Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling (Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction)

Many researchers claim that emotions arise either from human biology (i.e., biological reductionism) or as products of culture (i.e., social constructionism). Are human emotions best characterized as biological, psychological, or cultural entities? Zoltan Kovecses demonstrates how cultural aspects, metaphorical language, and human physiology are part of an integrated system. This book challenges the simplistic division between the body and culture by stressing how human emotions are to a large extent "constructed" from individuals' embodied experiences in different cultural settings. Hb ISBN (2000): 0-521-64163-2

Are human emotions best characterized as biological, psychological, or cultural entities? Many researchers claim that emotions arise either from human biology (i.e., biological reductionism) or as products of culture (i.e., social constructionism). This book challenges this simplistic division between the body and culture by showing how human emotions are to a large extent "constructed" from individuals' embodied experiences in different cultural settings. The view proposed here demonstrates how cultural aspects of emotions, metaphorical language about the emotions, and human physiology in emotion are all part of an intergrated system and shows how this system points to the reconciliation of the seemingly contradictory views of biological reductionism and social constructionism in contemporary debates about human emotion.