Emotion and metaphor

Emotion is one of the most popular research topics of the past decades, giving rise to the emergence of the so-called “affective sciences” and the rise of “affectivism” in numerous domains (Dukes et al 2021). Traditionally, emotion has also been one of the most investigated areas in conceptual metaphor studies within cognitive linguistics. And indeed, the link between metaphor and emotion is a privileged one. To illustrate this point, I will discuss the importance of metaphor in the affective sciences, providing an overview of the ubiquitous presence of metaphor in the representation and study of affect. In addition, I will discuss the positive influence that the affective sciences can have on emotion metaphor research. To this end, I will present several methodological developments to render linguistic studies more interdisciplinarily minded, and I’ll provide examples of some of our collaborative work combining emotion psychology and metaphor research.