Emotion in intercultural communication: A sociocultural model

Emotion has been widely studied in multiple disciplines which include but are not exhaustive to cognitive psychology, neurobiology, anthropology and linguistics. However, emotion in the context of intercultural communication has received far less well-deserved attention. On the other hand, although certain social factors such as context, common ground, formulaic language use and salience are deemed as indispensable helping us to understand the nature of and challenges in intercultural communication, a key concept such as emotion and its role in shaping people’s perceptions, interpretations, attitudes and language use in intercultural contexts is in effect neglected or taken from an intuitive departure, despite a burgeoning growth of literature contributing to conceptualising intercultural communication theories. In this paper, I intend to fill this overlapping gap in the emotion studies and in the intercultural communication research, drawing on findings on the nature of emotion in cognitive psychology, anthropology and linguistics to develop a sociocultural model theorising emotion in intercultural contexts. Naturally occurring intercultural interactions, where Mandarin is used as the language of communication, are employed to illustrate how the model can be applied to analysing emotion, language and culture in intercultural encounters. It is hoped that this paper can contribute to interdisciplinary efforts on theorising emotion in the area of intercultural communication.