[from Joel Judd 931007]
Bill (931003):
A complementary focus on emotions (and other language-expressed human
experience) has been pursued for some years by anthropological
linguists such as George Lakoff. Your posting on anger brought to mind
the following article:
Lakoff, G. & Kovecses, Z. (1987). The cognitive model of
anger inherent in American Engllish. in Holland and
Quinn (eds.) _Cultural Models in Language and Thought_,
195-221.
The paper is a revised version of one of the case studies in Lakoff's
_Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Reveal About the Mind_.
What I found interesting is that the "model" proposed in the article
contains the same aspects to anger that you mentioned, but arrived at
through the metaphors and metonymy English speakers use re: anger.
What they arrive at is a "prototypical scenario" which serves as
a culturally shared model for anger but which, in fact, may rarely
be experienced, in the same sense that we have a perceptual reference
for the lexeme 'dog' which is more or less satisfied by the creatures
we experience to which the label might be applied.
The scenario for anger is:
STAGE 1: offending event
this may be an event or a wrongdoer that displeases the
Self (S)
STAGE 2: anger
this is associated with physiological effects such as
increase in body temp, blood pressure rise, etc.
STAGE 3: attempt at control
STAGE 4: loss of control
STAGE 5: act of retribution
this is carried out in terms of the perceived "intensity
of offense" for the purpose of "balancing the scales."
I forgot to put that the desire for retribution is part of stage one,
BEFORE "anger." That would coincide with your comment that anger
ceases when the desire for retribution goes away. Interesting that on TV
last week was a short news program segment on anger, and the growing
findings that EITHER letting it out OR keeping it in is harmful--doing
so has physiological effects of its own, usually detrimental to the
cardiovascular and immune systems. The suggestions that were being
given by the researcher interviewed was to do things that would distract
you from the traffic or employee or whatever was leading to anger. I
suppose that successful distraction would serve the purpose of ending
the desire for retribution.
Anyway, I've skipped over all the details that got Lakoff to the above
stages, in case no one's interested in pursuing them. I'd just thought
I'd let people know there's some fruitful ways of investigating things
such as emotions through such a subjective and unscientific thing as
everyday language.
Joel