Experimental and theoretical investigations of affect in language and cognition

Affective content (e.g., emotion, valence, evaluatively, expressivity), plays a central role in our cognitive lives, though we often take it for granted. It influences our experience with the world, helping us to adapt by making positive or negative connections to things we encounter. It underlies our moral thinking, shaping how we determine our moral stance. It directs our interactions with others: when we encounter a speaker using emotive language, we learn something about them and ourselves. However, the systematic study of affect remains largely fragmented across psychology, linguistics and philosophy. The goal of this course is to discuss the treatment of affect across these disciplines, with a focus on how they can inform each other in the study of affective meaning. We further provide students with a practical introduction to research design and analysis through discussion of affect and the theoretical and empirical issues it raises.

There are several reasons for this disciplinary fragmentation. On the philosophical side, Enlightenment philosophy, typified by Cartesian dualism, set the stage for the dismissal of emotion, as part of the body, the animal and “baser” aspect of humanity; in contrast to the emphasis on the mind, reason and the “higher” aspect of humanity. Additionally, logical positivism asserted the importance of logic in the study of philosophy, equating it to an empirical science. Further, as the discipline of psychology matured, the positivists found a foothold through methodological behaviorism, rejecting unobservable mental states as legitimate psychological inquiry, and foregrounding observable behavior.

This was the intellectual context in which Frege, the godfather of the logical analysis of language and a referentialist about meaning, developed his Begriffsschrift. Affective meaning is inherently psychological; it tracks language users’ private and subjective attitudes. Thus, it is unsurprising that Frege rejected its relevance to the construction of an ideal formal language. Nonetheless, the methods for the formal analysis of natural language developed in the mid 20th century on the back of Frege’s work, with the melding of ideas from Tarski, Davidson, Montague, Lewis, and standardized in Heim and Kratzer (1998). In these now canonical views, Frege’s dismissal of the psychological aspects of meaning not only persisted but indeed reified in the methods themselves and the restrictions on permissible objects of inquiry. Although researchers have pointed out the empirical and theoretical flaws in this dismissal since the beginning, the attitude has remained largely unchallenged. However, the last 20 years of semantics research have seen a flourishing of interest in such phenomena, including recent proposals (e.g. by McCready 2020 on expressives, Cepollaro 2020 or Hess 2021 on slurs, and Jeshion 2021 for a taxonomy of pejorative meaning). Further, findings from psychology and cognitive science, experimental semantics and pragmatics have increasingly highlighted the prominence and function of affect in the determination of meaning.

Within psychology, the study of emotions was further fragmented within the behaviorist landscape. It wasn’t until the mid-20th century that emotional or affective meaning was addressed by psychologists. In 1957, Osgood and colleagues developed a measurement called the semantic differential, which placed all concepts in affective space, where the fundamental dimensions included valence, arousal and dominance. Subsequent models refined and expanded this dimensional view, although there remains ongoing tension between dimensional (e.g., Bradley & Lang, 1999), discrete (e.g., Ekman 1992), appraisal (Scherer & Moors 2019) and predictive models (e.g., Barret, 2017), including neuroscientific approaches (e.g., Lindquist et al. 2012). However, across these perspectives, valence consistently appears as a fundamental organising dimension, making it a natural bridge between psychological models of affect and linguistic theories of evaluative meaning.