When faced with hardship, how do we emotionally appraise the situation? Although many factors contribute to our reasoning about hardships, in this article we focus on the role of linguistic metaphor in shaping how we cope. In five experiments, we find that framing a person's cancer situation as a "battle" encourages people to believe that that person is more likely to feel guilty if they do not recover than framing the same situation as a "journey" does. Conversely, the "journey" frame is more likely to encourage the inference that the person can make peace with their situation than the "battle" frame. We rule out lexical priming as an explanation for this effect and examine the generalizability of these findings to individual differences across participants and to a different type of hardship-namely, an experience with depression. Finally, we examine the language participants produced after encountering one of these metaphors, and we find tendencies to repeat and extend the metaphors encountered. Together, these experiments shed light on the influential role of linguistic metaphor in the way we emotionally appraise hardship situations.
What is the role of language in constructing knowledge? In this article, we ask whether learning new relational language can create new ways of thinking. In Experiment 1, we taught English speakers to talk about time using new vertical linguistic metaphors, saying things like "breakfast is above dinner" or "breakfast is below dinner" (depending on condition). In Experiment 2, rather than teaching people new metaphors, we relied on the left-right representations of time that our American college student participants have already internalized through a lifetime of visuospatial experience reading and writing text from left to right. In both experiments, we asked whether the representations (whether newly acquired from metaphor or acquired over many years of visuospatial experience) are susceptible to verbal interference. We found that (a) learning new metaphors created new space-time associations that could be detected in a nonlinguistic implicit association task; (b) these newly learned representations were not susceptible to verbal interference; and (c) with respect to both verbal and visual interference, representations newly learned from linguistic metaphor behaved just like those on the left-right axis that our participants had acquired through years of visuospatial experience. Taken together, these results suggest that learning new relational language can be a powerful tool in constructing new representations and expanding our cognitive repertoire.
Languages around the world use a recurring strategy to discuss abstract concepts: describe them metaphorically, borrowing language from more concrete domains. We “plan ahead” to the future, “count up” to higher numbers, and “warm” to new friends. Past work has found that these ways of talking have implications for how we think, so that shared systems of linguistic metaphors can produce shared conceptualizations. On the other hand, these systematic linguistic metaphors might not just be the cause but also the effect of shared, non‐linguistic ways of thinking. Here, we present a case study of a variety of American English in which a shared, non‐linguistic conceptualization of time has become crystallized as a new system of linguistic metaphors. Speakers of various languages, including English, conceptualize time as a lateral timeline, with the past leftward and the future rightward. Until now, this conceptualization has not been documented in the speech of any language. In two studies, we document how members of the U.S. military, but not U.S. civilians, talk about time using conventionalized lateral metaphors (e.g., “move the meeting right” to mean “move the meeting later”). We argue that, under the right cultural circumstances, implicit mental representations become conventionalized metaphors in language.
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