At the Neural Intersection Between Language and Emotion

What role does language play in emotion? Behavioral research shows that emotion words such as "anger" and "fear" alter emotion experience, but questions still remain about mechanism. Here, we review the neuroscience literature to examine whether neural processes associated with semantics are also involved in emotion. Our review suggests that brain regions involved in the semantic processing of words: (i) are engaged during experiences of emotion, (ii) coordinate with brain regions involved in affect to create emotions, (iii) hold representational content for emotion, and (iv) may be necessary for constructing emotional experience. We relate these findings with respect to four theoretical relationships between language and emotion, which we refer to as "non-interactive," "interactive," "constitutive," and "deterministic." We conclude that findings are most consistent with the interactive and constitutive views with initial evidence suggestive of a constitutive view, in particular. We close with several future directions that may help test hypotheses of the constitutive view.