Research on the relationship between language and emotion - A descriptive overview

The basic relationship between language and emotion is more and more present in research over the last decades. This chapter presents the field of research in a historical and current overview to open up new perspectives for future research. For this purpose, the authors analyse 500 studies on language and emotion published over the last hundred years. Furthermore, the sub-study analysis examines the methodology of 50 empirical studies on language acquisition in detail. Results hint at disciplinary differences in the choice of methods and subjects. There is a lack of subjects with deviant developmental states and in at-risk lifeworlds. This overview illustrates the necessity of approaches which deal in a complex way with both sides of the relationship between emotion and language.