Emotional Analysis
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Introduction
Humans feel emotions. This observation, admittedly somewhat banal, contains an idea that proves to be crucial for an emotional analysis of a piece of discourse. Namely, emotions are not something that is out there in the world. They arise in people who bring their experiences and concepts to bear on their interaction with that world. For the purposes of analysing language this amounts to the heuristic that emotions, if they are to be found language, will be found in the 'personal touches' of utterances. This vague notion of 'personal touch' will be fleshed out below in the steps.
The goal of this sub-layer is to chart out the basic emotional tone and/or progression of the psalm. To be sure, this is a descriptive endeavour. The point is to try to determine with some level of precision the emotions of the psalmist. How and for what this description is used will vary according to the norms and needs of the culture served.
Theoretically, we view emotions as componential. The field of emotional research is vast, and somewhat confusing, because it is not exactly clear what an emotion is, essentially. A number of scholars, however, have recognised that all of the many theories can be grouped in three categories that reflect something undeniably true about emotions. (1) Emotions involve cognitive processes such as evaluating, categorising and judging. (2) Emotions, obviously, involve many kinds of feelings, whether they be physical such as a fast heart-beat, or more abstract such as excitement or depression. (3) Emotions often lead to the motivation to act or even an action itself.[1]
- ↑ For an overview and the categorisation presented here see Andrea Scarantino and Ronald de Sousa, “Emotion,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, 2021; Andrea Scarantino, “The Philosophy of Emotions and Its Impact on Affective Science,” in The Handbook of Emotions, ed. Michael Lewis, Jeanette Haviland-Jones, and Lisa Feldman Barrett, 4th ed. (New York: The Guildford Press, 2016), 3–37. For an application of this framework to Biblical exegesis, see Anathea Portier-Young, “Linking Emotion, Cognition, and Action within a Social Frame: Old Testament Perspectives on Preaching the Fear of the LORD,” in Preaching the Fear of God in a Fear-Filled World: Proceedings from the 13th Conference of Societas Homiletica, Durham 2018, ed. Dawn Ottoni-Wilhelm (Zürich: Lit Verlag GmbH, 2020), 18–35.