Emotion Discourse

Abstract

Discursive psychology is defined and illustrated in terms of how people describe and invoke emotions in everyday talk and text. Materials from counselling sessions and newspaper texts show how emotion descriptions are used in narrative accounts and explanations, both in building and in undermining the sensibility of a person’s actions. It is suggested that, rather than stemming from fixed cognitive scenarios that define what each emotion word means, emotion discourse deploys a flexible range of oppositions and contrasts that are put to service in the situated rhetoric of description and counter-description, narrative and counter-narrative. The rich variety and situated uses of emotion words and metaphors suggest a set of rhetorical affordances in which different parts or potentials of meaning, even contrasting ones for the same word, may be worked up and deployed. The article works with a tentative list of 10 rhetorical contrasts.