The head is thought to be rational and cold, whereas the heart is thought to be emotional and warm. Eight studies (total N = 725) pursued the idea that such body metaphors are widely consequential. Study 1 introduced a novel individual difference variable, one asking people to locate the self in the head or the heart. Irrespective of sex differences, head-locators characterized themselves as rational, logical, and interpersonally cold, whereas heart-locators characterized themselves as emotional, feminine, and interpersonally warm (Studies 1–3). Study 4 found that head-locators were more accurate in answering general knowledge questions and had higher GPAs and Study 5 found that heart-locators were more likely to favor emotional over rational considerations in moral decision-making. Study 6 linked self-locations to reactivity phenomena in daily life –e.g., heart-locators experienced greater negative emotion on high stressor days. Study 7 manipulated attention to the head versus the heart and found that head-pointing facilitated intellectual performance, whereas heart-pointing led to emotional decision-making. Study 8 replicated Study 3’s findings with a nearly year-long delay between the self-location and outcome measures. The findings converge on the importance of head-heart metaphors for understanding individual differences in cognition, emotion, and performance.

Metaphor representation theory contends that people conceptualize their non-perceptual states (e.g., emotion concepts) in perceptual terms. The present research extends this theory to color manipulations and discrete emotional representations. Two experiments (N = 265) examined whether a red font color would facilitate anger conceptions, consistent with metaphors referring to anger to "seeing red". Evidence for an implicit anger-red association was robust and emotionally discrete in nature. Further, Experiment 2 examined the directionality of such associations and found that they were asymmetrical: Anger categorizations were faster when a red font color was involved, but redness categorizations were not faster when an anger-related word was involved. Implications for multiple literatures are discussed.

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