Rethinking emotion in discursive psychology: A systemic functional perspective

Abstract

Emotion, as a classic topic in psychological studies, has been intensively investigated by scholars across disciplines. In discursive psychology, emotion discourse refers to the rich variety and situated uses of emotion words and metaphors. Many studies of emotion in discursive psychology focus on the rhetorical contrasts of emotion. Conceptual analysis is another significant part of emotion discourse, and one that requires further investigation. To reveal how people describe and evoke emotions in discourse, this article starts with a reinterpretation of emotion in discursive psychology, followed by setting up an emotion system from a systemic functional perspective to illustrate how conceptual analysis may be conducted and rhetorical contrasts explored. During the process of establishing the emotion system, the paper elaborates upon the emotion concept and rhetorical contrasts on the basis of four illustrative examples taken from authentic extracts (including news and testimonies). The paper discusses the purpose behind the construction of the emotion system in terms of (1) the constituents in conceptual analysis and rhetorical contrasts of discursive psychology from a functional perspective, (2) the collaboration between conceptual analysis and rhetorical contrasts, (3) the traits of the emotion system as a method of discursive psychology analysis.