Language and Emotion

The research group on bilingual emotion works on understanding how emotion terms are understood, used and expressed in different languages. The team approaches the issue from different perspectives, combining experimental approaches from cognitive psychology, ethnographic interviews as well as utilizing different corpus to explain emotion terms crosslinguistically. The research also focuses on the different ways in which bilinguals negotiate emotion terms in the two (or more) languages they use. Are emotion words like ‘anger’, ‘shame’, ‘guilt’, ‘pride’ and ‘disgust’ understood the same way in different languages? How do languages shape our understanding of emotion words? How does shared understanding of emotion words connect us to our community and heritage?