ArticleFrontiers in psychology2015
The role of language in emotion: predictions from psychological constructionism.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 87 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
87 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The role of language in the experience and perception of emotion: a neuroimaging meta-analysis.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2017Pooled it
- Effect of attention bias modification on depressive affect.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- Self-administered mindfulness interventions reduce stress in a large, randomized controlled multi-site study.Nature human behaviour · 2024Trial
- Sorting out emotions: How labels influence emotion categorization.Developmental psychology · 2022Trial
- Emotion in English as a foreign language: Affective ratings for over 2,000 words by college learners.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Improving the comparability of momentary affect assessments and accounting for item-specific effects in within-person affect dynamics.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Brief speech samples reveal emotional states in daily life.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Putting Emotional Memories in Context: The Constructionist Model of Emotional Memory.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2026Review
- Processing of Emotional Words in Children and Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2026Article
- Age of Acquisition Effect in Second Language Emotion Word Recognition: A Cross-Task Validation.Journal of psycholinguistic research · 2026Article
- Emotion-specific vocabulary is associated with preschoolers' emotion knowledge and behavioral emotion regulation.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Dynamic emotion fabric theory: a new framework for understanding the biology of flexible emotion states.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Review
- The unity of sense and mind: A review of cross-domain mapping.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Conscious experience and emotion: an attention-based account.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- Article
- Parent-reported emotion regulation in children with dyslexia and/or developmental language disorder.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Combining psychoanalytic concepts and computer science methodologies: an empirical study of the relationship between emotions and the Lacanian discourses.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Patterns of emotional expression during the formation of egocentric awareness in early childhood: a case study.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Children's emotion word knowledge is associated with adaptive emotion regulation: Links to family-level and child-level factors.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2025Article
- The Impact of Violence Exposure and Posttraumatic Stress on the Academic Functioning of Latine Middle School Students: The Moderating Role of Language Use.Journal of latinx psychology · 2025Article
27 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Common sense suggests that emotions are physical types that have little to do with the words we use to label them. Yet recent psychological constructionist accounts reveal that language is a fundamental element in emotion that is constitutive of both emotion experiences and perceptions. According to the psychological constructionist Conceptual Act Theory (CAT), an instance of emotion occurs when information from one's body or other people's bodies is made meaningful in light of the present situation using concept knowledge about emotion. The CAT suggests that language plays a role in emotion because language supports the conceptual knowledge used to make meaning of sensations from the body and world in a given context. In the present paper, we review evidence from developmental and cognitive science to reveal that language scaffolds concept knowledge in humans, helping humans to acquire abstract concepts such as emotion categories across the lifespan. Critically, language later helps individuals use concepts to make meaning of on-going sensory perceptions. Building on this evidence, we outline predictions from a psychological constructionist model of emotion in which language serves as the "glue" for emotion concept knowledge, binding concepts to embodied experiences and in turn shaping the ongoing processing of sensory information from the body and world to create emotional experiences and perceptions.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.