Thematic Organization of the Cluster

The cluster is divided into four research areas.

Area A inquires into how emotions are shaped through language and other semiotic systems. The research area brings together expertise from linguistics and language psychology and focuses on the affective implications of language as a system, language use and language acquisition.

Area B addresses the particular uses the arts make of the powers of language and other semiotic systems to shape emotions. The principal aim is a clarification of the specifically aesthetic aspects inherent in artistic poetics of affect.

Research Area C combines desiderata of A and B. Extending the psychological and linguistic focus on the relations of signs and affects (Area A) into the fields of clinical psychology and neuropsychiatry, Area C focuses on the interdependence of emotional competencies—including its disorders—and linguistic competencies. At the same time, research in Area C adds a psychological-psychiatric dimension to the research of Area B in as far as modes of affective art reception are studied as factors in the development of emotional and linguistic competencies, as indicators of their disorders, and as instruments of therapeutic intervention.

While the development and disturbance of linguistic and emotion-regulatory capabilities studied in Area C are closely linked to the social factors that determine the immediate interactive environment of individuals (especially parent-child interactions), Research Area D examines the sociocultural codes of emotion that are conveyed via larger social units and the symbolic structures of a society. The main focus of work in area D is on the multiple, historically varying functions of cultural artifacts (which also offer points of interconnection with work in Research Area B) for the production, rehearsal, or ambiguization of “emotion codes.”