Abstract:

Language is known to play an important role in communicating our thoughts, memories, and emotions. In this chapter, we propose that the role of language extends much more deeply to   further shape and constitutively create these mental phenomena. Research on emotion has shown that language can powerfully influence experiences and perceptions that are affective or emotional. Research on memory, too, has also shown that language can be used to shape and even create experiences of memory. We organize this work in a framework that is characterized by the many forms and aspects that language may take such as rich narratives, specific emotion words, words that focus on the situation v. words that focus on the body, and even words that convey psychological distance from grammatical tense and pronoun usage. We describe a constructionist theoretical model to understand how language shapes emotion and memory in terms of psychological and neural mechanisms. Our model integrates with recent active inference models of neural processing. Finally, we relate this work to clinical and translational models of therapeutic change.

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