Metaphorical and literal profiling in the study of emotions

This paper focuses on the conceptualization of anger as viewed from two disciplinary perspectives: Conceptual Metaphor Theory and emotion psychology. In the first study, twenty varieties of anger lexicalized in three languages (English, Russian, and Spanish) are characterized using the Metaphorical Profile Approach, a quantitative corpus-based assessment of the meaning of emotion words in metaphorical contexts. In the second study, the same set of lexemes is analyzed using a psycholinguistic feature-rating instrument adapted to the study of near-synonyms. Our results demonstrate congruence of the two methods in unveiling the internal organization of the anger family of terms in each language, and the reasons for this organization. In particular, the metaphorical and the feature-based profiles provide consistent insight about variation in bodily heat, expressiveness, regulation, action tendencies (aggression and drive to act), regulation, and the temporal characteristics of anger experiences. To conclude, we discuss the mutual complementarity of the two profiling methodologies and their relevance for a wider research context.