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The Language of Anger: The Words That Impact Behavior for English Speakers

by Carlos Juan Marrero
July/August 2002
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Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/the-language-of-anger-the-words-that-impact-behavior-for-english-speakers/5014648/

Anger is a negative force, with some exceptions. Our cognitive model of anger is evaluative and gives anger a negative value. Anger is understood as a negative emotion because of the effects that our cognitive model asserts that it has on self and the community. The cognitive model demands that occurrences of anger be prevented or undone. Left without redress, anger will mount and ultimately destroy its host and possibly others around him or her. This is the prototypical cognitive model of anger, pervasive in communities of English speakers.

Metaphor defines personal responsibility. Questions of responsibility are settled mostly through metaphorical definitions of events, rather than through structural-temporal descriptions of actual occurrences - we know the order in which things happened, but we typically disagree about how to color the events, how to describe them contentfully. Purely object-oriented and sequential language gives us only a notion of causation. Objectification and serial ordering are not enough to formulate a moral concept like responsibility - and in fact are used often to have the opposite effect, to de-moralize descriptions. What language we use to define personal agency matters a great deal and has an impact on results, consequences, and social and personal responses ...

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