The construction of emotional meaning in language

The experience of emotion is a form of meaning-making: it encapsulates one’s relationship to the circumstances. Certain concerns are put in focus; one sees oneself and events from a particular perspective; events are evaluated along a set of relevant dimensions. These three processes – attention, construal, and appraisal – are key to understanding how emotional meaning is assembled in context. In this perspective, we illustrate their importance for the science of emotion and propose means of studying them through language. Our interdisciplinary approach seeks to move the field beyond the words that label emotions, to a higher-dimensional, dynamical account of emotional meaning.