Emotions are one of the core components of human biology and behavior, linking senses, thoughts, and actions. In particular, emotions are one of the main components of human communications, including: facial expressions, postures and body language, pheromones and chemosignals, non-linguistic vocalizations, and spoken language (Lambie, 2009; Niedenthal and Brauer, 2012; Dehaene, 2014; Van den Stock and de Gelder, 2014; Lench et al., 2015; Ekman, 2016; Haviland-Jones et al., 2016; Martinez et al., 2016).

Neurophysiologists analyse human emotions as complex interlinked continua of neurological and hormonal signals and processes (Dehaene, 2014; Etkin et al., 2015; Bray, 2016). The social sciences, however, rely on the subtleties of language to differentiate and communicate the fine distinctions between closely related emotions (Johnson-Laird and Oatley, 1989; Ekman, 2016; Lakoff, 2016; Tissari, 2016). Some of these distinctions are very subtle, and we use languages to communicate those subtleties to each other.