Abstract
According to the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, people understand abstract concepts depending on the activation of more concrete concepts, but not vice versa. The present research aims to investigate the role of directionality and automaticity regarding the activation of the conceptual metaphor “good is up”. Experiment 1 tested the automaticity of the spatial-to-valence metaphoric congruency effect by having participants judge the valence of a positive or negative word that appeared either at the top or at the bottom of the screen. They performed the task concurrently with a 6-digit verbal rehearsal task in the working-memory-load (WML) blocks and without this task in the non-WML blocks. The spatial-to-valence metaphoric congruency effect occurred for the positive words in the non-WML blocks (i.e., positive words are judged more quickly when they appeared at the top than at the bottom of the screen), but not in the WML blocks, suggesting that this metaphoric association might not be activated automatically. Experiments 2-6 investigated the valence-to-spatial metaphoric association and its automaticity. Participants processed a positive or negative prime, which appeared at the center of the screen, and then identified a letter (p/q) that subsequently appeared at the top or bottom of the screen. The valence-to-spatial metaphoric congruency effect did not occur in the WML (6-digit verbal rehearsal) or non-WML blocks, whether response modality to the prime was key-press or vocal, or whether the prime was a word or a picture. The effect only unexpectedly occurred when the task was simultaneously performed with a 4-dot-position visuospatial rehearsal task. Nevertheless, the data collapsed across multiple experiments showed a null valence-to-spatial metaphoric congruency effect, suggesting the absence of the valence-to-spatial metaphoric association in general. The implications of the current findings for the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and its alternatives are discussed.
Highlights
How an abstract concept is mentally represented is one of the most important research questions in cognitive psychology
As we predicted a specific direction for the metaphoric congruency effect, we reported the statistical power based on α = .05 [44].] The mean accuracy for these participants’ digit recall in the working memory load (WML) blocks was .99 (SD = .03)
We conducted a 2 (WML: WML vs. non-WML) × 2 × 2 ANOVA after collapsing the data across Experiments 2–5, with total N = 184. [Here we only report the results of AVOVA by taking participants as the random factor, because different stimuli were used in Experiments 2, 3, and 5 and in Experiment 4.] reaction times (RTs) analyses showed that the main effects of block, position, and valence were all significant, F(1,183) = 4.30, MSE = .001, p = .04, ηp2 = .02; F(1,183) = 39.18, MSE
Summary
How an abstract concept is mentally represented is one of the most important research questions in cognitive psychology. Spatial-Valence Metaphoric Association often express abstract concepts in terms of concrete concepts. I am feeling down is used to express sad mood, time is described as an object that flows, and thumbs up is given when something is good. These are called metaphors, a figure of speech in linguistics, which is used to describe a concept by another apparently unrelated concept. The Conceptual Metaphor Theory [1,2] posits that metaphors are a linguistic phenomenon, but can reflect how abstract concepts are represented in terms of more concrete, physically embodied concepts (see [3], for a similar view). In this article we follow Meier and Robinson [6] and describe the effect obtained in our experiments as “an effect of metaphoric association”
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