Introduction to the special issue affective neurolinguistics: understanding the interaction of emotion and language in the brain

Emotions permeate every aspect of our lives including how we process and use language. Affective neurolinguistics is an emerging field that aims to unify separate research traditions in neurolinguistics and affective neuroscience. This special issue provides an overview of recent developments, on the lexico-semantic, syntactic and pragmatic levels. The 11 studies address the embodied acquisition of emotional concepts, their network representation in the brain, their representation in the first versus second language as well as the role of attentional focus. They also specify how emotional content interacts with morphosyntactic processing, how inter individual differences determine the primacy of syntax or affect in sentence processing, and how emotional influences play out in the multi-modal integration of language in quasi-realistic communicative settings. In total, this collection of studies covers the status of the field of affective neurolinguistics, laying the groundwork for a more formal multi-level integration of affect into language models.