Individuals often describe objects in their world in terms of perceptual dimensions that span a variety of modalities; the visual (e.g., brightness: dark–bright), the auditory (e.g., loudness: quiet–loud), the gustatory (e.g., taste: sour–sweet), the tactile (e.g., hardness: soft vs. hard) and the kinaesthetic (e.g., speed: slow–fast). We ask whether individuals use perceptual dimensions to differentiate emotions from one another. Participants in two studies (one where respondents reported on abstract emotion concepts and a second where they reported on specific emotion episodes) (...) rated the extent to which features anchoring 29 perceptual dimensions (e.g., temperature, texture and taste) are associated with 8 emotions (anger, fear, sadness, guilt, contentment, gratitude, pride and excitement). Results revealed that in both studies perceptual dimensions differentiate positive from negative emotions and high arousal from low arousal emotions. They also differentiate among emotions that are similar in arousal and valence (e.g., high arousal negative emotions such as anger and fear). Specific features that anchor particular perceptual dimensions (e.g., hot vs. cold) are also differentially associated with emotions. (shrink)

Horror movies consistently reflect metaphorical associations between verticality and affect, as well as between brightness and affect. For example, bad events happen when movie characters are going downwards, or when lights go off. Monsters and villains emerge from below and from the darkness. And protagonists get lost and stuck in dark underground caves, dungeons, tunnels, mines, bunkers or sewers. Even movies that are primarily set above ground or in bright light have the most suspenseful scenes happening beneath the ground and (...) in the dark. An analysis of several horror movies highlights the striking consistency with which the two metaphors “EVIL IS DOWN” and “EVIL IS DARK” are used within this genre. I will argue that these metaphors help in creating fear. Moreover, I will outline how cinematic manifestations of metaphor elaborate and extend metaphorical concepts and ultimately may have a formative role in keeping metaphors alive within a culture. (shrink)

Spatial metaphors of affect display remarkable consistencies across languages in mapping sensorimotor experiences onto emotional states, reflecting a great degree of similarity in how our bodies register affect. At the same time, however, affect is complex and there is more than a single possible mapping from vertical spatial concepts to affective states. Here we consider a previously unreported case of spatial metaphors mapping down onto desirable, and up undesirable emotional experiences in Mlabri, an Austroasiatic language of Thailand and Laos, making (...) a novel contribution to the study of metaphor and Cognitive Linguistics. Using first-hand corpus and elicitation data, we examine the metaphorical expressions: klol jur ‘heart going down’ and klol khɯn ‘heart going up’/klol kɔbɔ jur ‘heart not going down’. Though reflecting a metaphorical mapping opposite to the commonly reported happy is up metaphor, which is said to link to universal bodily correlates of emotion, the Mlabri metaphors are far from idiosyncratic. Rather, they are grounded in the bodily experience of positive low-arousal states, and in that reflect an emic view of ideal affect centered on contentment and tranquility. This underscores the complexity of bodily experience of affect, demonstrating that cultures draw on the available sensorimotor correlates of emotion in distinct ways. (shrink)

Speakers of English frequently associate location in space with valence, as in moving up and down the “social ladder.” If such an association also holds for the sagittal axis, an object “in front of” another object would be evaluated more positively than the one “behind.” Yet how people conceptualize relative locations depends on which frame of reference (FoR) they adopt—and hence on cross‐linguistically diverging preferences. What is conceptualized as “in front” in one variant of the relative FoR (e.g.,translation) is “behind” (...) under another variant (reflection), and vice versa. Do such diverging conceptualizations of an object's location also lead to diverging evaluations? In two studies employing an implicit association test, we demonstrate, first, that speakers of German, Chinese, and Japanese indeed evaluate the object “in front of” another object more positively than the one “behind.” Second, and crucially, the reversal of which object is conceptualized as “in front” involves a corresponding reversal of valence, suggesting an impact of linguistically imparted FoR preferences on evaluative processes. (shrink)

Recent research suggests that people's understanding of the abstract domain of time is dependent on the more concrete domain of space. Boroditsky and Ramscar (2002) found that spatial context influences whether people see themselves as moving through time (ego-moving perspective) or as time moving towards them (time-moving perspective). Based on studies of the embodiment of affective experience, we examined whether affect might also influence which spatial metaphor of time people adopt. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 showed that participants (...) who imagined a negative event were more likely to report that the event was approaching them, whereas those who imagined a positive event were more likely to report that they were approaching the event. Experiments 3a and 3b showed that participants judge an event to be more positive if it is described from the ego-moving perspective than if it is described from the time-moving perspective. Results from these studies provide initial evidence that positive and negative events are associated with different spatial metaphors of time. (shrink)

Emotional experiences are often described in metaphoric language. A major question in linguistics and cognitive science is whether such metaphoric linguistic expressions reflect a deeper principle of cognition. Are abstract concepts structured by the embodied, sensorimotor domains that we use to describe them? This review presents the argument for conceptual metaphors of affect and summarizes recent findings from empirical studies. These findings show that, consistent with the conceptual metaphor account, the associations between affect and physical domains such as spatial position, (...) musical pitch, brightness, and size which are captured in linguistic metaphors also influence performance on attention, memory and judgment tasks. Despite this evidence, a number of concerns with metaphor as an account of affect representation are considered. (shrink)

Participants maneuvered a rat image through a circular region on the computer screen to find a hidden target platform, blending aspects of two well-known spatial tasks. Like the Morris water maze task, participants first experienced a series of learning trials before having to navigate to the hidden target platform from different locations and orientations. Like the dot-location task, they determined the location of a position within a two-dimensional circular region. This procedure provided a way to examine how the number of (...) surrounding cues (1, 2, or 3) affects the memory for spatial location in navigation. Memory performance was better when there were more cues and when targets were close to cues, consistent with the idea that cues bolster fine-grain memory, especially in proximal regions. Early and late measures of bias in memory reflected biases in a direction toward the nearest cue, implicating a cue-based category structure of the navigational space. Collectively, results suggest cue-based spatial memory representations that have been inferred from the dot-location task generalize to a navigation task within a simple, computer-based environment, as demonstrated by the good fits of the spatial model developed for the dot-location task (Fitting, Wedell, & Allen, 2005, 2007). (shrink)

Can children’s handedness influence how they represent abstract concepts like kindness and intelligence? Here we show that from an early age, right-handers associate rightward space more strongly with positive ideas and leftward space with negative ideas, but the opposite is true for left-handers. In one experiment, children indicated where on a diagram a preferred toy and a dispreferred toy should go. Right-handers tended to assign the preferred toy to a box on the right and the dispreferred toy to a box (...) on the left. Left-handers showed the opposite pattern. In a second experiment, children judged which of two cartoon animals looked smarter (or dumber) or nicer (or meaner). Right-handers attributed more positive qualities to animals on the right, but left-handers to animals on the left. These contrasting associations between space and valence cannot be explained by exposure to language or cultural conventions, which consistently link right with good. Rather, right- and left-handers implicitly associated positive valence more strongly with the side of space on which they can act more fluently with their dominant hands. Results support the body-specificity hypothesis (Casasanto, 2009), showing that children with different kinds of bodies think differently in corresponding ways. (shrink)

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) was used to measure population levels of conceptual alignment among two polar sensory metaphors and clusters of concepts to which they are commonly applied. A total of 873 participants were tested online, to compare within- and between-cluster alignments of concepts associated with two different polar sensory metaphors (up/down and black/white). IAT results were sensitive to semantic alignments that were also picked up by Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) using a large-scale corpus of English. However, even with (...) these semantic alignments taken into account, the dual categorization results demonstrated strong metaphor-cluster alignments over and above the predictions of LSA. It is proposed that, rather than ontogenetic development of metaphoric concepts based on sensorimotor experience, conventionalized sensorimotor metaphors in language may be cognitive tools that provide language learners with insights supported by conceptual properties of a phylogenetically evolved perceptual interface. (shrink)

The intuition of clarity-valence association seems to be pervasive in daily life, however, whether there exists a potential association between clarity (i.e., operationalized as visual resolution) and affect in human cognition remains unknown. The present study conducted five experiments, and demonstrated the clarity-valence congruency effect, that is, the evaluations showed performance advantage in the congruent conditions (clear-positive, blurry-negative). Experiment 1 through 3 demonstrated the influence of the perception of clarity on the conceptualization of affective valence, while Experiment 4 & 5 (...) verified the absence of the influence of conceptualization on perception, thus the unidirectionality of clarity-valence association in cognition is confirmed. The findings extend the affective perceptual-conceptual associations into the dimension of clarity, thus providing support for the ideas of embodied cognition as well as implications for our preference for clarity and aversion to blur. (shrink)

In two experiments, Brookshire, Ivry, and Casasanto showed that words with positive and negative emotional valence can activate spatial representations with a high degree of automaticity, but also that this activation is highly context dependent. Lebois, Wilson-Mendenhall, and Barsalou reported that they “aimed to replicate” our study but found only null results in the “Brookshire et al. replication” conditions. Here we express concerns about three aspects of this paper. First, the study was not an attempt to replicate ours; it was (...) a different study that adapted our method. Second, Lebois et al. did not accurately represent our theoretical position. Third, Lebois et al.’s main conclusion, that spatial congruity effects depend on the task context, was not supported by their data. Despite these concerns, we agree with Lebois et al.'s overall message that spatial aspects of words' meanings are activated differently in different contexts. This was a main conclusion of our study as well. (shrink)

Informed by theories of embodied cognition, in the present study, we designed a novel priming technique to investigate the impact of spatial diversity and script direction on searching through concepts in both English and Persian (i.e., two languages with opposite script directions). First, participants connected a target dot either to one other dot (linear condition) or to multiple other dots (diverse condition) and either from left to right (rightward condition) or from right to left (leftward condition) on a computer touchscreen (...) using their dominant hand's forefinger. Following the spatial prime, they were asked to generate as many words as possible using two‐letter cues (e.g., “lo” → “love,” “lobster”) in 20 s. We hypothesized that greater spatial diversity, and consistency with script direction, should facilitate conceptual search and result in a higher number of word productions. In both languages, word production performance was superior for the diverse prime relative to the linear prime, suggesting that searching through lexical memory is facilitated by spatial diversity. Although some effects were observed for the directionality of the spatial prime, they were not consistent across experiments and did not correlate with script direction. This pattern of results suggests that a spatial prime that promotes diverse paths can improve word retrieval from lexical memory and lends empirical support to the embodied cognition framework, in which spatial relations play a crucial role in the conceptual system. (shrink)

Parts of the body are often embedded in the structure of compound words, such asheartbreakandbrainchild. We explored the relationships between the semantics of compounds and their constituent body parts, asking whether these relationships are largely arbitrary or instead reflect deeper metaphorical mappings shared across languages and cultures. In three studies, we found that U.S. English speakers associated the English translation equivalents of Chinese compounds with their constituent body parts at rates well above chance, even for compounds with highly abstract meanings (...) and even when accounting for the semantic relatedness of the compounds and body parts. English speakers in India and Chinese speakers in Hong Kong showed similar intuitions about these associations. Our results suggest that the structure of compound words can provide insight into cross‐culturally shared ways of connecting meaning to the body. (shrink)

In a new integration, we show that the visual-spatial structuring of time converges with auditory-spatial left–right judgments for time-related words. In Experiment 1, participants placed past and future-related words respectively to the left and right of the midpoint on a horizontal line, reproducing earlier findings. In Experiment 2, neutral and time-related words were presented over headphones. Participants were asked to indicate whether words were louder on the left or right channel. On critical experimental trials, words were presented equally loud binaurally. (...) As predicted, participants judged future words to be louder on the right channel more often than past-related words. Furthermore, there was a significant cross-modal overlap between the visual-spatial ordering and the auditory judgments , which were continuously related. These findings provide support for the assumption that space and time have certain invariant properties that share a common structure across modalities. (shrink)

(2009). Mellow Monday and furious Friday: The approach-related link between anger and time representation. Cognition & Emotion: Vol. 23, No. 6, pp. 1166-1180.

Psychologists are increasingly interested in embodiment based on the assumption that thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are grounded in bodily interaction with the environment. We examine how embodiment is used in social psychology, and we explore the ways in which embodied approaches enrich traditional theories. Although research in this area is burgeoning, much of it has been more descriptive than explanatory. We provide a critical discussion of the trajectory of embodiment research in social psychology. We contend that future researchers should engage (...) in a phenomenon-based approach, highlight the theoretical boundary conditions and mediators involved, explore novel action-relevant outcome measures, and address the role of individual differences broadly defined. Such research will likely provide a more explanatory account of the role of embodiment in general terms as well as how it expands the knowledge base in social psychology. (shrink)