Metaphors of Emotion

Metaphors of Emotion is Andrew T. Austin's exploration of the language used to describe emotional experience, developed in connection with Metaphors of Movement. It considers how expressions of weight, containment, temperature, pressure and injury give form to experiences that are otherwise difficult to describe.

Common forms of emotional description

• Weight and burden: "weighed down by worry" or "carrying guilt" presents an experience as a load.
• A person as a container: "full of joy" or "bottling up anger" places something within the person.
• An emotion as a surrounding state: "in love" or "in despair" places the person within a state.
• Temperature: "boiling with anger" or "a warm welcome" uses heat and cold to describe a reaction or relationship.
• Pressure: "under pressure" or "ready to burst" suggests force, capacity or constraint.
• Injury: "hurt", "crushed" or "torn apart" describes distress through bodily damage. See Hurts.

These forms can overlap. "Bottling up anger", for example, involves containment and may also suggest pressure. The list describes patterns of language, not separate types of people.

Why the wording matters

An emotion label and a description of an experience provide different information. Two people can both say they are upset while describing very different situations. Equally, similar images can have different meanings for different speakers.

"Crushed" and "weighed down" share an association with force or weight, but they do not describe exactly the same event. Replacing one with the other can lose a distinction the speaker has made. The same care applies to an idiom: a familiar phrase is only relevant when it fits the description and context.

Interpretation and context

An emotional metaphor expresses a person's experience; it does not automatically establish its cause, identify another person's intentions or prescribe a therapeutic response. The wording should therefore remain connected to the speaker's account rather than treated as a code with a fixed translation.

This page provides an overview of the language. Claims about the effectiveness of a therapeutic intervention require their own evidence and do not follow from identifying a metaphor.

Research example: taste and emotional words

Zhou and Tse's 2020 study examined associations between taste words and words naming or evoking emotions. Across four studies with 357 participants, sweetness was mainly associated with positive words, while bitterness, followed by sourness and spiciness, was mainly associated with negative words. Participants were Cantonese-speaking university students in Hong Kong. Yanyun Zhou and Chi-Shing Tse, “The Taste of Emotion: Metaphoric Association Between Taste Words and Emotion/Emotion-Laden Words”, Frontiers in Psychology 11:986 (2020), abstract and methods.

The tasks used word associations and ratings. Participants were not being fed different tastes to establish changes in emotion. The distinction matters: an association between words is evidence about language and judgement under those conditions, not proof that the corresponding taste changes a person's mood.

The paper also distinguishes an emotion word from an emotion-laden word: naming a feeling and naming something that evokes a feeling are different linguistic acts. This is useful when comparing descriptions of emotional experience with descriptions of events, places or objects that carry emotional significance.

For complementary approaches, Metaphor in Literature and Creativity discusses sensory description, while Metaphor in Therapeutic Conversation examines how patients and therapists use and interpret imagery. Further sources are collected in the Metaphor Research Library.

Kövecses: emotion as force and a cultural model

Zoltán Kövecses's Metaphor and Emotion is a separate research contribution to the study of emotional language. In chapter 5, he examines how apparently different descriptions of emotion can organise relationships between a force, something affected by it, resistance and a resulting response. This is background scholarship alongside the account introduced above, rather than a description or validation of Austin's method.

His analysis distinguishes two relationships that can easily be blurred: an event described as causing an emotion, and an emotion described as producing a response. In the constructed sentence “The news sparked her anger”, the event initiates a state. In “Anger drove her to protest”, the emotion becomes a motivating force. The second account assigns the emotion a causal role within the description; it does not independently prove why the person acted.

What a pressure image adds

A pressure model can combine several correspondences: the person is a container, emotion is something within it, and increasing intensity becomes increasing pressure. Resistance and the boundary's capacity then become relevant to how a response is described.

Constructed wording	Relationship foregrounded	Detail that should remain open
“The criticism lit the fuse.”	An event begins a possible sequence.	Is a later response described, anticipated or merely feared?
“She kept a lid on her irritation.”	Containment and restraint.	Does the account concern outward expression, felt intensity or both?
“Relief washed through him.”	Movement of a substance through a person.	What changes during the movement, and where does it end?
“Worry followed me home.”	A pursuing or accompanying agent.	Is the relationship threatening, persistent or otherwise specified?

These examples illustrate linguistic contrasts. They are not categories of people or observations of an underlying physical fluid. A container may be full without being pressurised, and an emotion may be intense without the speaker describing an explosion. Adding unspoken heat, confinement or damage can change the account being analysed.

Description does not establish a mechanism

Kövecses calls attention to a language-based folk model, including expectations about causes, emotional states, control and responses. Studying that model can show how an experience becomes intelligible within a community. It is a different undertaking from establishing the physiology of emotion or testing an intervention.

For example, a pressure metaphor may make release seem like an obvious next event. The linguistic inference alone does not demonstrate that a particular way of expressing anger improves wellbeing. An account that moves from figurative structure to a claim about beneficial action needs additional evidence for that step.

Body, culture and individual variation

Kövecses's broader argument connects embodied experience with cultural interpretation. In his later work on context, he also notes that an opponent image can describe illness, tasks and other difficulties, as well as emotion. A source image is therefore not a unique label for one feeling.

An entry about emotional language should preserve the named emotion, the image, the surrounding event and the speaker's qualification of it. If two people use a similar image, record whether their accounts give it the same direction, intensity, agency and outcome. Personification and Agency and Force Dynamics: Pressure, Resistance and Release develop these comparisons; Metaphor Across Languages and Cultures examines variation at several levels.

Related pages

• Idiomatic, Literal and Figurative Communication
• Embodied Cognition
• Containers
• Burdens
• Pressure, Compression and Explosion

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