Language and Emotion

Language and emotion have tight links - we used language to transport our own emotions, but language can also evoke emotions (think about someone crying when reading a particularly moving passage in a book). In this seminar we will read and discuss psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic studies investigating the links between language and emotion. We will learn that even single words have evoke certain emotions, we will look at the neurocognitive processing of literary texts and we will have a look at studies investigating whether emotional involvement is equally strong in a foreign language as in the native language. These are but a few possible topics, the contents can be adapted to the specific interests of the students, as long as they pertain to the overall topic language and emotion.