Abstract
What is difficult is not usually pleasurable. Yet, for certain unfamiliar figurative language, like that which is common in poetry, while comprehension is often more difficult than for more conventional language, it is in many cases more pleasurable. Concentrating our investigation on verb-based metaphors, we examined whether and to what degree the novel variations (in the form of verb changes and extensions) of conventional verb metaphors were both more difficult to comprehend and yet induced more pleasure. To test this relationship, we developed a set of 62 familiar metaphor stimuli, each with corresponding optimal and excessive verb variation and metaphor extension conditions, and normed these stimuli using both objective measures and participant subjective ratings. We then tested the pleasure-difficulty relationship with an online behavioral study. Based on Rachel Giora and her colleagues' 'optimal innovation hypothesis', we anticipated an inverse U-shaped relationship between ease and pleasure, with an optimal degree of difficulty, introduced by metaphor variations, producing the highest degree of pleasure when compared to familiar or excessive conditions. Results, however, revealed a more complex picture, with only metaphor extension conditions (not verb variation conditions) producing the anticipated pleasure effects. Individual differences in semantic cognition and verbal reasoning assessed using the Semantic Similarities Test, while clearly influential, further complicated the pleasure-difficulty relationship, suggesting an important avenue for further investigation.
Highlights
This experiment was designed to examine the relationship between pleasure and the ease of comprehension of verb-based metaphors using a combination of experimental manipulation, subjective ratings, and individual differences (Semantic Similarities Test performance)
Our results offer only partial support to the hypothesis that, as comprehension difficulty is increased by varying familiar metaphor stimuli, pleasure will peak at an ‘optimal’ mid-point level of difficulty
Individual differences in the form of Similarities Test (SST) scores further complicated the picture, indicating that, while increased aptitudes for recognising semantic similarities correlated with reduced difficulty of comprehension across conditions, surprisingly they tended to correlate with reduce pleasure as well
Summary
‘The new dawn blooms as we free it’ [1]. That line, like many others in Amanda Gorman’s famous poem ‘The Hill We Climb’, is striking. While this would seem to predict a linear relationship between difficulty and pleasure, in the case of our study, the point at which a stimulus metaphor is complex enough to provoke both default and nondefault responses simultaneously (the apex of the inverted U-shape) is likely to depend on an individual’s processing aptitude. This complements prior studies that focused on comprehension of completely novel metaphors [e.g., 33, 34], though we believe variations of familiar metaphors are more common in both everyday communication and highly specialised communication like poetry To make this possible, we developed a broad set of stimuli phrases, matched for psycholinguistic characteristics, and assessed on familiarity, ease of interpretation, figurativeness, and imageability. Individual differences were measured using the Semantic Similarities Test (SST), to begin to unpick how the aptitudes and characteristics of individuals might influence the difficulty-pleasure relationship
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