitement and anxiety to lower-intensity emotions (i.e., relaxation and boredom), and finally becoming inter-individually varied. As for the impacts of students’ emotions, students believed that both positive and negative emotions were associated with their performances in class. The present study suggests that much attention should be paid to EFL college students’ emotions in speaking classrooms both by themselves and by their teachers, and provides some possible sources of their emotions. In order to enhance students’ psychological well-being and achieve better teaching effects, this study also recommends pedagogical practices that boost positive emotions and reduce negative emotions to be incorporated into EFL speaking classes.

Old English emotion is temperature: Cultural influences on a universal experience

In recent years, the study of emotion metaphors and metonymies has broadened our understanding of how people conceptualise and verbalise their emotional experiences. While some emotion source domains appear to be culture-specific, others are widely employed to denominate the same emotion. One of these potentially universal source domains, temperature, appears to be widely used by speakers from different areas to derive figurative expressions for positive and negative emotions. However, the systematic study of this emotion source domain remains uncharted territory, and numerous fundamental questions about the relations between emotions and temperature remain untouched. This study aims at approaching the question of whether, and to what extent, the motif emotion is temperature illustrates the existence of a universalist embodiment model or, on the contrary, it is a result of historical and cultural variation. With this aim, using cognitive semantic methodology, I will scrutinize the complete corpus of Old English texts (850-1100) to provide a fine-grained analysis of the expressions for positive emotions rooted in the source domain high body temperature used by Old English authors. Generally speaking, this source domain indicates negative experience, which is why it has normally been studied in the context of negative (and, in consequence, unpleasant) emotional experiences. However, as the findings of this study show, the existence in Old English of the conceptual mapping positive emotion is high body temperature challenges our previous understanding of temperature metaphors as a product of universal embodiment, thus contributing to the current debate on metaphors as culture loaded expressions.

Language access differentially alters functional connectivity during emotion perception across cultures.

It is often assumed that the ability to recognize the emotions of others is reflexive and automatic, driven only by observable facial muscle configurations. However, research suggests that accumulated emotion concept knowledge shapes the way people perceive the emotional meaning of others' facial muscle movements. Cultural upbringing can shape an individual's concept knowledge, such as expectations about which facial muscle configurations convey anger, disgust, or sadness. Additionally, growing evidence suggests that access to emotion category words, such as "anger," facilitates access to such emotion concept knowledge and in turn facilitates emotion perception. To investigate the impact of cultural influence and emotion concept accessibility on emotion perception, participants from two cultural groups (Chinese and White Americans) completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning session to assess functional connectivity between brain regions during emotion perception. Across four blocks, participants were primed with either English emotion category words ("anger," "disgust") or control text (XXXXXX) before viewing images of White American actors posing facial muscle configurations that are stereotypical of anger and disgust in the United States. We found that when primed with "disgust" versus control text prior to seeing disgusted facial expressions, Chinese participants showed a significant decrease in functional connectivity between a region associated with semantic retrieval (the inferior frontal gyrus) and regions associated with semantic processing, visual perception, and social cognition. Priming the word "anger" did not impact functional connectivity for Chinese participants relative to control text, and priming neither "disgust" nor "anger" impacted functional connectivity for White American participants. These findings provide preliminary evidence that emotion concept accessibility differentially impacts perception based on participants' cultural background.

Trends in the development of vocabulary for emotion and cognition in English: A millennial perspective

Existing research has shown that there is much variation in diachronic development and borrowability rates across different semantic fields in English, but most work up to now has focused on specialized or technical vocabulary, rather than fields associated with how people express and conceptualize their feelings and thoughts. While some studies have explored the historical evolution of the emotion lexicon (e.g., Diller [2014]) and, to a lesser extent, the cognition lexicon (e.g., Kiricsi [2010]), the contrastive study of these semantic categories has yet to be a focus in the research landscape. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the development of the cognition and emotion lexicon over a period of thousand years, from Old to Present-Day English. We compare the emergence of words in these two semantic fields across three key dimensions: semantic subfields, source languages of roots and morphological structure. For this purpose, we created a sample of approx. 1400 nouns on the basis of the Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE; categories: 02.01 mental capacity and 02.04 emotion) and analysed their etymology with the help of the Oxford English Dictionary. To annotate the lexical items in our sample, we used the methods of formal-morphological analysis (e.g., Tyschenko [2003]; Krykoniuk [2022]) and semantic analysis (e.g., Pons-Sanz [2022]; HTE [2023]). We analyse our sample with clustering techniques (i.e., Principal Component Analysis and Correspondence Analysis) to determine general trends across the two lexicons (e.g. a greater involvement of Latin roots and compounding in the formation of the cognition lexicon, and Norse-derived roots and conversion in coinage of nouns referring to emotion), as well as specific features of each period of the English language (e.g. the significant impact that the Middle English period had on the lexicalization of memory, fear, compassion, pleasure and suffering, and the early integration of French-derived terms, as suggested by word-formation processes).

Translating Persian Emotion into English Subtitles from a Semantic Perspective: A Case of Persian Films

Abstract A matter of great concern in audiovisual translation is considering how the emotion words can be conveyed. Creating emotional adaptability, in addition to language proficiency, cultural sensitivity, and technical aptitude is a necessary skill for every subtitler. This study analyzed, through the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) method, the compatibility of the corresponding emotion words/concepts in the original (English) and subtitled versions (Persian) of ten Persian films based on Johnson-Laird and Oatley’s (1989) coherent categories and basic emotions, as well as the semantic explications. According to the results, the subtitles into Persian of the English emotion words/concepts were categorized into eleven categories, with ‘same source and target emotions’ as the most frequent category. This confirmed the efficiency of the NSM method and deemed it an efficient toolkit for subtitling emotion words/concepts, particularly the culture-specific ones. Accordingly, a three-level model was proposed for analyzing the ‘emotional adaptability’ of emotional pairs across languages. Keywords: Audiovisual Translation, Emotion words/Concepts, Natural Semantic Metalanguage, Subtitling.

Assessing Emotions in Learning English as a Second Language Among Pre- Service Teachers

Assessing Emotions in Learning English as a Second Language Among Pre- Service Teachers

Emotional Expression and Information Communication in English Texts Based on Artificial Intelligence Technology

Abstract This paper firstly researches English text emotion expression and information communication, classifies English text emotion expression and information communication according to the human emotion-value relationship, and summarizes the characteristics of English emotion expression and information communication. Secondly, using artificial intelligence technology, it is proposed to construct an analysis model for English text emotion and information communication using the BiLSTM neural network. To deal with the characteristics of English text quickly and efficiently, it is necessary to encode the emotional information of English text, and based on encoding, the BiLSTM neural network is applied to extract the emotional features of English text and solve the problem of the loss of emotional features through the loss function. Then, the crawler tool is used to obtain the dataset from the Chinese English module under the MOOC of Chinese universities, and the evaluation indexes are set according to the model’s performance, followed by the experimental analysis of the English text emotion expression and information conveyance. The results show that compared with the original CNN, LSTM, and T-LSTM, the BiLSTM-based neural network performs better in the task of text emotion expression and information conveyance, with the accuracy rate staying above 0.925, and the effect on the English dataset is a bit better than that on the Chinese dataset. This study aims to enhance English teaching and communication between Chinese and foreign cultures.

Examining the influence of foreign language anxiety on organizational strategies and foreign language proficiency in Chinese secondary EFL learners

Academic anxiety is one of the prominent emotions in learning English as a foreign language (EFL), and its impact on foreign language proficiency (FLP) has been extensively documented. However, the mediating effect of cognitive strategies between foreign language anxiety (FLA) and FLP has rarely been explored. In a sample of 524 Chinese secondary school students, the present study investigated the linkage between FLA, organizational strategies, and FLP. Structural equation modelling (SEM) and mediation analysis were conducted, and three findings were identified. First, FLA was negatively correlated with the use of organizational strategies. Second, the negative correlation between FLA and FLP was identified. Third, organizational strategies fully mediated the association between FLA and FLP after controlling for gender and age. Exploring the mediating mechanism between FLA and FLP might help EFL educators take intervention measures to alleviate the negative impact of FLA on foreign language learning. Limitations and directions for future research are discussed.

FOREIGN LANGUAGE ANXIETY REDUCES CHINESE SECONDARY EFL LEARNERS’ ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGIES AND PROFICIENCY

Academic anxiety is one of the prominent emotions in learning English as a foreign language (EFL), and its impact on foreign language proficiency (FLP) has been extensively documented. However, the mediating effect of cognitive strategies between foreign language anxiety (FLA) and FLP has rarely been explored. In a sample of 524 Chinese secondary school students, the study investigated the linkage between FLA, organizational strategies, and FLP. Structural equation modeling (SEM) and mediation analysis were conducted, and three findings were identified. First, FLA was negatively correlated with the use of organizational strategies. Second, the negative correlation between FLA and FLP was identified. Third, organizational strategies fully mediated the association between FLA and FLP after controlling for gender and age. Exploring the mediating mechanism between FLA and FLP might help EFL educators take intervention measures to alleviate the negative impact of FLA on foreign language learning. Limitations and directions for future research are discussed.

Emotions and the archaic consciousness of man: a diachronic semantic reconstruction of the names of emotions in English

This paper works with the diachronic depth of concepts in national worldview, and is a piece of panchronic research that respects the stages in evolution of human consciousness, as it looks at diachronic depth of emotion concepts in English worldview, in the case of diachronic semantic reconstruction of the nouns fear, sadness, happiness, and serenity that in Modern English manifest the FEAR, SADNESS, HAPPINESS, and SERENITY concepts. Etymons of the nouns were identified in Old English as fær, hæp, sæd, and in Old French as serenité. These etymons are words, and also are signs for certain phenomena on the map of archaic world represented in the mind; these signs were reconstructed via etymological analyses from the Proto-Indo-European archetypes *pēr-, *kap-, *sá-, and *ksero-. Next, the archaic images that came to motivate the words fær, hæp, sæd, and serenité at the time of creation were reconstructed and shown via etymological interpretations organized into matrices relative to sacred rituals of pagans in whose mind the world was represented with the help of images as symbols for certain phenomena of this world. Interpretations within each matrix unfold into a mythical story narrated with reference to symbolism of pagan rituals in the archaic worldview.

Positive and Negative Emotions of High School Students in Learning English through Google Classroom

Google classroom is one of teaching media commonly used by teachers in online English learning system recently. Its use brings various emotions among students. This narrative study aims to explore students’ emotions in learning English through Google Classroom and how these emotions influence English learning. Data were garnered from semi-structure interviews, and analyzed by using the concept from Braun & Clarke. The analysis of the collected data showed that there are positive and negative emotions felt by students, and these emotions influence their English learning. The positive emotions include pleasure, hope, pride, and relief, while the negative emotions include anger, anxiety, shame, hopelessness, and boredom. These emotions in language learning make the students be able to learn all the time (anywhere and anytime) and increase their grades. On the other hand, it also brings them to be reluctant to study, not focus in the learning process, and less interested in learning.

Basic Emotion Prototypes in English and in Polish

Abstract This paper explores the conceptualization differences between the prototypical categories of six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise) in English and Polish lexicalizations of these concepts in noun, verb, and adjective forms. Measures of valence, arousal, and dominance were collected and analyzed across the six semantic categories, between parts of speech and depending on the gender of the study participants for both languages. The results indicate that the basic emotion prototypes in both languages have common characteristics hinging broadly on valence but have unique language-specific patterns of valence, arousal, and dominance across individual emotion categories. Conceptualizations of emotions were found to be different between men and women and across languages, while language-specific patterns were found in part-of-speech effects. These results have serious implications for future study designs and research methodology at the intersection of cognition, emotion, and language and in cross-linguistic contexts.

Social-functional characteristics of Chinese terms translated as “shame” or “guilt”: a cross-referencing approach

ABSTRACT Previous research has found a rich lexicon of shame and guilt terms in Chinese, but how comparable these terms are to “shame” or “guilt” in English remains a question. We identified eight commonly used Chinese terms translated as “shame” and “guilt”. Study 1 assessed the Chinese terms’ intensities, social characteristics, and action tendencies among 40 Chinese speakers. Testing term production in the reverse direction, Study 2 asked another Chinese-speaking sample (N = 85) to endorse emotion terms in response to eight eliciting scenarios generated using each term’s social characteristics from Study 1. A native English-speaking sample (N = 83) was also included to examine the production of English emotion terms and compare motivational tendencies cross-culturally. Using this cross-referencing method, we found that some of the Chinese terms shared similar social-functional characteristics to their English translation, but some had distinct profiles. The two large shame-like and guilt-like term categories yielded in Study 1 were replicated in Study 2’s Chinese term-production task where larger-scale correspondences between categorised elicitors and term clusters were found. Meanwhile, English speakers’ term use provided further evidence for the equivalence between some Chinese terms and “shame” or “guilt” both in terms of their social and motivational characteristics.

Motivations of Volunteering during Crises—Perspectives of Polish Youths during the Ukrainian Refugee Crisis

Volunteering work has always played a key role in dealing with crises around the world. Understanding the motivations behind volunteering during a crisis could not only explain such behaviour but also become a guide for the government for future policies, to non-governmental organizations for attracting and recruiting more volunteers, for companies to attract and engage young talent and for society to encourage volunteering more. The present military conflict between Russia and Ukraine has resulted in an influx of over six million Ukrainian refugees in Poland. Given the phenomenal response of Polish people towards welcoming the Ukrainian refugees and, in general, the favourable attitude of the youth in Poland towards extending humanitarian aid to them, our present study examines the motivations of Polish youths behind volunteering during crises. The study also examined how volunteering has influenced their lives and future, besides understanding the barriers to volunteering. The research participants were Polish youths aged between 17–30 years of age. The participants were from both genders, students as well as working professionals. To take part, they had to prove that they took an active role in volunteering during a crisis and were able to share their personal stories and emotions in English. The findings of the research revealed normative, hedonic, eudaimonic and personal motivators behind volunteering during crises, with greater dominance of hedonic motivators, followed by normative, then eudaimonic and personal motivators. The influence of a mix of collectivist and individualistic cultures of Poland, with a progressive lean towards individualism, is clear in shaping the motivations behind the volunteering of these Polish youths. The role of intrinsic motivation is more pronounced when it comes to volunteering during crises.

Emotion Word Processing in Immersed Spanish-English/English-Spanish Bilinguals: An ERP Study

We conducted a lexical decision task to measure Spanish-English/English-Spanish bilinguals’ behavioral (RT) and electrophysiological (EPN, Early Posterior Negativity and LPC, Late Positive Complex) responses to English emotion words and their Spanish translation equivalents. Bilingual participants varied in age of acquisition (AoA of Spanish/English: early, late), language status (L1 Spanish, L1 English) and language dominance (English-dominant, Spanish-dominant, balanced) but were all highly immersed bicultural individuals, uniformly more proficient in English than Spanish. Behavioral data showed faster and more accurate responses to English than Spanish targets; however, the emotion effect was only present for Spanish, with positive Spanish words recognized significantly faster than those that were negative or neutral. In the electrophysiological data, the emotion response was affected by language of the target stimulus, with English targets eliciting larger EPN amplitudes than Spanish targets. The reverse effect was found on the LPC component, where Spanish targets elicited a higher positivity than English targets. Dominance did not turn out to be a significant predictor of bilingual performance. Results point to the relevance of proficiency in modulating bilingual lexical processing and carry implications for experimental design when examining immersed bilinguals residing in codeswitching environments.

Studying Legal Persuasion and Emotion in Spanish and English: An Advocate General’s Dismissal of the Rule-of-law Challenge by Hungary and Poland

The present work examines the role of persuasive lexicon in legal discourse through the analysis of emotional devices at a lexical and rhetorical level. Our preliminary premise is that emotion is deployed by experts to convey the sentiment of shared values and epistemic trust: the need to rely on the tenets of the law as fair and conducive to the common good. The corpus of our study is constituted by the conclusions in their original Spanish, and their translation into English, by the Advocate General Manuel Campos on the challenge by Hungary and Poland of the regulation establishing a “conditionality regime” in the event of a rule-of-law breach in a EU Member State. To this end, we undertake a two-pronged analysis of legal persuasion to find out what emotional devices are deployed to convey the rule-of-law principles of justice, non-discrimination, equality and solidarity. At a first stage, we concentrate upon the polarity and intensity of emotion words and their categories. Emotional implicatures in the shape of legal technolects and metaphorical ontologies and the way they are deployed in each text constitutes the second part of our study. Among our conclusions are that both the original and target texts have a strong persuasive character, mainly grounded in the negative emotion of fear and the positive emotion of trust, and that there are variances in the emotional language deployed in either version due to the different mechanics of each law system and to functional differences between English and Spanish.

Analysis of Multimedia Combination-Assisted English Teaching Mode Based on Computer Platform

English is an important international language. Whether it is international economic or international political communication, it is inseparable from English. English teaching is mainly to impart the basic knowledge of English as well as the knowledge of audiovisual knowledge. However, the traditional English teaching mode often ignores the expression of English emotion and the background of English. The traditional English teaching mode often uses textbooks and other forms to impart knowledge, which can no longer meet the English teaching in today’s era. Computer-aided systems have become an important technology in the field of teaching today. Multimedia technology can also show English knowledge to students in the form of video or audio. This will increase students’ interest in learning English. This research will use computer platform and multimedia technology to build a new English teaching platform. It also uses the ConvLSTM algorithm and the CF algorithm to implement the active recommendation function of English knowledge. The research results show that multimedia technology can achieve the purpose of collecting video and audio information in the process of English teaching. The CF algorithm has a specific high similarity index in recommending English knowledge. The ConvLSTM method can also better predict the characteristics of English grammar and English emotion in the English teaching process. This can also show that the multimedia-assisted English teaching mode has a certain use value for different English teaching scenarios.