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.
Related pages
- Idiomatic, Literal and Figurative Communication
- Embodied Cognition
- Containers
- Burdens
- Pressure, Compression and Explosion