The Mechanism of Valence-Space Metaphors: ERP Evidence for Affective Word Processing

Abstract

Embodied cognition contends that the representation and processing of concepts involve perceptual, somatosensory, motoric, and other physical re-experiencing information. In this view, affective concepts are also grounded in physical information. For instance, people often say “feeling down” or “cheer up” in daily life. These phrases use spatial information to understand affective concepts. This process is referred to as valence-space metaphor. Valence-space metaphors refer to the employment of spatial information (lower/higher space) to elaborate affective concepts (negative/positive concepts). Previous studies have demonstrated that processing affective words affects performance on a spatial detection task. However, the mechanism(s) behind this effect remain unclear. In the current study, we hypothesized that processing affective words might produce spatial information. Consequently, spatial information would affect the following spatial cue detection/discrimination task. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to remember an affective word. Then, they completed a spatial cue detection task while event-related potentials were recorded. The results indicated that the top cues induced enhanced amplitude of P200 component while participants kept positive words relative to negative words in mind. On the contrary, the bottom cues induced enhanced P200 amplitudes while participants kept negative words relative to positive words in mind. In Experiment 2, we conducted a behavioral experiment that employed a similar paradigm to Experiment 1, but used arrows instead of dots to test the attentional nature of the valence-space metaphor. We found a similar facilitation effect as found in Experiment 1. Positive words facilitated the discrimination of upper arrows, whereas negative words facilitated the discrimination of lower arrows. In summary, affective words might activate spatial information and cause participants to allocate their attention to corresponding locations. Valence-space metaphors might be grounded in attention allocation.

Affective valence facilitates spatial detection on vertical axis: shorter time strengthens effect

“…This metaphoric association observed in Experiments 1B and 2 is most likely based on attention allocation. Xie et al (2014) adopted a similar paradigm using a 750-ms ISI and found that when spatial targets appeared at the top and bottom of the screen, a larger P200 amplitude was found after positive and negative words, respectively. This P200 may be related to attention allocation.…”

“…We used the same 240 affective words as those used by Xie et al (2014) , which were selected from the Chinese Affective Words System (CAWS). Half of them were positive, while the other half were negative ( Wang et al, 2008 ).…”

Implied Spatial Meaning and Visuospatial Bias: Conceptual Processing Influences Processing of Visual Targets and Distractors

“…Furthermore, although the polarity correspondence account holds that the concept-space interaction should be driven primarily by the +polar conceptual category, it has been found that if visual targets follow the concept after brief delays (100 ms), both positive and negative concepts can cause a spatial bias [ 14 ]. Furthermore, the P200 event-related potential (ERP) was modulated by cue-target compatibility after both positive and negative concepts [ 15 ]. These findings support the metaphorical association account, over the polarity correspondence account.…”

“…These include explicitly directional words (e.g., "left" and "right", [ 1 , 7 , 8 ]) and words with an implicit spatial meaning. Implicit spatial cues include numbers [ 9 , 10 ], concepts referring to time [ 11 ], concepts with a positive or negative valence [ 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 ], concepts related to social status and self-esteem [ 16 , 17 ], and concepts referring to divinity and evil [ 18 ]. In all these cases, peripheral targets were processed faster at locations compatible with the spatial meaning of the concepts.…”

Cross-modal metaphorical mapping of spoken emotion words onto vertical space

“…Specifically, it has been argued that abstract and emotion concepts have sensorimotor properties much like concrete concepts. For example, it has been shown that there is a metaphorical association between emotionally valenced concepts and the vertical plane (e.g., Meier and Robinson, 2004 ; Meier et al, 2011 ; Sasaki et al, 2012 , 2015 ; Santiago et al, 2012 ; Marmolejo-Ramos and Dunn, 2013 ; Marmolejo-Ramos et al, 2013 , 2014 ; Xie et al, 2014 , 2015 ; Damjanovic and Santiago, 2015 ). Most of the work on the association between emotion words and the vertical axis has used visual words as typical experimental stimuli.…”