Biodata of Cristina Soriano

Cristina Soriano is a senior scientist at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences (CISA), an interdisciplinary research center at the University of Geneva dedicated to the study of emotion. She studied English philology at the University of Murcia, where she earned a PhD in linguistics under the guidance of Prof. Antonio Barcelona. After completing research stays at UC Berkeley and in Hamburg, she returned to the University of Murcia as a junior lecturer. She later moved to the University of Geneva, where she conducts cross-cultural research on emotion language.

Soriano coordinated a significant international research project, the GRID project, which focused on the structure of lexicalized affective space and the meanings of emotion words across languages and cultures. This project resulted in numerous publications in linguistics and psychology journals, as well as a book published by Oxford University Press. She has expertise in using corpus-based methods to study conceptual metaphors and in employing psychological experimental approaches to test conceptual metaphor claims. Her publications cover topics such as the metaphorical representation of anger and its variants in English and other languages, the affective components of color and time representation, and the linguistic resources available for conveying affect.

More recently, Soriano has collaborated on research investigating the role of emotion in the use of creative metaphors by native (L1) and second-language (L2) speakers. At CISA, she also serves as the head of Education & Training.