Hand Position and Response Assignment Modulate the Activation of the Valence‐Space Conceptual Metaphor

Abstract

Conceptual metaphor is ubiquitous in language and thought, as we usually reason and talk about abstract concepts in terms of more concrete ones via metaphorical mappings that are hypothesized to arise from our embodied experience. One pervasive example is the conceptual projection of valence onto space, which flexibly recruits the vertical and lateral spatial frames to gain structure (e.g., good is up-bad is down and good is right-bad is left). In the current study, we used a valence judgment task to explore the role that exogenous bodily cues (namely response hand positions) play in the allocation of spatial attention and the modulation of conceptual congruency effects. Experiment 1 showed that congruency effects along the vertical axis are weakened when task conditions (i.e., the use of vertical visual cues, on the one hand, and the horizontal alignment of responses, on the other) draw attention to both the vertical and lateral axes making them simultaneously salient. Experiment 2 evidenced that the vertical alignment of participants' hands while responding to the task-regardless of the location of their dominant hand-facilitates the judgment of positive and negative-valence words, as long as participants respond in a metaphor-congruent manner (i.e., up responses are good and down responses are bad). Overall, these results support the claim that source domain representations are dynamically activated in response to the context and that bodily states are an integral part of that context.

Why Smoggy Days Suppress Our Mood: Automatic Association Between Clarity and Valence

“…Specifically, positive words showed evaluation advantage in the clear condition whereas negative words showed evaluation advantage in the blurry condition, demonstrating the clarity–valence congruency effect. The current findings are consistent with the pioneering study on the space–valence association (Meier and Robinson, 2004), as well as a line of subsequent studies concerning the perceptual–conceptual associations with various physical dimensions (Marmolejo-Ramos et al, 2014; Meier et al, 2015; Damjanovic and Santiago, 2016; Zhao et al, 2016; Castaño et al, 2018; Chen et al, 2018; Woodin and Winter, 2018). For example, Zhao et al (2016) examined the metaphoric link between weight perception and emotional words through a priming paradigm, another dominant paradigm used in this body of research.…”

Moved by Emotions: Affective Concepts Representing Personal Life Events Induce Freely Performed Steps in Line With Combined Sagittal and Lateral Space-Valence Associations

“…Experimental findings support these associations by showing that people tend to assign the word "joy" to upper spaces and the word "sadness" to lower ones during tasks that enable freely choosing between different spatial locations (Marmolejo-Ramos et al, 2017). Facilitation effects have also been demonstrated for predefined actions by button-presses "up" or "down" when processing positive or negative words on a monitor as compared to the opposite mappings (up-negative and down-positive; Dudschig et al, 2015;Castaño et al, 2018).…”

Metaphorical conceptualization in national sports

“…Moreover, metaphorical conceptualization is a dynamic process that is characterized by different factors: sensorimotor, cultural, and linguistic experiences [3]. In everyday life, conceptual metaphors perform at least three cognitive functions: they structure our conceptual system, conceptualize abstract concepts in more understandable terms, and create a new understanding of our experience [4, p. 8].…”