Abstract
ABSTRACTWhen 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.
Highlights
Conventional wisdom tells us that hardship may be inescapable
Participants read about a person’s cancer experience, either framed as a “battle” or a “journey.” They responded to questions that probed their appraisals of the patient’s emotional landscape: how likely was the protagonist to feel guilty that they had not done enough if they did not recover? How likely were they to make peace with the situation? Participants generated additional information they imagined about the person’s experience so we could understand their mental models of the hardship experience
We ruled out some potential explanations for the metaphor framing effect: that it arose because of lexical association between the independent and dependent variables (Experiment 2), that it was a function of the character’s gender (Experiment 4), and that it was a consequence of using metaphors to describe a cancer experience, as opposed to another disease
Summary
Conventional wisdom tells us that hardship may be inescapable. But we can choose how to respond to our hardships. Thinking about one’s relationship as a “unity” can lead a person to feel more threatened by interpersonal conflicts than thinking about the relationship as a “journey,” which is more likely to naturally have positive and negative experiences (Lee & Schwarz, 2014) These studies and many others (see Thibodeau, Hendricks, & Boroditsky, 2017 for review) suggest that for a wide range of topics, linguistic metaphors can guide thought. Metaphors comparing a cancer experience to a “battle” or “fight” have been widely described as dominant in English, in the United States and the United Kingdom (Granger, 2014; Miller, 2010; Penson, Schapira, Daniels, Chabner, & Lynch, 2004; Reisfield & Wilson, 2004; Sontag, 1979) Quantitative evidence for this dominance has been provided in a UK–based study that used corpus linguistics methods (Semino, Demjén, Hardie, Payne, & Rayson, 2018). We examine the language people produce after encountering one of the metaphors to better understand the mental models those metaphors give rise to
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