The valence-space metaphor is grounded in embodied experience

The valence-space metaphor is grounded in embodied experience

Emilia Castaño1, Elizabeth Gilboy2, Sara Feijóo1, Elisabet Serrat3, Carles Rostan3, Joseph Hilferty1, and Toni Cunillera2                                                      

1. English Department, Faculty of Philology, University of Barcelona, Spain.

2. Department of Cognition, Development and Educational Psychology, University of Barcelona, Spain.

3. Department of Psychology, Faculty of Education and Psychology, University of Girona, Spain.

Conceptual metaphor is ubiquitous in language and thought, as we usually reason and talk about abstract concepts in terms of more concrete ones via metaphorical mappings that are hypothesized to arise from our embodied experience. One pervasive example is the VALENCE IS VERTICALITY metaphor, which maps affective valence onto the vertical axis of space (e.g., GOOD IS UP and BAD IS DOWN). In the current study, we used a conceptual-coherence task to explore whether the semantic processing of valence automatically recruits spatial cognition. We also examined whether the speed and accuracy of valence evaluation varies as a function of word-class stimuli (nouns vs. adjectives) and body posture (namely, hand position). Experiment 1 shows that adjectives, but not nouns, elicited spatial-congruency effects, thus indicating that grammatical category is a crucial factor for the space-valence associations. Experiments 2 and 3 show that the alignment of participants’ body posture with that of the stimuli facilitated the judgment of positive- and negative-valence words, but only when response allocation was congruent with the GOOD IS UP metaphor. Overall, these results are in line with the embodiment thesis, which claims that the understanding of many abstract concepts is grounded in bodily experience.