“…Following other empirical studies on phonological iconicity in poetry, we too focused on the basic emotions of joy and sadness (Russell, 1980; Ekman, 1992; Jack et al, 2014). Phenomenological accounts of emotional qualities have conceived of joy, happiness, and pleasure as being mainly characterized by ease, uplift, and spatiotemporal expansion (German: Weitung ), i.e., by a person's feeling of being light, free, and flowing (Schmitz, 1969; Demmerling and Landweer, 2007). Sadness, on the other hand, is typically characterized by the opposite features: as bleak, compressed, heavy, and downward-oriented, as a feeling of oppression and depression (Schmitz, 1969), and as anxious, passive, and burdened (Demmerling and Landweer, 2007).…”