Abstract
People often express emotion in language using weight (e.g., a heavy heart, light-hearted, light humor, or heavy-handed), but the question remains whether these expressions of emotion are rooted in the body. Six experiments used a priming paradigm to explore the metaphoric relation between weight perception and emotional words. Experiments 1 and 2 investigated the influence of weight perception on judgments of emotional words and the influence of emotional words on judgments of weight, respectively. A significant difference between the consistent condition (e.g., lightness corresponds to positive words and heaviness corresponds to negative words) and the inconsistent condition (e.g., lightness corresponds to negative words and heaviness corresponds to positive words) was found in Experiment 1 but not in Experiment 2. Experiments 3, 4, and 5 were conducted to exclude potential confounds. Experiment 6 was a repeated-measures study that was conducted to verify the weight-emotion effect. The study confirmed that weight perception affected judgments of emotional words. The results contribute to the growing literature on conceptual metaphor theory and embodied cognition theory.
Highlights
The way in which an individual represents concepts, especially abstract concepts, has consistently been a core issue in the field of cognitive research
The present study explored the relationship between abstract concepts and body perception from a novel perspective providing new evidence regarding embodied cognition
With respect to accuracy, no significant difference was found between the consistent condition and the inconsistent condition [F1(1, 31) = 1.39, p = 0.248; F2(1, 35) = 1.84, p = 0.183]. These findings indicate that the participants’ perception of weight affected their judgments of emotional words
Summary
The way in which an individual represents concepts, especially abstract concepts, has consistently been a core issue in the field of cognitive research. Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) proposed conceptual metaphor theory to explain how abstract concepts link to perception. They argued that people often refer to familiar, tangible, and concrete concepts to understand unfamiliar, invisible, and abstract concepts. Borghi and Binkofski (2014) proposed the Words As social Tools (WAT) view, a recent theory regarding embodied cognition and abstract concepts. These authors promulgated the idea that both sensorimotor and linguistic experiences form the basis of abstract concepts and abstract word representation, processing, and use
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