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Emotion

Psychology
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Complex psychological states involving subjective experience and physiological response.

Detailed Definition
Emotions drive human behavior and meaning-making. Poetry thrives on emotional expression—using rhythm, metaphor, and sensory detail to evoke and explore feelings, making the intangible tangible and connecting reader to universal inner experiences.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Emily Dickinson’s “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” emotion is rendered as sensory collapse; In Sylvia Plath’s “Tulips,” emotion clashes with sterile hospital detachment; In William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” emotion connects childhood joy to adult loss; In Langston Hughes’ “Harlem,” emotion simmers beneath metaphors of deferred dreams; In Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet,” emotion is framed as essential to artistic truth; In Ocean Vuong’s “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” emotion weaves shame, tenderness, and resilience.
Additional Notes
Emotion—the complex psychophysiological response to stimuli—is poetry’s lifeblood; but effective poetic emotion is shown, not told (via image, rhythm, syntax); students should avoid conflating emotion with sentimentality (excess without insight); theories from cognitive poetics (e.g., conceptual blending) help explain how poems evoke feeling; note cultural variation in emotional expression; useful to analyze how form modulates emotion (e.g., sonnet containment vs. free verse release).
Also Known As
Feeling Affect Sentiment Passion
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