Abstract
Recent neuroscientific research shows that metaphors engage readers at the emotional level more strongly than literal expressions. What still remains unclear is what makes metaphors more engaging, and whether this generalises to all figurative expressions, no matter how conventionalised they are. This fMRI study aimed to investigate whether idiomatic expressions - the least creative part of figurative language - indeed trigger a higher affective resonance than literal expressions, and to explore possible interactions between activation in emotion-relevant neural structures and regions associated with figurative language processing. Participants silently read for comprehension a set of emotionally positive, negative and neutral idioms embedded in short sentences, and similarly valenced literal sentences. As in studies on metaphors, we found enhanced activation of the left inferior frontal gyrus and left amygdala in response to idioms, indexing stronger recruitment of executive control functions and enhanced emotional engagement, respectively. This suggests that the comprehension of even highly conventionalised and familiar figurative expressions, namely idioms, recruits regions involved in emotional processing. Furthermore, increased activation of the IFG interacted positively with activation in the amygdala, suggesting that the stronger cognitive engagement driven by idioms may in turn be coupled with stronger involvement at the emotional level.
Highlights
For each PPI analysis we looked at results at the whole-brain level and applied a-priori small volume corrections (SVC): for the PPI with left inferior frontal gyri (IFG) seed, we applied SVC with the amygdala mask based on Brodmann areas, while for the PPI with amygdala as seed, we applied SVC with the left IFG mask, based on the seed created for the main analyses
30% of the variance in emotional arousal ratings was significantly predicted by figurativeness, R2 = .30, R = .55, F change(1,88) = 38.33, p < .0001, an additional 3% by concreteness, R2 = .34, R = .58, F change(1,87) = 4.24, p < .05, and an additional 11% by the quadratic function of emotional valence, i.e., valence2, R2 = .46, R = .67, F change(1,86) = 17.06, p < .0001, with the following regression equation: emotional arousal = 0.48 x figurativeness - 0.10 x concreteness + 0.37 x valence2
The present study tested whether the comprehension of idioms, the least creative and most conventionalised part of figurative expressions, evokes stronger emotional responses at the neural level compared to literal sentences as it happens for metaphors
Summary
Similar findings have been reported for affectively-laden sentences and texts (e.g., Altmann, Bohrn, Lubrich, Menninghaus, & Jacobs, 2012; Ferstl, Rinck, & von Cramon, 2005; Hsu, Jacobs, Altmann, & Conrad, 2015; Hsu, Jacobs, Citron, & Conrad, 2015; Lai, Willems, & Hagoort, 2015) These studies typically manipulated emotional valence, the extent to which a stimulus is pleasant/positive or unpleasant/negative, and emotional arousal, the degree of physiological activation elicited by a stimulus, e.g., how exciting/agitating or idle a stimulus is (Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1997; Russell, 2003; Wilson-Mendenhall, Barrett, & Barsalou, 2013). This represents an important limitation since figurative language is extensively used in everyday communicative exchanges (Cameron, 2008; Jackendoff, 1995; Pollio, Barlow, Fine, & Pollio, 1977), is very pervasive in literary texts and poems (Jacobs, 2015; Lüdtke, MeyerSickendieck, & Jacobs, 2014), and represents a crucial medium for social communication (Maas, Arcuri, & Suitner, 2014)
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