Abstract
According to the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, abstract concepts can be metaphorically associated with more concrete, physically embodied concepts, such as gustatory experience. Studies on taste–emotion metaphoric association reported that people associate love with sweet, jealousy with sour and bitter, and sadness with bitter. However, few studies have systematically examined the metaphoric association between taste and words referred to emotion (e.g., “sad”) or emotion-laden concepts (e.g., “funeral”). In the current four studies (total N = 357), we examined this metaphoric association by having participants come up with a taste word when reading an emotion and emotion-laden word (Study 1—explicit association of taste words-to-emotion/emotion-laden words), come up with an emotion word when reading taste words (Study 2—explicit association of emotion words-to-taste words), rate the association between taste words and basic or non-basic emotion words (Study 3), and rate the association between taste words and a more expanded pool of emotion/emotion-laden words (Study 4). Results showed that sweet was mostly associated with positive emotion and emotion-laden words, whereas bitter, followed by sour and spicy, was mostly associated with negative emotion and emotion-laden words. The bidirectionality of taste–emotion metaphoric association was supported by our dataset. The implications of these findings on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and embodied cognition are discussed.
Highlights
Metaphor, a figure of speech in linguistics, is used to describe a concept by another apparently unrelated concept, e.g., “Jealous is sour/bitter” (Yu, 1998)
In the current four studies, we examined this metaphoric association by having participants come up with a taste word when reading an emotion and emotion-laden word (Study 1—explicit association of taste words-toemotion/emotion-laden words), come up with an emotion word when reading taste words (Study 2—explicit association of emotion words-to-taste words), rate the association between taste words and basic or non-basic emotion words (Study 3), and rate the association between taste words and a more expanded pool of emotion/emotion-laden words (Study 4)
Our main goal was to develop a norm for taste–emotion metaphoric association, and based on this database, we explored whether the database could test some premises of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (e.g., Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), such as bidirectionality
Summary
A figure of speech in linguistics, is used to describe a concept by another apparently unrelated concept, e.g., “Jealous is sour/bitter” (Yu, 1998). According to the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (e.g., Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Landau et al, 2010), metaphors are a linguistic phenomenon, but can reflect how abstract concepts are associated with more concrete, physically embodied concepts. We examine how emotion is metaphorically associated with taste. We refer the “taste–emotion association” to the association between taste words and emotional words. Following the definition of Sutton and Altarriba (2016), emotional words refer to both emotion words (i.e., words for emotion state, e.g., “sad”) and emotion-laden words (i.e., words with emotional connotation, e.g., “tear”)
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