To each their own: a review of individual differences and metaphorical perspectives on time

Abstract

How do people talk—and potentially think—about abstract concepts? Supported by abundant linguistic evidence, Conceptual Metaphor Theory posits that people draw upon concrete concepts to structure abstract ones via metaphorical connections. Often, the source domain for a metaphor draws upon embodied physical experience, as in the time is space system, whereby representations in the domain of time are thought to arise from experiences of navigating through, orienting within, and observing motion in space. In recent years, psychological evidence has suggested that the connections between space and time are indeed conceptual; however, many gaps in our understanding of the workings of metaphor remain. Notably, until recently, the unique variations in the ways in which people experience metaphor have been largely overlooked, with much research falling prey to what Dąbrowska has identified as one of the ‘deadly sins’ of cognitive linguistics: to ignore individual differences. By focusing on two widely studied metaphors for time, Moving Time and Moving Ego, this review article shines a spotlight on the varied ways in which people draw on their embodied and enculturated experiences, along with ‘human experience’ on an individual level and the contexts within which they use metaphor. In doing so, it highlights the importance for metaphoric conceptualization of variation across languages, across contexts, and across individuals, suggesting that while the use and interpretation of metaphor may begin with cross-domain connections, they are but part of the story.

Approaching future rewards or waiting for them to arrive: Spatial representations of time and intertemporal choice

“…The results of [12,13] are consistent with the theoretical framework we have outlined, with an egomoving (vs. time-moving) prime increasing perceived temporal distance to events which people may be motivated to approach [12], and decreasing perceived distance to events which people may be motivated to avoid [13]. However, an alternative explanation of these findings is that objective units of time may be perceived as longer when an ego-moving perspective is adopted [4]. If an objective unit of time (e.g., days or weeks) seems longer when an ego-moving perspective is adopted, a given objective temporal interval to a future event (e.g., a task deadline [13]) may feel subjectively longer, while a given subjective temporal distance (e.g., how psychologically distant the end of a period of grief seems [12]) may be estimated to occupy fewer units of objective time.…”

“…with mental representations of the self actively approaching future events (ego-moving) rather than passively waiting for them to arrive (time-moving) [4]. Such a relationship between perceived control and temporal perspective could emerge from associations developed in the spatial domain, where people are likely to feel greater control over their distance to objects they are approaching compared to objects that are approaching them.…”

“…In addition to extensive use of such linguistic metaphors, research has found that processing spatial information influences how people subsequently interpret temporal information, suggesting an overlap in how these concepts are represented in human cognition [2,3]. Our mental representation of the passage of time is thought to be structured by concepts of spatial motion, including an ego-moving temporal perspective in which the self is perceived as approaching future events (e.g., "we're approaching the weekend"), and a time-moving temporal perspective in which future events are perceived as approaching the self (e.g., "the weekend is approaching") [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] (see Fig 1).…”

That Which Does Not Kill You on Wednesday Makes You Stronger On Friday: A Bidirectional Relationship between Resilience and Time

“…How and whether temporal perspective inculcation can be introduced to the resilience process at the organizational level (Kahn et al, 2018) would seem a necessary step forward to test the generalization of the results found herein. Second, the accretion of evidence has indicated that people's metaphorical perspective on time is subject to a conglomeration of factors (Feist & Duffy, 2023) and although we have allowed for a relatively salient confounding variable (i.e., happiness), there is always the possibility that other coufounding factors (e.g., extraversion and introversion) may be simultaneously at play that cannot be completely avoided (Li & Cao, 2020). Therefore, future experimental studies incorporating other potentially confounding predictors should be designed to test the robustness of the correlational and causal relationship between resilience and temporal perspective preference.…”

Spice up the moment: The influence of spicy taste on people's metaphorical perspectives on time

“…The finding that the ego-moving perspective and the time-moving perspective are accessed and utilized in processing temporal information thus demonstrates that these two metaphorical perspectives are cognitively real. Extending this seminal finding and employing the same temporal disambiguation paradigm (i.e., "Next Wednesday's meeting" statement), a growing accretion of factors has been uncovered to exert a modulatory effect on people's metaphorical perspectives on time (Bender & Beller, 2014;Feist & Duffy, 2023). For example, priming participants with actual motion by asking them to manually draw lines of different lengths, Ramscar et al (2010: Experiment 1) found that the longer the drawn lines were, the more likely it was for the drawer to adopt the ego-moving perspective.…”